Archive of Our Own

Minas Tirith, T.A. 3018

"Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised."

The thread snapped.

It was white silk, impossibly fine — a gift from the merchants of Dol Amroth who arrived each spring with salt and cloth and news from the coast — and Cordelia had been working it through linen for the better part of the afternoon, stitching tiny elanor blossoms along the hem of a handkerchief that no one would ever look at closely enough to admire. But she liked the work. She liked the smallness of it: the way a needle could make something beautiful in a space no larger than her palm, the way her breathing slowed and her mind grew quiet when her fingers were occupied. It was the closest thing to peace she had found in recent months, and she clung to it with the quiet desperation of a woman who knew her peace was numbered.

She held the broken thread up to the light. It had frayed where she'd pulled it too tight — her own fault, she knew. She had not been concentrating. Her mind kept drifting west, past the Pelennor, past the river, past the mountains, to a place she had been only thrice before, where a man she barely knew was waiting to marry her.

"You've gone somewhere again," said Cressida, without looking up.

Cressida was sitting across from her in the solar, curled into the window seat with a book balanced on her knees and a cup of wine she had been nursing since noon. She was the daughter of Lord Húrin, Warden of the Keys and one of Denethor's oldest friends, and she had been Cordelia's closest companion since they were children — since the year Finduilas died, really, when Cressida's mother had brought her small, solemn daughter to the Citadel to play with the Steward's equally small, equally solemn one, and the two girls had sat in a corner of the nursery for an hour without speaking before Cressida had silently handed Cordelia half of her apple, and that had been that.

"I'm here," Cordelia said.

"Your hands are here. The rest of you is in Rohan." Cressida turned a page. "You've pulled four stitches out and you haven't noticed."

Cordelia looked down. She had, in fact, pulled four stitches out. The small golden flower she'd been building so carefully was now missing most of a petal, and the linen was puckered where the thread had caught. She set it down in her lap and pressed her fingertips to her temples.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask."

"You were about to."

"I was about to say that you should drink your wine and stop torturing that handkerchief, but if you'd prefer the version where I ask if you're fine and you lie about it, we can do that instead." Cressida's voice was dry, fond, and entirely without mercy. This was, Cordelia reflected, why she loved her. Everyone else in her life was either too careful with her or not careful enough. Cressida was simply honest.

Cordelia reached for her wine. It was from Lebennin, pale gold and faintly sweet, and she drank half of it in a single swallow, which was not at all ladylike and which Cressida, to her credit, did not comment on.

From the outer chamber came the sound of laughter — Ioreth and Merien, two of her ladies-in-waiting, who were supposed to be sorting linens for Cordelia's household but who had, from the sound of it, abandoned the task in favor of something more interesting. There was a murmur of voices, a high bright peal of laughter from Ioreth, and then Merien's voice, carrying clearly: "— and she says he looked at her, properly looked, and she nearly —"

Cordelia closed her eyes.

She did not dislike her ladies. Ioreth was kind-hearted and warm and could arrange flowers more beautifully than anyone Cordelia had ever met. Merien was clever with a needle — cleverer than Cordelia, truth be told — and had a gift for remembering the names of every person she had ever been introduced to, which was useful at court. Nellas, the quietest, had a lovely singing voice and was genuinely thoughtful in a way that occasionally surprised her. They were good women, all three of them. They simply inhabited a different country from the one Cordelia lived in, a country where the chief concerns were gowns and gossip and the relative handsomeness of the young soldiers in the Citadel guard, and where a betrothal to a prince of Rohan was not a quiet catastrophe but the most exciting thing that had ever happened to anyone they knew.

"They're happy for you, you know," Cressida said, reading her face. "In their way."

"I know."

"You could try being happy for yourself, too." 

"I could," Cordelia agreed, and picked up her sewing again. The broken thread trailed from the needle like a small white flag of surrender.

The truth was this: she did not want to go.

She had never said it plainly, not to Cressida, not to Faramir, not to anyone. It felt ungrateful. It felt, worse than that, childish — the complaint of a girl who did not understand that daughters of stewards were not permitted the luxury of wanting. Her father had arranged the match. The alliance was sound. Théodred was, by every account, a good man: brave, honourable, well-liked by his people. She had met him last summer and found him courteous and warm, with strong hands and a laugh that came easily, and she had thought — standing in the golden hall of Meduseld at sixteen, watching him speak with her father's envoys — I could be content with this. I think I could learn contentment.

