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Haleth had expected daylight to do to the Elf-lord what it did to most people: to reveal the assorted blemishes and imperfections that strong drink and gentle half-light always painted over between them, and write over her memories of the previous night with hard unsentimental reality. She sat up, and stretched, and looked over at him.
He had not changed at all. The sunlight that should have aged and sharpened him only made him luminous. He was like a man out of a song or story, as you saw them in your mind: an idea of how a person should look, not a real person.
He seemed to feel her staring. He rolled over and regarded her, heavy-lidded. The eyes beneath the long lashes were glittering dark and knowing, the eyes of a grown man in the face of a beardless youth fair as a girl. It was the face of a young god or a dream-vision. Were they all like this, the Elves of this west country? Ye gods! This ill-spoken prince hadn’t even been the prettiest one at the party.
Almost immediately upon the heels of that thought came another: Haleth herself had certainly not been the prettiest woman of her people at the party. And the sunlight that kissed the Elf so lovingly was undoubtedly not doing her any favours. That glittering gaze had to be taking in her scars new and ancient, the old white marks of overquick growth on her belly and thighs that had made her self-conscious back when her people had been prosperous enough to afford things like self-consciousness, and the cherry-coloured blot of a birthmark on her left breast. There was grey in her hair since they crossed the mountains, more since her brother and father died: and the shapes of frowns were painted on her face in the fine tracks of wrinkles that she knew would only deepen. She was not young. A decade from now she would be past childbearing; two decades, and she would be a hag, no doubt as hideous in the sight of those dark-shining eyes as any Orc.
And that same time, if what she had heard tell of these Elves was true, would pass for this prince as an eyeblink: and he would remain precisely as beautiful as he was just now, and had been for hundreds of years already.
“Well?” she snapped, when he had been looking at her for what seemed an unreasonably long time. There was something disturbed in that dark gaze.
“Lady,” he answered - in her own tongue, not the lilting accented Elvish that served as a common tongue in these parts, nor yet in the Dwarvish trade-speech that all at the celebrations the night before had been employing to fill the gaps in understanding that lay between their peoples. Haleth had striven hard for her mastery of both. Bare weeks this boy - she could not help thinking of him as a boy - had had to pick up the ancient speech of her people, a speech known wherever they traded as a tongue of uncommon difficulty. The only evidence that it had been any effort for him at all was a slight lisp. “Have I offended thee?"
"You are staring,” she answered in Elvish. “I can speak your language: you need not mangle mine.”
He had not mangled it - not beyond the lisp - and it was plain from his raised eyebrow that he knew it; yet he acquiesced. “This is not my language,” he answered her, in Elvish nonetheless. “Only the local cant of the Grey-elves. In my own I might say -” and he spoke a string of meaningless syllables.
Haleth frowned. “Meaning?”
“You are splendid,” he answered in Elvish, and then in her own tongue, translating again, “Thou art fair!”
Haleth snorted. “You need not flatter me: you already bedded me.” Not particularly well, either: perhaps when you were so beautiful you did not trouble yourself learning how to please a woman. She did not say so, any more than she would have said it to the beardless boy he looked like. It was hard not to think of him as a boy. Much too young for you, Haleth, she said to herself, imagining her brother nudging her and sniggering as he said it. Hundreds of years old, this latecomer prince who looked at her with such dark nervous fascination: but much too young!
She got out of the bed and started pulling on her clothes. The Elf still watched her. There was colour rising in his cheeks. “I meant to give thee a compliment,” he said. If he had known the train of her thoughts perhaps he would have tried not to sound quite so much like a whining child. Since she happened to be facing the other way, Haleth allowed herself to roll her eyes. “I never thought to wed,” said the Elf.
Haleth laughed. Was that all that was troubling him? “Nor I,” she said lightly, “so you need not worry on that head. I am no man’s wife, nor ever shall be - and no Elf’s either.” She came back to the bed then and pecked him on the cheek. “My thanks to you,” she said, “for a pleasant end to a pleasant evening. You are fair enough to look upon yourself - as I’m sure you know, if you own a mirror."
He stared at her. "Where are you going?”
“West,” said Haleth.
“But - you must stay here. Your people are welcome here. These are rich lands - I can give you rich lands - and besides, to thee I -"
There again that presumptuous thou. "I have thanked you already for your generous offer,” Haleth said, “but we did not cross the mountains looking for Elven lords. I do not want one any more than I want an Elven husband. West to a free country, wherever we may find it. The Haladin do not want your lands, Caranthir. We need no latecomer prince.”
The rising flush in his cheeks bespoke anger now, if Haleth was any judge. Ah, he was young, she decided: he made the most sense to her if she thought of him as young. Young, and proud, and selfish, and rather stupid. If he had been a youth of her people she would have thought him worth taking some trouble over all the same: for the generosity was true enough, if overlate and shortsighted, and young men grew wiser as they grew older. But how long did it take an Elf to grow out of being a fool? Probably more lifetimes than Haleth had to spare. “I thank you,” she said again, “for all your kindnesses, my lord: and I bid you farewell."
She bowed to him, politely, and left the bedchamber. Already she was forgetting him as she sought her kinswomen and hearth-warriors, most of them hungover and half of them in each other’s beds: forgetting him even as some of her own folk began to rib her about her taste for handsome foreigners. "Well, they are pretty,” she said to make her aunt laugh, for the old woman had had little enough to laugh about in these hard years. She would not survive the next march West: she knew it, and Haleth knew it, and she fully intended to make the journey anyway. West for a free country, or die on the way! What else was there?
Haleth very seldom thought of that prince of the Eastmarch again. With some greater knowledge of Elven customs - hard, in Beleriand, to avoid knowledge of Elven customs; or to miss how very strange the Elves thought theirs - it did occur to her that their coupling had been, by the standards of his people, an odd one. Perhaps he really had thought her fair.
If she ever thought of him beyond that, it was only to hope he lived long enough to grow out of being a fool: for there might be something to him, eventually. She thought much the same of all the Elves she ever met. It was strange the way they seemed to grow younger every year.