She remembered the wood grain beneath her fingertips, the cut of moonlight across white columns. She remembered the midnight breeze and the cold iron of the door handle pressed against her cheek.
She remembered the tutor's words and her father's silence, so quiet she would not believe him in the room if she hadn't watched him enter from the slit between tapestry and wall.
The tutor's words were a horse's galloping hooves: too quick to follow, blurring together into one long chain of syllables that is hard to parse even without the wood separating them.
Her father did not reply. He did not reply when the tutor told him how - after so many years - she can barely read and hardly write. He was quiet still when the tutor explained that she could not sit still and stay focused long enough to do anything of note with numbers.
"Always moving, never listening," the tutor said, and her hands started to shake, the iron seeming to suck all the warmth from her face.
"A slow, dim child."
The handle against her cheek burned like ice; she turned away to tear through the halls of the keep.
Blurs of white and beige walls speckled with tapestry color, the moon keeps a flashing pace beside her between columns and through windows. She didn't notice - too busy trying to escape from the pressure behind her eyes.
She ran until it hurt and then ran some more, until her lungs were on fire and her legs were shaking and numb. Until she collapsed.
The moon and stars were above, rough stone below. It scrapes against her skin whenever she breathed - great gasping breaths -, but the feeling was distant and muted, buried beneath the burn of her lungs and the pins-and-needles pain draped from her soles to her hips. Her fists were clenched and shaking at her side.
The stars twinkled lazily above.
Fathûir slammed the meat of her fist against the stone and began to cry.
She hugged her knees to her chest and pretended she couldn't hear the heavy footfalls - leather on stone - drawing closer. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and willed the sound and its maker to turn around and go away.
The footsteps stopped in front of her: legs like stone columns wrapped in burgundy stood at the edge of her vision. Late night wind off the sea whipped over her head.
"I am not dull," she muttered to her knees.
The legs shifted. A sigh cut the wind, "mîth-ûrê" its end punctuation.
Her arms tightened - "I'm not. " - then loosened again.
"I did not say you were, Fathûir."
"Bâr-Sakalthôr said so." She glared at the legs, but only because she'd spent hours already glaring at the stone. "You didn't stop him."
"It is not my role to stop him when I please, it is my role to listen."
"You're King," she contested, half confused and half indignant.
"That only means I must listen more."
Fathûir frowned behind her arms and the wind filled the silence.
"You still didn't deny him…?" She hated the way her voice trembled and trailed off at the end, making her accusation into a question. Making her look weak and childish in front of her father, in front of the King.
The King did not respond at first. She watched the hem of his clothes blow in the wind through the hair covering her face.
Her gaze went up, head tilting back until it thunked against the stone and her eyes could meet his.
They were brown like hers. Crinkled at the corners with olive skin weathered by salt and sun and age.
And they were sad. Disappointed and sad. "Mîth-ûrê," he breathed.
She looked away, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
Moonlight and self-loathing. She woke the next morning and dressed for lessons. Nerennen and Falthiur led her to a drill yard where a company waited in shining steel.
By order of the King, her lessons with tutors were cut to almost nothing and replaced with drills. Tutors were just one hour of one day in a week, shoved into the waning moments of light before sunset.
They did not teach her, they barely looked at her. They piled mounds of ancient parchment before her with an order to copy them exactly and then left in billowing robes. To their desks or their quarters or the grand libraries of Umbar – big enough to swallow a man whole without a trace.
She obeyed - with vigor at first, with resignation soon after – fantasizing about their precious library morphing into a maw with paper teeth and leather lips; it would chew them up and swallow them, like a lion devouring a rat, and she would smile despite.
Dust in her mouth and sweat running down her face. She screamed an order in her too-high voice and the phalanx shouted back twice in affirmation. They shifted with a sound like a breaking wave, chanting a beat to move in step with shields locked and spears levelled.
She tried, but couldn't match their cadence, always a hair too slow or a hair too fast, scrabbling to catch up and keep level at the wall.
The sun blazed overhead, wind whipped up little spirals of dirt between the brush.
Her foot caught on a rock while she was focused on finding the rhythm and her shield broke rank from the line. It was only for a moment – a flash, but they saw. They saw. She could feel their eyes on her like a hundred blades of grass through her armor, pressing against every piece of her skin.
She called out a new order, voice too high, shield arm trembling.
The phalanx echoed her as one and pivoted. Their eyes were forward, but somehow she could still feel them watching.
She leant against the battlement in grimy mail and a sweat soaked gambeson and watched the sun vanish into the sea. The book was heavy in her arms, and, if she focused hard on the colors of sunset staining the water and sky, then she could almost forget how much every part of her hurt.
Fathûir opened the book. It's easier to try and read when no one was watching her and expecting failure.
