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Peace settled on the new realm of Doriath as though it had never left. The blades dark with Orc-blood were cleaned and polished and put away. The dented shields were half-heartedly hammered to make them ready for another battle. But that was all.
Elves poured out of the palace-fortress that was Menegroth, into the woods that the queen’s magic had made safe again. They were deep and green and dark, starlight trickling faintly down through furled leaves that had never seen another kind of light. The Elves sang, Daeron’s hands flew upon her pipes, and the wood grew more beautiful. Trees grew new bark over the scars made by enemy weapons. Moss covered bones that sank calmly into the thick loam, vanishing forever. Thingol wore the great sword Aranrúth and spoke still of danger, but it was danger’s absence that many felt, for the first time in this land complete and wonderful.
Daeron had her study back, which had briefly been converted into a storehouse for maps and missives. She drew pen to ink and then to paper and began again with a poem set to the notes of a zither. Thingol and Melian laughed and drew into each other’s arms in the beech grove when she played it, as though reeled by a thread.
There was only one restless soul in this new paradise.
“Come away with me,” Lúthien whispered as Daeron packed up her instrument.
“And leave the feast?”
“You’ve made them all forget the feast,” Lúthien laughed, inclining her head to the dancing and embracing couples. “Why can’t we too?”
As ever, Daeron could refuse her friend nothing: she followed the clusters of white flowers that bloomed beneath Lúthien’s feet as they snaked far out amid the trees, and then she followed Lúthien’s light step up into the dark branches, and up again. At last they beheld the stars at close range, with nearly no obscuring leaves and twigs. How they hung in the darkness, like great jewels!
Lúthien stepped out upon a very thin branch at the treetop, her quick feet dancing. Then she seemed to cast herself out into the night, and Daeron gasped, even though she knew the forest like she knew her own craft. Hearing her, Lúthien laughed, and Daeron saw that she had laid down upon some kind of woven platform, more like a basket than a talan.
“Come! Lie by me, my Daeron.”
Daeron thought they both might fall, but did not say so. Creeping carefully out onto the branch, she saw Lúthien undo her loose robe of birchbark fabric. The plush swell of her breasts made Daeron’s bare feet slip upon the narrow bough. She half-stumbled into the platform’s woody embrace.
“Lúthien–”
The princess was tugging the rest of the robe off, shifting in the small space. Beneath, dark curls winked in the starlight: Daeron observed dizzily that she wore no underthings.
“What liberties you take, princess.”
“O, I will drink as deeply as I can of those freedoms that remain to us!”
Her breasts moved as she laughed. Daeron’s knees turned to jelly, and she sat clumsily upon the woven floor.
Lúthien must have seen something in her face she misliked, because she pushed herself up a little, as though sitting. “Why shouldn’t we? You have long had a wish for me—or so I thought.” There was no fear in her voice, only the question.
Daeron did not deny it. But: “You are the daughter of Elu Thingol. Of Melian the Maia.”
There is a strange mantle of power about you, she wanted to say. You are the heroine of a great story. You are a curled bud of potential, like this whole place. The wood sings it, so flowers open under your feet in fear and reverence. I feel it, the same as they.
“So may I not live, as others do?” Lúthien snickered. Her long-lashed eyes closed and opened again smiling. “You of all people cannot tell me that I must wait until marriage to taste the pleasures of the body.”
Defeated, Daeron inclined her head and swept in one tattooed arm in an approximation of a bow. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lúthien’s hand dipped between her thighs, down to that glistening place. Daeron’s rapt gaze followed.
“Then lie down by me.” Lúthien suddenly sounded young, for all the weighty beauty of her presence. She hesitated. “Show me.”
Daeron gulped and felt dizzy again. She lay down alongside Lúthien’s fuller body.
“I had not thought your heart yearned for me,” she murmured.
Lúthien watched her seriously. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, yet her eyes were grave and wide, and so dark one could fall into them. “I know not that for which my heart yearns. I only know that now the horizons close in, and I am here, and so is my beloved friend and minstrel.”
“‘Tis your good fortune that you are so beautiful,” Daeron said, rather breathlessly. She was watching Lúthien’s fingers tracing her black curls, the soft folds of her cunt. “Because your courtship flatteries need much practice.”
Lúthien groaned. “I need practice in far more than this. Don’t deny me.”
Daeron found herself grinning. “How can I refuse my princess?”
