[Note: Credit where credit is due, the title is a reference to the lyrics of a favorite song of mine that, while not particularly in-character, is also not entirely out. If you like your rambling fanfiction with a side of musical accompaniment, it's worth the listen.]
It is not a new experience that Nauraa finds herself unable to sleep. What is unfamiliar is the urge to get out of this house, away from the four walls and creaking ceiling that seem to come ever-closer every time she breathes. The roof seems an acceptable compromise, with no one to see her do something so unseemly, nothing above her and nothing to the sides and enough of a clearing to see the vast infinity of unfamiliar stars.
There is a loose thread at the edge of all of these signs of the last month, far too many strange things to put into the few words she knows. The more she tugs at it, demands to find either beginning or end, the more the fabric of everything else gives way around this one thread woven through the entire tapestry of her life.
In the way of so many conversations, all the things she could have said come to mind hours too late.
Do you think I know so little of duty? I have buried my brother and my intended husband. My parents do not even know their daughter still lives, and a stranger will tell them their son is dead. Do not speak to me like a child of duty or honor or promises kept, when these are the only things I want and still out of my power.
The image unravels more rapidly now, like the great snow-drifts falling down from the mountains, set off by the shift of a single pebble.
The wolf-men had brought her knight to her, some ten years ago, and he had given her a ring and a promise. She had long forgotten that promise by the time the same wolf-men had taken her people from her. The bloody ambush had thrown her together with the hunter who had led her south, to the city where she had found Valo – the horse had brought her to Orenn, who had helped her find work in the city, which had led her to find the kittens. The kittens had brought her to her friends, and her friends had given her the advice which had put her in her yard at the right time to find the dog which had been chasing Kivi. And the rabbit, the little pebble at the heart of the avalanche, was the first sign she had recognized for what it was. She had asked it an impossible question.
And then in answer to that question, spoken only in secret, there had been the man from far away, who happened to be the friend of her only two friends in a city of so many hundred people.
It is so great a series of chances, each meaningless without the previous and the next – a perfectly-arranged sequence of accidents and happenstance – that it is difficult to believe even in the midst of it.
She drifts half-asleep into a long-forgotten memory – a man in battle-worn armor, his hair grayer than his age ought to make it, kneels in the snow. As a child, she had not understood why someone would have tears in their eyes when they were going home. Now, flung a hundred thousand miles off-course and faced with choosing between one duty and another, she knows that expression well enough.
Fear.
Fear that duty itself would never again be a good enough reason, when one had been free of it for even a short time. Fear that the choice between what one wanted and what one had to do would mean a slow obliteration of the other.
You are smart and brave, like my daughter – my little bird. It seems almost cruel to have shown you a map of so many places you might never see. But I tell you this – here. Hold onto it. I fear it will do little good for me now. If you ever leave this place, if you ever find yourself out in the rest of that big world, you bring this back to me, hm? By then you will be bigger and smarter and maybe you can meet my Fil, and there will be at least one person who remembers my name without a curse. You promise me that?
I promise.
She had told no one, not even her parents, who would have thought it ridiculous that a little girl of the northern tribes should chase a man of Gondor halfway across the earth for a child’s oath.
Fate, if there is such a thing like that which sets its hand to keeping all things in their right order, must consider a promise like hers as binding as those made by much more important people. What else but a guiding mind, far above and away, could have heard her so many years ago and woven together the span of time so seamlessly into the present?
Perhaps that great unknowable something can see her more clearly sitting on the highest point of the house, or perhaps it is she who sees it as it is for the first time – the wind a breath, the stars a thousand all-seeing eyes, the swaying trees a beating heart.
She supposes, rationally, that this should terrify her. For some reason, it does not.
There is a comfort in the thought that she is not finding her own way, after all.
The rooftop is not high enough to escape the start of the same nightmare as always – a person she loves, the end of a dock, a shockingly-blue lake and the feeling that she ought not to be here, drawn inexplicably to the same end.
Except this night, the last of her steps never comes. Just before the point of no return she finds, for the first time, that she is able to turn her foot from the dreaded end, to put her back to the darkening lake and the faces of the dead and walk instead into an endless green country where the sun rises on white birds and high towers.