Her footfalls echoed off the walls as she strode down the halls of the keep, Nerennen and Falthiur in lockstep behind her. Sunrise's breath still lingered, cool and multicolored, dyeing the sky a color of afterthought.
The court parted before her when they heard her coming. She knew all their names and all their faces, not through bond but years of formal introduction and rote memorization. The other children did not maintain eye contact, their parents inclined their heads toward her and she manages to school the scowl out of her expression.
Ar-Gimilkhâd's youngest daughter was a fixture of the keep, as inapproachable as stone.
She had never meant to be. After so long, she didn't really know how to be anything else.
Fathûir ascended the stairs to stand behind her aunt, not even checking to see if her Naru n'Aru followed.
The woman gestured, and court began.
By sixteen she could read her name. By seventeen she could write it.
Fathûir roared and the phalanxes answered, marching forward on either side of her like a rolling tide of wood and iron. They crushed brush and dust devils beneath them, they chanted a rhythm that carries all the way back to Umbar. They moved as one, and, sun in her eyes and soaked with sweat, she moved with them.
Her room was cool, her arms were crossed. Nerennen read her a letter from Gimilzôr and tried to match her sister's voice to get her to smile.
Her sister said that remnants of the Faithful quarrel with them over Barad Harn at the mouth of the Harnen. She said they rode down on steeds like donkeys wielding swords closer to retooled plows. She said they broke upon her troops like a limp, quiet wave.
She said they were a distraction, that the true war laid North and West behind black mountains, beneath ash and fire.
She said she will be home soon, and Fathûir did smile then.
A cold breeze blew through the library and her tutor stopped just short of calling her stupid. "Too slow," he said, tutting. "Too distracted." The shape of the words she wrote were too blocky and too sharp at the same time, her feet were bouncing beneath the table and he said it distracted her (it did not).
Her arm was stained with ink up to her elbow and her quill was shaking in a white knuckled grip.
"Again," he ordered, voice nasal and haughty and bored.
He did not like the next words.
"Again."
Too quick.
"Again."
Too slow.
"Again."
She pressed too hard and her quill tore a hole in the parchment that bleeds dribbling ink like a stab wound.
Her tutor tuts; she almost screamed.
Fathûir waited at the very edge of the dock in her polished drillyard mail. Behind her were six Naru n'Aru in their iron masks, around her was the beating heart of the Black Havens.
Innumerable ships from a hundred different peoples were coming or going or docked to rock gently in their housing all cover the bay. Their masts made a forest on the wine-dark water, one filled with stitched canvas portraits of dragons and lions and wolves and serpents and squids and beasts that defy name or knowledge. They bobbed and pitched in the waves, and it seemed almost like the forest was walking.
The sound was like everyone in the world gathered in a single spot and all spoke at once, and then never stopped. She thought she knew it, having heard it every day in the keep for years, but it was different to be in it, to be part of it when she spoke or sighed or breathed. It enveloped her completely, a bone deep vibration.
She closed her eyes and fell into the sound. The smell - salt and seaweed and fish and a million others. The warm sun on skin not covered by her helmet. When she opened her eyes again the forest had changed, trees shuffling across the water to new spots with canvas leaves in tow.
"How much longer?"
"I do not know, my lady," Nerennen said.
Fathûir sighed, the air tasted like seawater. "It has been too long," she declared to the water lapping at the end of the dock.
"It has been only two hours, my lady."
She pursed her lips because lords of Adûnâim do not pout.
It has been three days since her sister's letter arrived, wine-stained at the edges and scrawled in cacography.
'Ten silvers says you will not be there when I land, sister.'
Fathûir had stood at the edge of the dock every day for the past four days. It took three to sail from Barad Harn. It was hell getting the salt scoring off her mail, it was worse when it was covered in dirt after drills too. But when the sun was low on the water and her hands were slick and aching she would think of how those ten silver pieces would feel in her palm, and she would smile.
Gimilzôr arrived atop the figurehead of a balukazga four hours later. It was dark wood - sleek, carved like a snarling panther. It sliced across the water and through the forest with three rows of perfectly in-synch oars, almost silent. An absence, moving through a jungle of noise.
Black, burgundy, and barnacles beneath a coiled white sail topped with eyes. Figures moving atop it in plate and chain and sailor's clothes, utterly sure footed.
Even from here, a hundred meters out, Fathûir could see when her sister spotted her. Her head stopped its even scanning, and she swore she could even see the smile.
Gimilzôr shouted an order, the sound carrying clear to her even if the words were lost in wood and water. A whole flank of oars lifted from the bay as one, dripping water, and the balukagaza turned.
The ship sliced toward her: a panther and a sister. Somehow they both seemed to grin.
