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Going to bed with an Elf, it turns out, is more like going to bed with a Haladin woman than a Haladin man. Caranthir is certainly male, but he wants to take more time with her than any warrior she’s ever lain with. It’s usually women she wants for that, not only for bedding but for long stretches of kissing, for touching and talking without any particular purpose. For men, she wants hard, quick, gone.
The first time happens after the banquet Lord Caranthir holds at Thargelion, part of the aid he offers to the Haladin after their rescue. It’s not that she likes the Elf-lord, but he’s pretty under his scowl, and his mouth is really more sulky than sneering, the more she looks at him, and the more harsh red wine she drinks. The more he drinks, the more his face flushes with it.
He flushes redder when she takes him by the ears late in the evening and kisses him. It’s like he’s never been kissed before, the way he startles! Haleth doesn’t go to bed with maidens, men or women, so she lets him go, and he blinks his terribly long eyelashes at her.
Flustered and at a loss is a look she likes on him. It suits him better than haughtiness.
“Was that your first kiss?”
“I – No,” Lord Caranthir says. “I was – married. Before.”
Widowers make better lovers than men who've never married. “Then you’ll know what to do,” she says. “Where’s your bedchamber?”
It’s a room more fit for a lady than the sneering warrior-king she met in the mud and blood of the riverbank. Away from the crowded hall, the air is perfumed with something flowery she can’t identify, and the bed is heaped with only furs but strange, soft-covered cushions and rich cloth. Haleth barely glances around before she’s pushing down and tearing at his chestplate, the laces of his leather leggings, hers.
Then she’s on him, biting at where she bared his chest and fucking herself home in his lap, and proves to herself that she’s still alive until he gasps and sputters under her, conquered.
The Elf is still gasping when she’s done herself, a little after he is, his eyes very wide. Haleth’s still wearing most of her own armour, and she’s still on top of him when she takes off the leather cuirass with its rough metal plates, the buckles stiff under her fingers. Then her tunic. She’s still wearing a shift, marked with sweat and rust, a breast band under that, her leather chausses, but Caranthir re-focuses on her abruptly and his hands tighten on her hips, and they go again.
When it’s over she starts to collect her outer layers. The dirty leather and metal of her abandoned gear look out of place on his floor, among the sweet rushes and crushed herbs. Her underclothes are less than clean or fragrant. So is she.
“Uh,” says the Elf behind her. He’s still mostly dressed, save for his cloak thrown off and his chestplate torn away. His armour is a lot fiddlier than hers. She’d been thinking about cutting him out of some of it. “I have – a bath.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“An offer.”
“Hm,” says Haleth.
It turns out that Elves know how to heat their bathwater without a lot of bother. She might have fucked him just for that. It might be better than the bedding was, getting to bathe in a quiet, well-kept room, safe, the distant sounds of her people enjoying themselves far away sounding faintly through the walls. It’s hot. How long has it been since she wasn’t cold?
“I have – oil,” says Caranthir.
“What for,” Haleth asks suspiciously.
“Your hair,” says the Elf. He’s been watching her wash, saying nothing. Now he goes to his knees beside the bath. “I have – a comb.” He’s redder than she is, and her flesh has gone boiled-pink from the water. “Can I –?”
“If you like,” says Haleth, and the Elf pours his oil into the water. It’s the same flowery scent as the room, thick and sweet. He guides her head back under it, hands curved around her skull. Then he pours more oil on her wet hair, and rubs his hands through it, and she could stand more of this so it’s a good thing that he seems happy to do it for a while.
“It’s quite coarse,” he says of her hair. She says nothing.
Then he takes out his comb – had he been carrying it? Surely not into battle – and starts to work. So passes what will remain the strangest half-hour of her life, and nothing like what she had had in mind for after the banquet, no matter who she took to bed to prove she was alive. He works gently through every knot and tangle for the longest time. Then he parts her hair from the nape of her neck and combs it forward carefully over her shoulders, short as it is.
The bathwater has cooled, and when he presses his mouth to the bare back of her neck it makes her shiver. She’d meant to leave once she was clean, but now she feels indolent with warmth, well-fed, well-fucked. She wraps herself in his discarded cloak while he strips, and stays to watch him scrub himself clean in her used bathwater. It’s only later that Haleth will perceive his unwonted haste, the disregard of his usual standards for cleanliness.