But contentment was not happiness, and Edoras was not home.

Home was the library on the sixth level of Minas Tirith, where the windows faced east and the morning light fell across the reading tables in long amber bars and the books smelled of dust and leather and age. Home was the garden where her mother had once walked, now slightly overgrown and unkept, which Cordelia tended in secret because no one else remembered it. Home was Faramir reading aloud to her on winter evenings, his voice low and steady, while the fire burned down to embers. Home was even the cold stone corridors of the Citadel, which she had memorised so thoroughly that she could walk them blind — every uneven flagstone, every draught, every place where the torchlight caught the pale veins in the marble and turned them briefly gold.

She had spent twenty-one years learning the shape of this city. It was the only place in all of Middle-earth that knew the shape of her in return.

And in three months' time she would leave it, and she would marry a man whose laugh she could barely remember, and she would live in a wooden hall on a windswept hill and learn the customs of a people who were not her people, and she would bear sons who would ride horses before they could read, and that would be her life. It was not a bad life. She knew that. Many women managed it.

But some nights, lying awake in the dark with the city murmuring below her window, she pressed her face into her pillow and felt something very close to grief.

She found Boromir in the armory.

He was sitting on a bench near the door, not doing anything in particular — just sitting, his hands resting on his knees, staring at the far wall where the old shields of the Citadel Guard hung in their iron brackets. He looked tired. He had looked tired for weeks, ever since the dream, the one he would not speak of in full, the one that had sent their father into long private consultations with maps and scrolls and had ended, finally, in the decision that Boromir would ride north to a place called Rivendell to seek an answer from the Elves.

Cordelia stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him. Her eldest brother had always been the most beautiful thing in any room he entered — tall and dark-haired and broad across the shoulders, with the easy confidence of a man who had never once had cause to doubt his own worth. Their father's favorite. The son of sons. She loved him without reservation and with a small, private ache that she had never quite named, because Boromir's love — which was real and warm and entirely sincere — had always been a thing he gave to her in passing, between battles, between duties, between the thousand obligations that consumed his life. She had never been angry about it. She understood. He was the heir. She was the daughter.

"You'll wear a hole in the wall," she said.

He looked up, and his face changed — softened — the way it always did when he saw her, and her heart twisted a little in her chest. "Cora." His childhood name for her. He was the only one who still used it. "Come. Sit."

She crossed the room and sat beside him on the bench, tucking her skirts beneath her. The armory smelled of iron and oil and old leather, and through the high window she could see the tip of the White Tower, bright against the afternoon sky.

"You're leaving tomorrow," she said.

"At first light."

"Father says it will take you months."

"Father says a great many things." Boromir's mouth curved, but it was not quite a smile. He was quiet for a moment, and then he turned to look at her. "You will be gone when I return. To Rohan."

"Yes."

"And you are happy? With the match?"

She was so surprised by the question that she nearly told him the truth. Boromir did not ask about her feelings, as a rule — not because he did not care, but because it did not occur to him. He loved her the way he loved the city: automatically, fundamentally, without examination.

"Théodred is a good man," she said carefully.

"That is not what I asked."

She looked down at her hands. Her fingers were still faintly stained with ink from the archives — she had been reading that morning, an old account of the founding of the alliance between Gondor and Rohan, written in a cramped hand she had struggled to decipher. She had wanted to understand the history of the thing she was being woven into. She was always trying to understand things through history. It was, she suspected, both her best quality and her most useless one.

"I will miss you," she said instead, which was true, and which answered nothing, and which Boromir accepted with a nod because he, too, was a child of Denethor and understood that there were questions it was better not to press.

He put his arm around her shoulders. He smelled of leather and soap and the particular clean warmth that she had associated with safety since she was a child. She leaned into him, just for a moment, and allowed herself the indulgence of pretending that things were simple.

"I'll bring you something from Rivendell," he said. "A book, if they have them. Something old and strange and entirely useless."

"That would be perfect."

"I know." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "I know you."