She watched the ship with rapt attention. Her head didn't move - only her eyes, tracking each movement of the sailors as they withdrew the oars and pulled the ship into dock. It was an involved process, more so than she expected. More so than she was able to spy from her perch on balconies and parapets, when the great wooden boats were merely the size of her thumbnail.
Gimilzôr was among the sailors the whole time; her sister doesn't shout a single order - the whole crew moves about as one clambering host. A bed of termites with a single shared mind, or… or a beehive. Or ants.
By the time her sister steps off the boat her hands were stained with pitch and her light mail is more oil and salt than metal and leather.
This time, in the heart of the Black Havens, Fathûir fought not to budge. Her feet stayed planted, her back stayed straight, her eyes tracked her sister as she steps down the gangplank, smiling behind her chainmail and fidgeting behind her back. Father's voice was in her ear whispering about decorum.
"Sister!" Gimilzôr's alto cut through the harbor ambiance like a knife, with a smile sharp enough to match. Her sister didn't walk, she swaggered - all easy confidence and unerring bravado. She stopped two paces from her, hands on her hips; looked her up and down before raising a single eyebrow. "No hug this time, dear sister?"
"It is not enough to lay eyes on me after three years and four months?" She answered, clamping down on the urge to race forward and tackle her sister into the water, laughing. Yet she is a Lord. She will be a Lord. Fathûir rubbed a bit of chainmail between thumb and forefinger faster behind her back.
Gimilzôr pursed her lips and hummed, and, for a moment, Fathûir was terrified that she offended her only sister.
Then the woman rusheed forward low, picked her up, and spun her around. And Fathûir could not stop the laugh.
The walk to the keep took a while, not because it is long, but because Gimilzôr insisted on wending through Umbar's alleys. Her sister did not stop talking, her sister did not stop teasing her.
Fathûir was grateful the mail over her mouth hides her smile and spares her a little dignity.
When they reached the high walls of the keep it was twilight, the stone was stained indigo, and Fathûir's face hurt from smiling.
"No new scars?"
Gimilzôr gave her a sly grin. "None that you can see, mîth-ûrê."
She scowled. "I am not little…" and it is not a grumble.
Her sister chuckled and a chill sea breeze carries the sound out into the night and buries it beneath lapping waves. "No. Not so much anymore. Troublesome thing that, you really should stop growing when I'm not around." Gimilzôr flicked her ear and she hissed. "It's rude."
"Rude?" She scoffed, rubbing her ear between two fingers. "If either of us is rude it is you for only visiting every three years." The words were meant as a jape but they come out bitter as vinegar, and when she tried to school her scowl and apologize the words don't form and her muscles won't cooperate.
They walked in silence down an empty hall lit by torchlight and moonlight. It was a clear night. All the stars were bright.
"Ar-Adûnâim calls," Gimilzôr said at last, "and I answer."
She stopped and her sister does too. Her face was like someone took father's and sharpened all the edges. Dark skin lined with pale scars, black hair recently sheared short by what was probably the woman's own dagger.
Looking at her, Fathûir is reminded of an eagle.
"Ar-Adûnâim? Or father?"
Or a hunting falcon.
"We are the King's Men, sister. He is the King. They are one and the same."
Beneath the breeze and the waves and the crackle-hiss of torches in their sconces, she thought she heard something sad in her sister's tone.
Fathûir looked away. Began walking forward again. After a moment, her sister followed.
"Tell me about the battle."
"It was messy and loud and wet," mail shifted and she got the sense the woman had shrugged. "There is not much to tell truly."
"You break a siege and rout an army and say there is nothing to tell?" She paused. "Wait. Wet?" The land around Gobel Mirlond was no Haradwaith - not with the Harnen just south, but it should be far from wet.
"It rained the day before," Gimilzôr said, nodding, "and the day before that. A storm that blew in off the sea and wouldn't let up. Caused the Harnen to flood like mad; it overflowed its banks, emptied into the land on either side and turned the plain into a swamp. Luckily, we crossed a day before the water grew wild."
"The Faithful didn't try to stop you?"
"Oh they did try. Poorly."
"'Not much to tell, truly,'" she quoted back at her sister, dodging the answering ear flick this time and almost cackling before she remembered she's supposed to be mad. At someone. About something.
Really, she was just mad.
"And truly there isn't." Her sister asserted, "it was an easy fight - one charge and they crumbled like sand. They were not even really of The Faithful."
Her brows furrowed. "They weren't?"
"No. Gondor forfeited the lands south and east of the Anduin a thousand years ago - too close to the Black Mountains. They were Numenorian, somewhat, but not Faithful." She can feel the woman's silent gaze on her neck. "You should know this."
Fathûir glanced to the left, catches a flash of her sister's studious face and looks straight back ahead, clearing her throat. She summoned the blankest 'court face' she can and answered with "the King still has not allowed me in a War Council."
