26. Wildness on the loose. 

It was when the fingertips of dawn slipped through the trees at a low slant, deep blue-grey, that the enchantment shrank back with the echoes of the horns and bells and laughter, sated with blood, and their songs struck up again. The night was the high time, when the elves went riding. On the times of the full moon it was louder, bloodier, the war cries ululating and overlapping until the air quaked, and the drums and horns shattered the forest all to fragments. On those nights they carried torches blazing up red, to glance off blades and teeth. Fire he loved, fire he had been named for, in his eyes and his hair and the desolation he left in his wake. But this night had been the moonless night of deep summer, and the silence that was most ancient, and most wild. When the dark creatures were about, and the elves forgot all lights but the stars lancing through the pine needles, and their hunting party that was a river of eyes, shining two by two.

Still, something now stopped Aegnor from forgetting entirely. These days, the hour before dawn had come to be his favorite, for he knew some of the Edain woke early to see the elves as they passed away into the firs and mist.

He strayed from his brothers and company and went to Aeluin, and the place where its waters reached out and made a little deep pool behind the cover of the fir trees. On the rocky edge he knelt to drink deep and wash away the blood. He stood and faced the east, closed his eyes. It was still dark, but no longer night, and it was calm. He stretched his sore arms, unfurled the kinks along his spine—

A hand seized the tendon at his heel just as he leaned back off-balance, and he yelped and tumbled over with a splash. Bobbing up he heard laughter, low and round like cool pebbles.

“Take care! Take care! Candles go out in the water! And look, yours has all melted down!” His yellow sheaves of hair, which had flopped down in a sodden mass over his eyes, were parted by slender brown fingers, and he could see.

“Andreth!”

She was naked and pink with scrubbing, wet curls sliding over her ear and shoulder from the loose knot on top of her head, eyes bright as the shine of a brook slipping over stone, and he swept her up to him, her breasts pressed to his collar bone, her teeth stilling the flick of his ear. He buried his face in her neck and his chest broke open like a flood, she filled everything from every quarter. She was waiting for him. Time fell away fore and aft of the moment. It was cut loose of his past and place, and it was almost startling when his heart continued to beat, and his voice continued to sound.

“Care! I could not have been caught had I been seeking otherwise, else I would have been dead long ago.”

“For my sake I am glad you have lasted until now, then,” Andreth said, twining her arms around his neck. “It would be a shame if another had stilled you so easily.”

He laughed and sat her on a ledge beneath the pool’s surface, so that her head was still higher than his. “If you say so! Your words are strange to me.”

“Really?” She looked up sharply. “Will you tell me? Do the elves think of it differently?”

He traced her thighs beneath the water, hoping to guess what response she wanted. It was rather soon for word games, but he had the feeling she was getting at something else. “Elves do not speak of death as stilling, but of flying free. So if an enemy overtook me, I would not be taken prisoner, but I would either be vanquished in the struggle and be free, or would cut down that which tried to catch me and remain home, here—“ He patted himself on the chest.

“Like a flame holds to its wick, or is blown out in smoke upon the wind.”

He grinned up at her. “You like that, do you? Would you be here if I had a name you could not make fun of?”

“It is a bottomless vault of gifts, indulge me. As for death, Men sometimes speak of it thus as well. We too, go back and forth.”

“I told you.”

He rested his head against her belly, listened to its workings, louder than the lapping of water or calling of birds piercing the hush. Alive, still alive.

“Aegnor! Aikanáro!” Andreth said after a moment. “Sharp-flame, fell-flame!” That, in her own tongue, its meaning passed through a strange lens, and less of a name. “Do you wish to know why I came to see the hunt?”

“For me?”

“Because if your mother had not named you so, someone with better sense would have named you so soon enough.”

“Mm. We did not have torches this night.”

“It is little concern to us. To the Edain, the elves riding out is a wildfire broken out amid the trees to raze the dark and rend the night, beautiful and terrible. There is much of Men caged inside behind our words and duties, but we see you pass, and it is there, visible and outside of us, so you are gratifying. To us your death would not be a flying free, for you would not be loose before our eyes, to spark such longings of the perilous in us.”

He struggled not to laugh. “In you? To you? Is that enough, Andreth? What you see?”

“Nay. Now tell me your side.”

He closed his eyes again. “If by wild you mean instinct lost on unmapped paths, that feeling comes when speaking to one I have never met before, especially the Edain. Because elves know nearly everyone there is to know, and have known them for hundreds of years, yet we must race against you, to seize what we can before you vanish.”

He felt her trace his shoulders, his back. Beneath her fingers all the rest of his hair stood on end too, and he was hot, hotter than fire, hot as the old furnace, blue-white and still. Her hands hovered just off his skin, touching the tips of the hairs, the aura of heat above the water.

“And the hunt?”

“Terrifying to us too, but too well-known to mean what you mean. We have done it all together a thousand times, you see.” He let his shoulders shudder beneath her palms, and pulled her closer. “I know you tease that I never get tired of the same thing, whatever that means, but however I love it, it is not adventure. This is.”

Andreth laughed. “Flatterer! I suppose with Men, you can only act upon what you knew when you first awoke. All you have learned among other elves over the ages has not taught you anything useful of who we are.”

He lifted his head. “And have your tales taught you anything, of us?”

A glint came into her eyes. “Tell me: I say, your hunt was known to you before your memory. The dark things come out in the darkest nights, when the moon and sun cannot reach them, but they forget there are older creatures lying in wait, who had woken before the trees had awoken, and who had called the night their home before the dark things were made.”

Aegnor blinked at her. “I—yes. I—I had never looked at it in such a way.”

She grinned, still anticipating, though he had nothing more to say, nor wanted to. She seemed so alive he could scarcely bear it.

She asked: “Do you feel lost in the wild now?”

He strained to speak what he felt, but found himself fumbling for borrowed words, not his own, so that it did not come too close. So that it would last a while longer before it was spent.

“If it is the wildness that draws you, why come near enough to touch?”

“Men envy what they cannot hold. But to think of such a thing, so wild and unstoppable, being tamed to rest upon our campfire, or our candles—” Andreth’s eyes darkened. “I do not know if longing keeps its heat when held so close. But if it lasted but one hour…” She wrapped her legs around his waist. Hot and solid in the cool dark water, but trembling against his skin.

“What–what would you do with it?”

He could hear her heart beating, like a tapping in a cavern below the cold earth.

“Do? I? Would it not eat me alive?”

She stopped, too suddenly. Still he looked up at her. The dawn had drawn closer and the air was full of light and mist, but the brightest stars still bloomed pale through the sharp points of the fir trees, caught on the gleam of her wet hair.

“My lady,” Aegnor whispered, slipping into her language, “what hast thou done to me?”

For the first time she looked startled, and withdrew her hands. He slipped out of the circle of her legs and vaulted onto the bank, collecting his arms and surcoat, back turned.

The faint light was melting over the lake and he had almost reached the trees when Andreth recovered herself enough to stand up on the edge of the pool and call after him in the same tongue.

“What, then, Sharp-Flame? Afraid I might kindle thee? Or that thou might engulf me?”

He turned back to her blindly, a lump in his throat. “I will come again. I promise, I will come again, but I have no more words to feed yours.” He lied, in Sindarin. “If you wish to know what might be when two things touch for the first time, go ask my brother, not me.”

And he stumbled between the firs, where the mist was still lying, and the elves far off were still singing.