They drank deeply of each other. Lúthien’s cries mingled with the song of night birds against the rustle of the pines’ boughs, and then her unversed fingers and smiling mouth made Daeron’s well-trained voice rise in answer.
When a new light filtered through the canopy, making it bloom in riotous and unknown color, it changed the shade of Lúthien’s eyes from the soft dark of an inkblot to a vivid cloud-grey, streaked through with bright. ‘Twas not only the hue that had changed: there was a gleam there that was also new. Lúthien was unsettled, excited, like the birds that sang at the first “dawn” and through each sunrise after.
At first the people of Doriath, and Daeron, too, credited the queen with this unfamiliar magic, this light that had something of the king’s gold-and-silver gaze to it. Yet Melian shook her head. For a moment her nightshade glance seemed to rest upon Daeron.
My art can do much, but not that, she said simply. Nor can I halt the course laid out in the Music.
Daeron felt the last like a stone sinking in her chest.
Lúthien loved the Sun. It bronzed her skin in their talan hideaway, which was so near the treetops that the light fell radiantly and scorched in summer. And Daeron forgot the fateful feeling of Melian’s mind-speaking pronouncement, or the miracle and panic of the first morning. It became usual, and ordinary. She fed Lúthien sun-sweetened berries from her fingers and kissed the bloodlike juice from chin and cheek. Lúthien had grown uncommonly skilled at their old lessons and enjoyed improvisation. She brought new instruments to the talan and took Daeron as a man would, and kissed her between her legs afterwards. She wriggled, lithe and strong as a panther, beneath the knots Daeron tied upon her wrists and ankles in turn. The light rose and dimmed and rose and dimmed. Daeron loved the starlight best—insisted her compositions’ melodies could be heard to greatest effect beneath the shimmering of a moonless night. But she still possessed it, just as she possessed the starry dark of Lúthien’s hair spilled against her shoulder when they fell asleep together.
Beren. The name came to Daeron when she played her flute in the woods far beyond Menegroth, where the queen’s magic began to turn wild at the edges before the wastes to their north. There was something new in their forest that could not be. A fearful miracle. Again she felt that sinking: that falling and opening. This time, try though she might, nothing would catch her.
In a different Age, and a different wood, Daeron’s bare feet showed through the rags in which she had wrapped them, and she was worn out enough with walking that she barely felt the root and rock that pressed beneath her soles.
She sang little these days, though she carried her pipes with her and sometimes played them at night. Still the larches bowed slightly to let her pass, their needles whispering one to the other. The ground seemed to slope more gently under her battered feet than it did to either side, making a path for her among stone and tree as it rushed down a ridge’s steep incline towards a distant, red-gold valley.
Daeron was thinking of the most mundane things—was that a river far below, or the rushing song of pines swayed by the wind? Would there be fish in the river?—when she felt the magic.
She swayed as one bespelled and fell to her knees in the rocky dirt. Daeron’s heart beat hard in her ears.
It was very like to the queen’s magic—though a thousand years had spent their days since that spirit had vanished across the ocean, Melian came to Daeron’s mind simply as queen—but this enchantment was subtler, and thrummed with life like a beating heart instead of a river’s serene, unceasing flow. It was an encirclement, Daeron realized, albeit a quiet and permeable one—a palimpsest that bore the unmistakable imprint of the great circle of the Girdle. Recognizing it, and knowing it to be so, Daeron could not breathe.
From the blur of her vision and of the moving woods a dark-haired Elf appeared and drew closer.
“Lúthien,” Daeron whispered, staring.
She had searched for her, at first. That was why she had left the guarded realm of Doriath for the wide wilds and dark places of Beleriand. But eventually she had heard the songs of her story—all Middle-earth was attuned to it, like a great instrument thrumming. Daeron had then given up any hope of finding the one she had meant to seek. Yet here in a robe of grey-and-blue stood this specter.
“I am Elrond, heir of Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Lúthien. This is my house.”
Elrond said it quite naturally, as if the whole valley were home.
A warm and steady hand alighted upon Daeron's cheek, tilting her face up. It was the first Elven touch she had felt in centuries. Grey eyes greeted her, their sun-after-rain shade all too familiar. They widened. Elrond's gaze had moved past Daeron's ragged garments, towards the pack where her flute was stowed, and at last to her forearms and hands that yet bore inked the old signs of Doriath.
“Well come indeed. Whatever your burdens, let them fall by the wayside and rest a while. You are safe here.”