From the corner of her eye she can see that threw Gimilzôr, but only for a beat. "Even so, it should be covered in your lessons."
Fathûir barely suppressed the flinch and grimace. "I suppose my tutor hasn't gotten to it yet."
Her sister observed her.
"She doesn't like history much."
Ten paces. Footsteps on stone over crackling braziers and the distant sea. Gimilzôr hummed.
"Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Like your histories."
Fathûir's gait stuttered. "They are…" old and dusty and faded and look like someone poured ink into chicken scratches and forgot about them for three thousand years. The dust made her sneeze and the words on the page hurt her head and never stop moving. She would like nothing more than to take a torch to every page and scholar in the library. "They're fine. It is not my favorite. Or my best."
Gimilzôr made a sound of agreement beside her, it mixes with the shuffling of her mail. "I couldn't stand all the genealogies and lineage maps - so many dead kings and queens all dust or fishbait - or both. But there are stories I liked in there too. I must have read the accounts of Ar-Pharazôn's capture of Zigûrun a thousand times." Her sister smiled. "I remember planting pillows beneath my sheets to look like a body and curling up beneath my desk with the book and a little candle. Fell asleep there more than a few times imagining myself at the head of that armada, accepting Zigûrun's surrender." The woman's eyes and smile turned sharp and amused. "Though in my version I cut his lying head off myself then and there, lead our spears on to conquer the world. Then sail west."
Fathûir nodded. It's harder than expected, something bitter was stuck in her throat.
"Gimilthôn always loved the ones about Berúthiel. Did he ever tell you he tried to collect cats like her until Father put a stop to it?" she clicked her tongue. "Probably not. Still think he's sore over it. He had one named -"
Fathûir tuned out her sister and tried to swallow the ugliness. It somewhat worked. She ignored the rest by focusing on her footsteps - on the rhythmic locomotion of her legs and the solid plap of them landing on the stone. On the sound of the sea and the smell of it. On -
"Fathûir?" A hand was on her shoulder. "Are you alright?"
Her sister's lips were pursed, the lines of her face concerned. Fathûir looked back down at the hand and shrugged it off. "I am fine."
"Fine? Like your histories?"
She said "yes," to the ground and does not look up when her sister hums, she doesn't speak when the silence stretches the length of the hallway.
They paused when they reached the courtyard. Her sister was watching her; Fathûir was watching the sky. The clouds covered the stars like tiger stripes.
Something metal jingled beside her but she still did not look. Only when Gimilzôr wrapped a hand around her wrist and pulled it to her does she break from looking up. It was more instinct than not.
Her sister was smiling at her. Not one of the broad, hard smiles she wore like polished parade mail, but something soft and slight. Something patient, something kind. It's enough to stop her from snapping at the woman for touching her - the words clogged her throat and stick there.
Gimilzôr placed a handful of silver bits in her hand. The moon was split in three by the clouds, the bits were cold in her palm, the garden around them was bathed in silver light. The hand around her wrist withdrew, and her sister smiled a little wider before turning and walking away.
The wind was strong off the sea. The wind was always strong off the sea. It ripped through her in shades of sea salt and city smells and ruffled her hair. Made it tickle her ear and get in her mouth and fall across her eyes no matter how tightly she tied it until one day, when she is tired from drills and furious from trying to read, she followed in her sister's footsteps and takes a dagger to her hair. Cut it so short it didn't fall past her ears.
Nerennen and Falthiur did not comment on it. The next time the King saw her he just hummed and nodded.
Everywhere she goes those ten silver bits jingled in her pocket. She never spends them.
Her hair threatened to grow back out. She would not allow it.
Father sends a barber this time, to keep her from cutting it wild.
She liked how it was cut, but would've preferred the dagger. Like how Gimilzôr did it.
He is tall and blue and old. He's shaped like a gnarled tree root, colored like wood that someone had left out to sun for a hundred years. He's wrapped in a navy cloak that he holds close despite the heat and he smells like woodsmoke and saffron.
A rod of polished driftwood, curled at the end, is nestled in the crook of his shoulder, in his lap is a book so old she half expects it to turn to dust and blow away at any moment. A sword's hilt pokes out from between the folds of his lapis robes.
She has never seen him before in her life. Not once has she seen him in the keep.
And here he is, sat in her Father's garden.
He does not answer her when she calls, he doesn't even look up.
Perhaps on a good day she wouldn't be so hasty, so rash. So dramatic. On a good day she would remember that there could be a few - not many - reasons why a stranger was armed not only in the keep, but in her father's gardens.
But her wrist hurts from a sparring strain and her eyes hurt from staring at her phalanxes' dust clouds in the drillyard and her most recent attempt at reading something beyond the intellectual capabilities of a slug ended with her hurling the book out a window and screaming at it all the way down.
So she is rash. And draws her sword.