His body is very pale, fair as a woman’s. There’s no hair on his long legs, under his arms, on his chest, and only the faintest, finest burr of it at the base of his belly, a shadow between his thighs. His nipples are pinker than hers, rather sweet. His long dark hair gleams like Lake Helevorn under an evening sky, and as she watches, he pulls at the complicated braids and silver hair-pieces, and combs his fingers through it swiftly.
Then he’s stepping out of the bath toward her, and the third time is softer than the first. This time she fucks him like she would a woman. She touches his skin all over, sliding the palms of her hands up and down his flanks, hard and soft and then hard again. Kisses him, the first time she has since she pulled him out of the hall. When he kisses her back, she runs her hands through his long, long hair, from the roots to the ends, and feels Caranthir shudder like she’s taken him in her mouth.
She doesn’t usually like to do that for men, but this one is very clean. She might. But for now she’s content with the kissing. It makes the warmth rise in her belly, sweet but not urgent, and Caranthir proves uncommonly amenable to everything she wants as long as she has her hands in his hair. The sneering, untouchable Elf-lord who had made her feel like dirt shudders for her, and shudders for her, and lets her push him back towards his bed.
This time she lies down in it with him, and it’s another kind of pleasure, feeling with her own bare skin the texture of the furs, the silks, heavy stuff he calls velvet. His skin is most like the silk. He doesn’t try to get on top of her. It’s like he’s content just to kiss, too, even though his cock rests on the inside of her thigh, willing to let her do what she will. His hands slide dreamily up and down her back, but they clutch at her harder when she puts her mouth on his chest again, sucking at his nipples until they’re as red as his mouth.
He still gasps very prettily, and he gasps again when she takes him in hand, fondles his cock, the warm private curves of his balls. He lies there and lets her touch him, flushed and wide-eyed, like he’s waiting for her to put him inside her again. She’s almost curious about what it would take to make him rough, to turn over and pin her down and make her take him. Is this what all Elves are like in bed? If Elf-women are as shy as Elf-men, how do they ever fuck?
She hasn’t seen many Elf-children in Thargelion’s halls. Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they’re bad at it. Perhaps they just kiss, and kiss, and go to sleep in their shifts still holding hands.
“Elf, come here,” Haleth says, at last, watching his eyelashes tremble with need, and pulls him into her by the buttocks.
They fuck a lot over the weeks that the Haladin stay in the shelter of his halls. She doesn’t want him to come to expect it, but she likes his bath, and she still hasn’t finished finding out all the things that make him blush.
He goes tremendously red the first time she sucks his cock, like no one’s ever done that to him before. He gets all sulky when she asks him, in a way that probably means no, they haven’t. He’s never put his mouth on anyone – his poor wife – so Haleth decides to teach him for his next one. He’s swiftly very good at it, as eager to spend hours between her legs as he is to spend them kissing. It’s how she spends most of her evenings in Thargelion, that strange jewel-bright grief-stained time she’ll remember the rest of her life: in Lord Caranthir’s bath as he combs out her tangles, or in his bed with his head between her thighs and her hands in his dark hair, her fingers rubbing against his scalp.
Pulling his hair makes him buck, and gasp, and throw his head back like she’s taking him from behind. Makes him push his tongue into her or rock against her stomach like he’s desperate to fuck or be fucked. She fucks him with his flowery bath-oil one night, and her fingers inside him make him shake and thrust into her mouth and come and come and come. She likes the ways he’s quiet for her, but she likes that, too. Would he get rough and frantic like that if someone was fucking him while he fucked her?
That suggestion turns him red, but not in a pretty way. He flushes mottled red-and-white to his hairline, and then his mouth works – also not in a pretty way. He shouts at her, and she shouts back, and they scream for a while until she dresses and storms out of his rooms.
Haleth won't put up with that. There's nothing wrong with a polite no, but if the Elf-lord thinks he can browbeat her, he has vastly underestimated his attractions.
She’s felt Elven eyes on her all the while, watching her go with their lord into his private rooms, watching her leave them; swift bright glances from their strange bright eyes, following her everywhere she goes. She expects rudeness once she stops bedding with their lord, but nothing changes. They still treat her with great respect, calling her Lady Haleth as though the Haladin are foolish enough to cringe at their leaders’ feet and put them on an unearned pedestal. They still watch her. They still bow their heads when she passes.