She wanted to say: do you? She wanted to say: I'm frightened, and I don't know how to be someone's wife, and I think Father is losing himself, and I'm scared, I'm really scared. She wanted to say: stay. Don't ride north. I have a feeling, an awful feeling, that if you go, something will —

But she was a daughter of the Steward, and daughters of stewards did not say such things, and so she leaned against her brother's shoulder and said nothing, and the light through the high window moved slowly across the floor, and the shadows of the old shields stretched long upon the wall.

Her father summoned her after supper.

The Steward's study was on the uppermost floor of the Tower of Ecthelion, a cold room with narrow windows that looked out over the Pelennor in every direction. Denethor sat behind his desk — a great dark thing of Lebennin oak, carved with the White Tree — and he did not look up when she entered. He was reading. He was always reading, these days, though he never told anyone what. 

"Sit," he said.

She sat.

He continued reading for a full minute before setting the parchment aside and fixing her with his gaze. Denethor's eyes were grey and sharp and deeply intelligent, and when he looked at her — when he truly looked — she always felt as though she were being assessed for flaws. Not unkindly. He was not a cruel man. But there was a precision to his attention that left no room for softness, and she had learned, very young, that there was no point in trying to charm him. Boromir could make their father smile. Faramir could sometimes, through sheer excellence of scholarship, win his grudging respect. Cordelia could do neither. She was simply present — the third child, the daughter, the one he had accounted for.

She remembered — she could not help it — a different version of him. When she was very small, perhaps four or five, before Finduilas died. He had carried her on his shoulders once, through the garden. She remembered looking down at the top of his head and seeing, with the startled clarity of childhood, that his hair was going grey at the temples, and she had touched the grey hair with her small fingers and said, very seriously, you're turning into silver, Father, and he had laughed. He had laughed. It was the only time she could remember it clearly — the actual sound of it, deep and warm and startled out of him, as though he had not expected joy and did not quite know what to do with it.

That man was gone. She did not know exactly when he had left, or where he had gone. The grief had taken pieces of him, and the pride had calcified around what remained, and what sat before her now was something harder, colder, still brilliant, still formidable, but closed, like a door that had been shut and locked and whose key had been thrown into the sea. She loved him anyway. She could not help it, even if he could not love her back in quite the way she need.

"Your household arrangements," he said. No preamble. No warmth. "I have reviewed the lists your women prepared. They are acceptable, though I have made adjustments to the provision of plate. You will not take the Númenórean silver — that remains with the house. I have commissioned a set from the guild in the fourth circle. Simpler. Appropriate for Rohan."

"Yes, Father."

"You will depart with an escort befitting your station. I have arranged for forty riders and a wagon for your household." His voice was even, practical, the voice of a man organizing the shipment of grain or the rotation of sentries. "Your uncle Imrahil will meet you at the crossroads of the Mering Stream. He has written to say he wishes to ride with you as far as Edoras."

"That is kind of him."

"It is appropriate. You are a princess of Gondor. You will enter Rohan as one."

She folded her hands in her lap. The word princess sat strangely in her ears. She had never thought of herself that way — it was technically correct, she supposed, as the daughter of the ruling Steward, but it was a title that implied grandeur, and grandeur was not a quality she associated with her own life. Her life was small and careful and constructed of small, careful things: sewing, reading, the quiet maintenance of rooms and relationships, the endless patient work of being a woman in a house full of men who had forgotten that women required maintenance too.

"Father," she said. She did not know what she intended to say after it. Something honest, maybe. Something true. I am frightened. I do not want to go. Please look at me. Please.

Denethor's gaze had already returned to his papers. "That will be all."

She rose. She curtsied. She left.

In the corridor outside, she pressed her back against the stone wall and breathed, very carefully, through the tight hot knot in her throat. She would not cry. She was a daughter of the house of Húrin, and they did not cry in hallways, and even if they did, there was no one to see it, and that somehow made it worse.

The morning Boromir left, the sky was grey and heavy with unshed rain.

Cordelia stood on the uppermost level of the Citadel, beside the White Tree — dead, leafless, beautiful in the way that sad things sometimes are — and watched her brother ride through the Great Gate. His banner snapped in the wind: silver and sable, the White Tree and the seven stars. Even from this distance he sat his horse like a king. Like the king their father would never be and never stop wanting to be.