The blade - a thick bastard sword - hisses free of its scabbard, glinting wickedly in the late afternoon sun.
"Who are you?"
He does not look up. His ear does not even twitch.
Her eye twitches. She takes two strong steps forward and flicks her blade so the point lands squarely on the old man's sternum.
In between his eyes and the book in his lap.
It takes him a moment. His eyes cross like he's trying to read words on the steel before he blinks, frowns, and looks up.
"Who are you?"
He is even older up close. Old like an ancient, weathered tree or a worn mountainside. Old in a way that goes beyond human and into something more. Something natural and implacable. As if he had never been young to begin with.
His eyes are a deep navy - they look her up and down, then blink. "Ah," he says.
"That is not a name."
"And I suppose you know every name of elves and men to say so?"
"I don't need to know 'every name of elves and men' to know that 'ah' is not one."
The old, blue man closes his book and hums. Her sword is unmoved. In the afternoon sun it looks less like steel and more like a spike of light. "And what do you think my name is?"
She shrugs, the grip and base of the blade moving but the point staying still. "Something old," she says, looks him up and down again, "something to do with blue."
He chuckles - the sound like air out a tiny bellows. "Not far off, child. But not too close either." The stranger grins at her slowly. "I could write it for you, if you like."
Her whole body tenses - muscles in her arms going taut like rope holding down a sail - her eyes snap to his: sharp, smug; under wild gray eyebrows and the edge of an azure cloth wrap.
Knowing.
Fathûir snarled, hand tightening around the hilt of her sword. The tip snaps up to the man's throat and the blade throws sunlight like a mirror across the courtyard and out of sight.
He smiles - no, smirks at her. Wrinkled lips on a wrinkled face above travel stained cloth that hang off him more like bedsheets than robes. She opens her mouth to say something cruel and Father's voice echoes across the courtyard.
Father's voice shouting her name.
She blinks and he is standing over her in royal regalia and light daytime shadow. Shouting and screaming, spitting fire at her for raising a sword at a guest whose name she doesn't even know. Disappointed, ashamed, furious, a desperate something else that she cannot place and does not care too. He calls her stupid - something he has never done before - he calls her undisciplined and shortsighted and foolish. He snatches the sword from her hand and plants it in the garden dirt like a spear. Forbids her from ever touching the thing again.
Her cheeks are burning, her fists are clenched, her neck and back are so rigid she cannot even nod, only answer with curt 'yes's and 'no's. A glance sideways and the humor in the stranger's eyes has faded into pity. Another fresh wave of humiliation.
The King sends her away.
She walks off so stiff with rage that it is hard to move.
Fathûir doesn't leave. Her feet and humiliation carry her out of the gardens, but her curiosity - still burning - keep her within earshot. Have her hiding behind a brazier a hallway down where the sound still carries through.
Her back is cold against the stone and her face is hot so close to the flame. Through the arched window she watches the sun set over the sea with her knees pulled tight against her chest and her teeth grinding.
"You need not be so harsh on the girl, Ar-Gimilkhâd." The voice bounces against the stone overhead before carrying on and breaking apart. "I do not know her reasons for holding me at sword point, but I doubt any of them are beneath her age."
"She is phazphêl, soon general." Fathûir can hear the King frowning. "She will learn discipline. She will think before she acts."
Air rushes through the hall, either a breeze or a sigh or both. "Soon, but not yet. Be cruel and overharsh and she will not learn anything except a distaste for you. You should know this, Gimilkhâd."
She is so mad, so humiliated from this stranger's - this old man's - defense that she almost doesn't catch the lack of honorific.
Silence. Fathûir can picture her father standing in the twilit gardens with his hands behind his back, studying a wall. "You did not come all the way to Umbar to discuss my daughter, sapthân."
Her eyes widen a fraction.
"No, Gimilkhâd, I did not."
"Then perhaps you should share with me why you are here."
Another pause, and while she can see her father's face clearly in her mind (that placid court mask with pursed lips and drawn brows), she cannot at all picture the stranger's - the sapthân's - expression.
"Khand."
The anger fades a little at the word, and she settles in to listen.
"I did not need your pity."
The sapthân looked up at her, away from his book. Fathûir stood with fists clenched at her sides in the late night garden. Moonlight, silver and soft, washed out the color of the place and made it feel distant. In the corner of her eye she can see her sword impaled in the dirt, standing like a polished headstone in the flowers.
The sight of it stokes her anger.
"I do not need your advocacy."
The blue man looks her up and down. "Indeed," he says, raising an eyebrow and closing the leatherbound book with a thunk of dense parchment, "you had the situation well in hand and championed yourself excellently."
She snarls at him and walks on.
Her sword never leaves her periphery.
The blue man stays one week, then two. He roams the corridors in flowing robes, driftwood staff clicking against the tile like an annoying bird.
