Chapter Text
When word came, far too late, of wolves in the wood, Dior took off the Nauglamír.
Galadriel argued with him. She said the jewel might be the best protection Menegroth’s king could now call to account. He had been wise to withhold it—wise in all things to deny them—but he was not wise to keep it from himself.
“Let the jewel guard one with less devoted counsellors,” Dior said. He saw anger grip her face like pain: it was painful, perhaps, to have pride enough that you shuddered at such barbs. Even with your cousins bearing down at the head of an army. She cared very much for his family. For him, by extension. He didn’t doubt her.
Yet blessings or the need of them weren’t what he’d thought of when his hand found the catch. The Silmaril had been his last inheritance: after beauty, a kingdom, Beren’s sword. When the green-lord came, bearing the coffer gingerly—the Laegrim never loved the jewel; they tolerated it, because it disclosed Lúthien’s face to the blindest among them in sycophantic detail—when he came, Dior had thought that he brought something stained. Some blood, some evidence. But the Silmaril was free of fault. It had grown strangely clear since he first saw it by the Ascar. His hand’s color was planted, then well-tended, in the depths. What he remembered thinking, in the silence that succeeded the gift—the only noise, the running footsteps of a fountain—was that they were wrong who said that it had aged his mother. It was a stone. It reminded him of her.
He wouldn’t wear it to battle. Fëanor’s oath was a sickness. Let them descend into the matrix of Thingol’s greater jewel; let disappointment flood them, and let them gorge on lack. When they had bled awhile, even they might prefer the curelessness of the world above to the caves. They had been sick for many years.
Outside the nursery, Galadriel’s words sounded again in his mind, rising and falling out of nowhere like a piece of dogged music. The necklace back in its iron coffer had a heft it had never admitted to, when worn: a living want of balance. He knocked once. When the door opened, he asked Elwing’s minder to leave them, and the woman smiled.
Nimloth was with the twins. She knew what he intended, though for the moment he felt alone.
Then his daughter crept from behind one of Melian’s tapestries, and he knelt down out of his high imaginings to greet her. She was three that year, sly by the measure of an Elven-child: her blood betrayed finally in the precision of her gestures. He fussed without great interest at her thick black storm of hair, and lifted her onto a stool, leaving the coffer by its feet. She sat for him with obvious intention, fidgeting more from the effort of stillness than she would have at rest.
He opened the coffer. She said, “Oh!” as though relieved he had remembered.
“Shh,” he said, aware in the bold light of his new shadow, and of the chamber’s former gloom—gray gloom broken as ice above some deeper, darker water.
Protection; he hoped so. But he would have given it to her whether it brought with it great risk, or nothing. He settled the band around her neck, working not to snag her hair on any lesser stones, that sat in rows like spray atop old gold. The Nauglamír had once been made to flatter every wearer. It was constrained by the addition of the Silmaril, which could not shrink or grow to the tune of Dwarven magic. A gem the size of a fist, bumping that serious chin… But the enchantment remained; only it made her look like a songbird, body belled at the throat.