Wildflowers by StarSpray

Chapter 1

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“Niënor, where are all these flowers coming from?” Morwen appeared in the doorway with a bouquet of daisies and niphredil blossoms. “I found these scattered all over the corridor.”

Niënor glanced at the vase by her bed, filled with violets that she’d spent the day before picking up from the floor every time she turned around. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said.

Morwen shook her head and vanished. When Niënor emerged from her room into their sitting room, she found her mother arranging them in another vase. “It is a wonder there are any flowers left in Neldoreth. It seems you have an admirer, my daughter.” Morwen did not smile often, but a small one touched her lips and softened her stern features as she looked back up at Niënor, who felt her own face turn red.

“I cannot imagine who,” she said. And then she asked, “May I take a walk outside?” Menegroth was vast and grand, but it was still too strange and stifling not to be able to see the sky, even out of a window.

“Do not stray far on your own.”

It was a relief to step outside onto the grass. Niënor walked until she was just out of sight of Menegroth’s sentries, and then hiked up her skirts to run through the niphredil along the Esgalduin, laughing at the butterflies that took flight as she passed by, fluttering all around her, their wings glimmering in the sunlight like feather-light gemstones.

Then something hard and small struck the back of her head. Niënor yelped and spun around, only to find a squirrel sitting on a fallen tree not far away, with a violet clutched in its little paws. It chattered at Niënor a bit before placing the flower carefully on the log and darting away.

“Wait!” Niënor scrambled after it. Surely squirrels hadn’t been the ones dropping flowers everywhere she went!

Somewhere in the trees, she heard laughter. The squirrel led her away from the river, passing through clustered hemlock umbels into a glade filled with wildflowers, too many to name. She lost the squirrel there, when it vanished into the waving blossoms.

Niënor heard laughter again, and a coronet of forget-me-nots twined with wild roses fell atop her head. “Nellas!” she exclaimed as a rose blossom slipped over one eye. “What are you doing?”

Nellas swung down from a low hanging branch by her knees, upside down and grinning. “I’ve not seen you in days,” she said. “So I thought flowers might lure you out of Menegroth—and I was right!” She looked very pleased with herself.

Niënor adjusted the flowers on her head and tried to act stern. “You could have come to see me yourself,” she said, “instead of sending squirrels.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“Well, now my mother thinks I have an admirer at Thingol’s court,” Niënor said, trying not to notice how Nellas’ tunic was slipping down, exposing her smooth sun-tanned stomach, and also trying not to blush. She wasn’t having much success with either.

“Lady Morwen is wise.” Nellas laughed again and swung back up into the tree. Niënor peered up into the branches after her, and yelped when a rope-and-wood ladder fell down out of the leaves. “Come on!”

Niënor was unaccustomed to climbing ladders into trees, and especially to climbing them while wearing a gown, but she managed, and found herself in a cozy little house nestled among the branches. A pile of soft furs made Nellas’ bed, and she had all sorts of trinkets and half-finished projects lying about—a basket here, a half-woven blanket there—and she sat by the wide open door busily weaving another wreath of flowers, this one of white niphredil. But she set it aside when Niënor finally joined her, and drew Niënor down to sit beside her. “Good,” she said. “Now I have you all to myself.” And before Niënor could ask what they were going to do next, Nellas kissed her. She tasted like strawberries and smelled like flowers, and felt like home.