Staff and sword. The two never leave him.
"It is rude to follow someone without their consent, Fathûir, daughter of Ar-Gimilkhâd."
Fathûir scowls and steps out from the doorway she'd been hiding in. His lips are pursed and his wrinkled face is neutral, but his eyes are smiling.
She does not ask his consent the next day - she is phazphêl, and this is her home - but she does not try to hide either.
Nor any of the times after.
She walks. He walks. They do not talk and that is the preferred outcome for everyone involved.
"You should stay away from him." It is midnight and aunt Fenuhúir is still in her court clothes, she leans heavy on the war table of the empty council room, with one hand she moves an idle phalanx piece from Umbar to Harad.
"Why?"
"He is dangerous," she replies without looking up, her tone plain and matter of fact.
She scoffs. "'Dangerous.' How? He must be older than the dirt 'neath the foundations, how can he be dangerous?"
Aunt Fenuhúir pauses mid-move to look at her. "He is sapthân, Fathûir. Appearances are not everything."
Fathûir crosses her arms over her chest and all but glares back. "If I die in my own home then I would not be much of a general, would I?"
"If you die in your own home you would not be much of anything at all."
She stops short next to the sapthân, scowling. It takes the old man a moment to notice. His eyes land on her, then flick up to the library's walls with dawning realization. "What? Not coming? Who knows what mischief and evil an old man could get up to in a library."
"Burn the whole place down," Fathûir grunts, turning away, "the world would be better for it."
It is a rare gray day in Umbar, and the weeping stormclouds are too vast for her to even notice them keeping pace off shoulder. The rain helps to degrade them into visual noise until they seem almost frozen, sat still to pour water onto the bay and city.
"I take it you do not see much rain, Lady Fathûir?"
Fathûir snaps her eyes off the cloud, first to the wizard - he is studying her - and then to the front. Lords do not gape at rainclouds, generals do not marvel at lightning. She is soon to be one and must be the other. "Umbar is a dry place."
"It is beside the sea."
"You know what I mean, old man."
He hums, out her periphery she can see him eye the clouds to the west with a far away, almost melancholy look, before turning back to the hall.
Rain so loud it is like silence; they round the corner, him always a half step ahead so she is slightly at his back. Through the arches she can see the rain fall heavy on Umbar in a thick, tall mist and leave the sea surface rippling. Long steady drips of water pour off the roof above them and into her view like spit strings from a great and slavering mouth.
"You came to my father to speak about Khand." She does not take her eyes off the water. She watches a flash of lighting erupt over the bay and feels the thunderclap in her chest.
"I did."
Fathûir clasps her hands behind her back to prevent them from fidgeting. "Tell me what you told him."
He raises an eyebrow at her but she does not flinch. "That was for the king's ears. Mayhaps I am getting old if I could forget your crowning to Ar-Fathûir, your grace."
She scowls but keeps her eyes forward. To her right the rain comes down in sheets. "I will be a general soon, if it affects my troops then -"
"Rest assured it affects every man, woman, and child west of the Walls of the Sun and the far East Sea. And yet," his hand slides a bit down his rod to slam it hard against the tile "it is not for their ears, like it is not for yours, your grace."
Her teeth are grinding, her hands are clenched behind her back. The sapthân hums, satisfied, and she wants nothing more than to grab him by his dull blue robes and hurl him over the railing.
She grips her hands together but cannot stop them shaking. They, like the rest of her, are bare of mail and leather and it makes her feel naked. One hand tears away to rub a nervous thumb over the pommel of her sword, the other flattens her velvet vest again and again.
It does not help. She switches her focus to the window because if she is reminded of anything near or attached to her she will burst.
The sky is grey. The bay is grey. The city, the farms, the hills, the scraggles of bushes and shrub are grey. Covered in a thick fog that makes it like trying to watch an old, hazy memory.
She has never been this nervous, not once in her life. Not the first time she picked up a sword or attended court or stepped onto the drillyard or… anything. Her eyes close, the grey world and fluted columns imprinting into an afterimage on her eyelids. One breath, quick and ragged, a second slightly slower, a third that resembles calm and steady.
She holds it in her chest somewhere below her diaphragm until it starts to hurt. Until it forces its way up her throat like gaseous vomit and spills into the air. She cannot see it, it is not cold, but she imagines it flows between the fluted columns and turns into mist and fog.
Today, she thinks, taking a slow breath, unballing the hand that has fisted into her vest. "Today," she speaks to the neat seams in the stonework and the guards just outside her room.
Today.
Fathûir runs another hand down her vest. Pulls her hand off her sword.
Outside it is still grey, ships like ink blots fill the harbor, a lighthouse blazes above them.
It is time to find father.