Caranthir glares at her from afar, but he watches her, too. He reminds her of a furious cat, now she knows how much he likes his hair stroked and how often he insists on washing: before and after. He looks at her when they meet in his halls like he wants to hiss at her. He looks at her like the marks of her short fingernails aren’t still sore and red in his back under all his armour, under the great fur-lined fall of the long red cloak she once wrapped around her nakedness. He looks at her, and he looks at her, and sometimes she thinks he’s trying to communicate something to her with the very pressure of his stare; that, or give her a headache.
Elves!
She takes someone else to bed, one of the women she’s lain with before – a friend, a fellow fighter – and tries with her not to think about others she’s been with, the ones who died in the mud with so many others of her people, with her father and her brother. All of them too late to be saved by the Elf-lord on his tall horse and all his men.
The Haladin continue with their preparations to leave. They’ve been preparing to leave since the moment they arrived, but they needed time for their wounded to heal, their grieving to mourn, their hungry children to grow less thin. Thargelion has given them that time. The Elves are strange and snooty, their food finicky but good. They look at the Haladin and at their clothes and their armour and their few saved precious things like they’re pitiful, pathetic, and barely try to hide it, but they’re kind to their children. They’re helpful with the injured.
They make her head hurt.
It takes Caranthir several more days to notice what they’ve been doing all along, and then he’s dragging Haleth into a corner in a way that is absolutely going to make her sink her elbow into his gut the second he lets her go. “You’re leaving?”
“Of course,” Haleth says, and watches him go white, then red, with some curiosity.
“Don’t,” he says, and then he clenches his jaw. “I’ll do – it. What you wish. However – foul, and perverse, and –”
Haleth stares. It takes her a moment to realise what he’s talking about. Bed? Now? “Do you truly think I’d stay for that? My people need to rebuild our lives, and our homes, to find a new way to live. A place of our own, where we’ll be safe. Do you think I’d barter that away for bed? For you?”
She doesn’t mean it to be sound as incredulous as it comes out, but Caranthir reddens further.
Also, “Perverse?”
He draws himself up. “To lie with two people–”
“It was only a passing thought,” Haleth says. “The one has nothing to do with the other. My people are very grateful for your aid, Lord Caranthir, but we do not wish to be dependent on anyone’s charity, and we cannot stay in your halls forever.”
“No,” the Elf agrees. Ah, so he hasn’t completely lost his mind. “No, but – near. In my lands. Not so far as before. Where I can come again to your defence, should you need it. And you to mine, of course!” he added. “It could be – a bond of mutual aid and support. I see – much value in Men now. I had not thought before – but now I see your worth; I think a, an alliance, would be –”
“Now you see the worth in us? Not before, when first we came into the West; only now we’re mostly dead. Or is it only now I've lain with you? Now that we’re weakened, we’re proper vassals –”
“I don’t want you because you’re weak!” Caranthir shouts. “I want you because you’re strong! I saw how long you withstood the Orcs; I saw how long you held the siege; I saw how–”
“You saw what a good shield we’d make? A good body to throw between you and the East! A good wall for the Orcs to crash against!”
He makes a furious, desperate noise. It’s not that different from one of his fucking-sounds, and she wants to slap him and also to throw him back on his bed and fuck him like the first time; she wants to respond in a manner suiting her leadership of the Haladin, and as her father’s daughter; and – more than before – she wants to sink the point of her elbow into his belly and make him gasp.
“I want to ally with you,” the Elf-lord hisses through his teeth, face fixed in a rictus harsher than his usual sneer and his eyes painfully bright.
Haleth glares back. “The Haladin did not come this far West only to serve another lord. We want to be left alone.”
“No one survives alone in Beleriand! You were happy enough to stay before–”
“We were always going to leave!”
That makes him look like she really did elbow him. “—Always?”
“Always,” Haleth says.
“Always?”
“As I said! We’re grateful for your aid, but we don’t need it any longer. We will be leaving in four days.”
“You can’t leave,” he says. “We – we lay together!”
There’s a reason Haleth doesn’t go to bed with maidens. “And?”
He glares at her and says nothing. His mouth works like he’s chewing over the things he wants to say, grinding rocks to dust.
He’s still glaring at her on the day that the Haladin leave to go further West. They mean to leave with nothing more than what little they brought with them in their flight, but the Elves of Thargelion press more upon them: way-bread and dried meat, fruits and vegetables, seeds for planting, for their future. Clothes and swaddling for the women and the children. Warm blankets and furs. Medical supplies. Horses, to carry it all.
“I thought you refused an alliance,” her brother’s widow says.
“I did,” says Haleth, shaking her head. Their lord is not among the gift-givers. "I will never understand these Elves."