Faramir stood beside her. He was quieter than Boromir. They were alike in that way, she and Faramir, two people who lived largely inside their own heads and emerged only when necessary. He was watching him too, and his face was very still.

"He will come back," Cordelia said, though she was not certain who she was reassuring.

"Of course he will." Faramir's voice was steady. "He always comes back."

They stood together in silence and watched until the banner was a flicker of silver against the grey of the Pelennor, and then a speck, and then nothing. The rain began — softly, almost gently, as though the sky were being careful — and still they did not move.

"Faramir," she said quietly.

"Mm."

"Do you think Father would have let me stay? If I had asked?"

Faramir did not answer immediately. He had their mother's way of considering things before he spoke, turning them over in his mind like stones in a stream, looking for the truest angle. It was one of the reasons Denethor found him so infuriating — their father valued decisiveness above all else, and Faramir's deliberateness struck him as weakness. Cordelia knew better. Faramir was not weak. He was simply unwilling to be wrong.

"I think," Faramir said carefully, "that Father sees your marriage as a matter of state. And matters of state do not accommodate the wishes of daughters." He paused. "I also think he would not understand the question."

"No," she said. "He wouldn't."

"That doesn't mean it isn't worth asking."

"It means there's no one to ask it to."

Faramir looked at her then, and something moved in his face — grief, maybe, or recognition, or the particular helpless tenderness of a man who sees his sister's sadness clearly and cannot fix it. He reached out and took her hand, and his fingers were cold from the rain, and she held them tightly and did not say any of the things she was thinking.

Below them, the city went on with its business. Soldiers changed guard. Market women carried baskets through the rain. Somewhere a bell rang, counting out the hour. The world was ordinary, and indifferent, and continuing, and her brother was riding north into a story she did not yet understand, and she was standing in the rain beside a dead tree, holding her other brother's hand, and the future was coming for her whether she wanted it or not.

That night, alone in her chamber, she sat at her writing desk and opened the leather-bound book she kept for her own thoughts — not a diary, exactly, but something close. She had never been able to write proper poetry, despite years of trying, but she wrote anyway, because the alternative was to sit in silence with her thoughts, and her thoughts tonight were not good company.

She wrote about the garden. Her mother's garden — the one on the fifth level, behind the old Houses of Healing, where Finduilas had planted roses and lavender and the pale sweet-smelling niphredil that grew wild on the banks of the Anduin. No one tended it now except Cordelia, who went when she could and pulled the weeds and cut back the things that had grown wild. It was not a duty anyone had asked her to perform. It was simply something she did, the way one tends a grave: because someone ought to, and because the dead deserve at least the memory of care.

She wrote about her mother, or what little she remembered: a voice singing in a language Cordelia did not understand. The scent of salt and rosewater. Hands that were always cool, even in summer. A face she could no longer picture clearly, though she had been told — by her uncle Imrahil, by the old women of the court — that she resembled Finduilas more than either of her brothers did. She did not know if this was a comfort or a cruelty. To carry the face of a woman she could not remember, in a city that had loved that woman and lost her, in a house ruled by a man who had loved her most of all and punished the world for it ever since.

She set down her pen. The ink dried on the nib. The candle guttered and spat.

She thought about Théodred. She tried to picture his face and found she could not — not fully, not the particular arrangement of his features, only an impression: fair hair, a broad jaw, kind eyes. She would learn his face. She would have a lifetime to learn it. She would learn the way he slept and the way he laughed and the things that made him angry, and she would bear his children, and she would grow old with him, and perhaps — perhaps — it would be enough. Perhaps contentment would calcify into something warmer, the way water becomes ice, and she would look back on this night and think: how young I was. How frightened over nothing.

Perhaps.

She closed the book. She blew out the candle. She lay in the dark and listened to the rain on the stone and thought of her brother, riding north through the same rain, carrying a dream he could not explain toward a place she had only read about in books, and she loved him so fiercely that it felt like an injury — a bruise on the inside of her ribs, tender and deep and impossible to touch.

Come back, she thought. Please come back.

The rain went on. The city slept. And Cordelia lay awake in the dark, in the room that would not be hers for very much longer, and the future pressed against the window like a stranger waiting to be let in.