He is not in his solar or his room. He is not in the empty council chambers or the gardens or the throne room holding court. He is not in the library or drillyard or the barracks or the great hall or the kitchens.
He is on a turret on the western curtain wall, gazing out at the city, so still and tall as to be a piece of the tower in the shape of a man. She breathes once to settle her nerves and twice to settle her heartbeat. The air tastes of fish and salt and sea and it slips in her mouth thickly. Fathûir steps up behind him back straight, shoulders back, chin jutted forward. One hand is thumbed in her belt to stop its shaking, the other is a fist at her side, tightening and loosening and tightening again every time her feet meet the stone.
She stops three paces from him. He does not turn around.
The wind carries up the sound of breaking water and midday Umbar, so far away that it all blends together, but not so distant that she cannot pick apart a shout or handbell if she tries.
"Your Grace," she says, bowing low to eye the floor even though she knows he isn't looking. Her hand fists again, the other clenches her leather belt into a cord. Cracks and brick and brown dust and salt blown in off the sea. She closes her eyes and forces herself to exhale. When she rises he is half turned to look at her.
His face is almost placid, but the slight knot of his brows and downward curve to his mouth makes him look curious. She would not dare for concerned.
"I-" her voice breaks and she stops, swallows, and starts again with burning cheeks. "I request your leave to attend the next war council."
Something changes in his face. His brown eyes turn almost sad.
"Gimilzôr can vouch for me, Gimilthôr too - if he's there." The words spill out of her like water through a broken dam, syllables so fast they might sweep someone away. "I've been sparring since I could walk and training with the phalanxes since -" I failed you "- my lessons changed." Wind off the sea turns to a gale, ripping at their clothes and snapping the banners that fall from the parapets. She hopes it makes her cheeks look more windburnt than blush, but she doubts it will. "I know that I am meant to be a general, it's where I belong, it's -"
"It's not where I want you."
It's like a horse steps on her lungs and shoves all the air out. She blinks. The words were so quiet she'd almost lost them in the gale and the city and the sea.
"What?" It is all she can think to say.
For a moment, quick as lightning, he looks stricken; like she was her own corpse at the bottom of the tower and not his daughter come to ask a favor. And then the look is gone, and she wonders, detachedly, if he ever meant to say anything at all, for he doesn't say anything after.
Pressure building in her sternum, pressing against her ribs and threatening to burst them out her chest like macabre wings. "I don't -" she swallows and tries to force the confusion out of her voice. "It's all I'm good at." It still comes out lost.
His eyes watch her, the hand around her belt is white knuckled and her other is picking holes in her vest. He turns away to face the sea and her only thought is that he will say no and she doesn't know if she would burst or not but she is certain that something would break, deep down, when her only path out of Umbar is closed and she is left to stew like a forgotten soup on the flame until she bubbles over and turns to froth and char. Waiting for a future that will never come. Staring out at the same sea and the same city under the same sky and -
"A moon's turn from today. In the room behind your favorite trellis." She refocuses. He is facing the sea again, his hands clasped behind his back and his robes whipping in the wind.
He does not say anything more, and does not acknowledge her when she leaves.
The sapthân is there one morning and gone the next, leaving behind a note she cannot read. Fathûir stuffs it in her wardrobe, scowling, and tries to forget it exists.
Gimilzôr advises her to get some sleep the night before. She spends it polishing her mail and half-plate, and, when that is done, picking the lint and dust off her clothes until they're black as ink and spotless.
She would've kept going, but Nerennen and Falthiur barged in sometime after two-bells and all but wrestled her into bed.
She lies awake after they're gone, staring at the ceiling, hoping no one will ask her to read.
The room is long and sparse and the high sandstone ceiling keeps the warm air well above their heads. Beyond the balcony is the sky and sea, before it are fluted columns that chop the sunlight into bars and shade the room in lines.
There are twelve chairs arranged around a table carved to depict all of Middle Earth, centered on the Old Home. It is cherry wood; where it meets the sunlight makes it look orange instead of red.
Gimilzôr is smiling on her right, Aunt Fenuhúir looking exhausted on her left. Every chair is filled with a general or governor, and the air sits heavy on her shoulders.
She takes a seat with the rest after father and it is like sitting under judgment - her arms lay across her thighs and every bit of nerves is forced into clenching and unclenching her fists beneath the table.
They begin with the Kin Strife.
It is odd, being on the other side of the trellis, it's all she's able to think about at first. She's used to laying her head against the ivy, eyes lidded, sun on her face, listening to the maneuvers and updates and numbers, feeling her armor warm steadily, mouthing her suggestions silently when they come to mind - whispering them, if the winds are strong.
And the winds are strong today. They whistle through the columns and windows and she has to catch herself before she can whisper twice..
