“– bitterer than the bitterest winter –”

Deep in a dark circle flashed golden hair, bright by lantern light. “The Noldorin lady Galadriel,” murmured Daeron, “describing the Helcaraxë, no doubt.”

The lady’s glance turned frosty as they passed by. “Oh, is she?” said Erestor, innocence personified. “Really?”

Daeron eyed him with misgivings. “You haven’t been back a day.”

“Long enough,” said Melinna. “They should have made socks and winter mittens. Even Men know how. ‘Needle-binding’, they call it. But they don’t know about knitting in Valinor. Apparently.”

Erestor grinned. “I don’t think she appreciated the suggestion that she might have stayed there.”

Heaps of marble rubble and ruined fountains littered Thingol’s hall. The gold was gone, along with all the silver nightingales, and murky water spilling from broken basins and choked-up pools flooded the treacherous floor. Scars marred the petrified beeches of this subterranean forest, where once jewelled blossoms had glowed and polished creatures clambered between stone boughs.

Melinna sat down on a felled pillar. “They might have mended the tapestries,” she said, after a moment. “Stitching’s easy.”

“We were occupied,” said the lady Galadriel from the doorway, “stitching wounds.”

Later she would stitch wounds inflicted on them by her cousins’ swords.

The Esgalduin was thick with ice and bloated corpses. He saw the white distended faces of dead friends and closed his eyes against them, thrusting both tunics deep among the reeds. Air bubbled icily up round his arms. He soaked and scrubbed and wrung the cloth until his hands were numb and returned still splotched with blood.

It was almost dawn. Galadriel was awake already.

“I thought,” he said. “I thought – but ‘double-dipped in dark heart’s blood’, as Daeron said of Denethor’s standard, and little enough mine...”

“Blood is a stain, not a dye,” she said. “Erestor. Go and rest.”

No, not like that... pinch the thread... keep the spindle turning! Look, it’s unwinding – not again...

Their voices fluttered around her: all those women who had wanted to take the wild girl from the mountains in hand. She remembered her spindle spinning away under her chair and the broken lumpy thread tangling into impossible knots. Then the Queen had laughed and said Melinna would learn the gentle arts elsewhere, if she learned them at all, which suited Melinna just fine.

Those women were mostly long dead. “Keep it turning,” said a girl from Ost-in-Edhil. “Like this.”

Melinna sighed and spun.

It was fair and stately, this Imladrin guestroom. It had an easterly window to catch the dawn and wild roses brushing pink petals curiously against the glass. There was a pitcher of cool water, a veined marble basin, a broad bed spread with a silken counterpane – and cushions alive with silver nightingales, so that Galadriel remembered Queen Melian’s grey-winged chorus and was without words.

“Do you like it?” asked Melinna.

“I do – but those cushions –?”

“I wanted to weave a tapestry, but they told me to start with something smaller. I practised on cushion-covers. That’s why Imladris is full of nightingales.”

There were gardens silver-lit by starlight, the flowers shimmering shades of grey; there were nightingales flitting under the archways of heavy-crowned trees and flocking around a white-armed woman alight in the shadows with Aman’s brightness. Gold patterns picked out her embroidered gown and she was smiling, just a little. Her starlit eyes gazed from the tapestry as though reflected from a mirror.

Galadriel looked away. “I would have thought it the Queen’s handiwork, had you not woven her into it.”

“It was,” said Melinna. “She wove Lórien’s gardens for us once. I thought she might walk in those gardens now.”