"With respect, phazphêl, we cannot be certain that Gobel Mirlond is secure, not with Amrothian ships roving up and down its coast. I've seen them slavering, they eye it like stray dogs outside a butchery."
"The swans are no threat, not yet." Gimilzôr's smile hasn't faded the whole council - if anything it's grown, but it still doesn't quite reach her eyes. "The Faithful keep them on a tight leash, they will not act before Gondor does."
Her mouth opens and she takes a breath to whisper - about Gondor, about their threat and their inaction, but she manages to click her mouth shut before the words can form. Gimilzôr glances at her out of the corner of her eye. Thrice now.
"But Gondor could act any day now," Aunt Fenuhúir sounds tired, but then she always sounds tired. She is squeezing her brow with a hand like she hopes it will pop. "Each season we creep closer to the Faithful's borders; the land's south of Anduin may not be theirs in power, but I doubt they will let us see the riverbank without resistance."
"Nor should they," Gimilzôr declares, voice as hungry as it is proud, "Sons and daughters of Númenór do not shy from a fight, even our northern kin know this."
Another general opens her mouth to speak, but father leans forward slightly, the movement is enough to silence the council. "Mordor -" her sister's face sours "- will keep the bulk of the Faithful in check in Ithilien and Osgiliath. For now, Dol Amroth is our foremost foe." His eyes sweep the table for dissent, land on each of them in turn. With his golden mask and golden crown, they are the only part of his face that is visible.
"Mordor." The word spills across the table with enough acid to eat through the polish.
The council turns to Gimilzôr, but father, in his imperious bronze mask, is the only one who matters. "You have concerns, daughter?"
"Yes, your grace," her shoulders are still as stone, between the black cheekguards of her helm her jaw is set. "I do."
Father inclines his head, sunlight bouncing off the spines of his crown.
"Dol Amroth is not our chiefest foe, Gondor is not our chiefest foe." Gimilzôr is no longer smiling. "We sit here, discussing war with our kin , while the black hand that shoved Akallabêth beneath the waves is just a few leagues north and east. Laughing!" Her sister slams her mailed fist on the table and the whole thing shakes, a few ships and troops rattle, fall, and roll away. "We should be in talks with the Faithful, we should be marching north to their aid and tearing Zigûrun's legions apart! We -"
"You are too young, Gimilzôr," Aunt Fenuhúir is not looking at the woman, but staring off into the clouds with a face of more iron than Fathûir has ever seen. "Too young to understand the mistrust, too far removed to know how they have contemned us for generations." Her aunt looks up and the pair's eyes meet. "If we marched to their aid they would leave us at the Black Gate to die and call it justice."
Heads all around the table nodded, someone said "there would be celebrations in the street."
"And what of after Mordor triumphs, hm? What of after the Faithful fall and the north is overrun with orcs? Do any of you -" Gimilzôr casts her eyes around the table "- think that the Betrayer will give us the land that is ours by right? Do you think he will still court our favor when we are no longer a threat to him?" The words come faster, angrier, "do you think Harad would cast aside a god-king for us? Do you think Khand will ride back to the far east in peace? Do you think Rhûn will be sated with just Gondor's blood? Do you think we will ever avenge Akallabêth on our own? Because if you do," her sister's lips pull back in a snarl, "you're fools ."
Silence, broken only by the whistling wind.
"You speak of siding with Gondor as if it is a reasonable choice," Aunt Fenuhúir intones, voice taut with checked anger. "As if their cause is not already doomed, as if it will not array the whole east against us while we are north, fighting for kin who have disowned and derided us a thousand times over! Gondor has never been weaker than it is now!"
"It is weak because Mordor is strong; wait another fortnight and it will be weaker still. Gondor will only grow weaker, Mordor will only grow stronger. Our only chance is to catch Zigûrun now, hurl him back into his own fire then sweep across the Faithful like a tide. That is the only path where justice is done. Kin or not -"
"Enough." The single, quiet word echoes behind her father's mask, slips out from the gaps between skin and metal; the table stills.
Her sister's mouth shuts with an audible click - the only sound in the room for a moment. Her jaw is clenched, her shoulders are stone, beneath the table Fathûir can see the woman's hands clench the edges of her tabard then, slowly, relax.
"I will take all your words under advisement," he says flat-voiced, leaning back slightly away from the table. A line of sunlight through the columns cuts him into thirds through the middle. He turns to Gimilzôr and the slight frown of his governance mask looks more like a scowl. "For now, however, Dol Amroth remains our most immediate threat."
"As my king commands," Gimilzôr responds, voice tight.
A/N: I've been struggling with not writing in present tense lately as I'm sure you can see from this chapter. I will go back soon and change that later. Been meaning to post this but wanted to wait until I finished chapter three until I did.
On a completely unrelated note: buy a split keyboard. God, they're nice.
Catch y'all next time!