Disclaimer: They belonged to J.R.R. Tolkien before I was born and they'll still belong to him after I die.

Credit for the pairing goes to the wonderful Vana Tuivana, Patron Valie of Goldberry Plot Bunnies.

I

Glorfindel entered the forest against a spray of willow leaves. They rained against his face, brittle and golden and arrow-sleek, and fluttered past him into a sunset that recked of fire. Perhaps the wind brought them to a haven by a wood-smoke sea, to dance and wither in the salt air. He liked to imagine that everything in the Old Forest found its way to water, but he tried not to lend too much thought to the pieces of a dying vine. Of all the golden things in these woods, leaves were not to be his concern.

He wondered when the forest first began to strike him as a place of permanence, rather than somewhere to collect himself and set out from once more. A month later, a season, the fifth year? Or that morning, ten strides in, when he noticed that sunlight diffused by leaves looked nothing like the heart of a flame?

II

Why was it that so many stories threw their lovers together in the woods? How many star-crossed meetings could truly occur where boughs blocked out the stars?

He stumbled upon the river almost by accident. Broad and brown and slower than dream-thought, littered with the last of the yellowing leaves and few dying lilies. And in the middle, up to her hips in water, a maiden.

He did not bother with the sung-of pleasantries of gazing dumbstruck or chasing through winter. Death, after all, lends everything a sense of urgency, even after the fact.

He stepped out of the trees and folded himself neatly to the bank. The maiden noticed him without looking up, reaching for a lily that had already gone brown around the edges.

"It's a bit late, isn't it? Not a one of them is worth keeping." What ridiculous first words! He'd used to have a tongue as golden as the rest of him; where in his falls and climbs and wanderings had he lost it?

"How do you define 'worth keeping'? Thriving? If we cast aside the half-dead we would cast aside half the world." It was neither platitude nor rebuke. She slipped her hand beneath the torn pad, twisted sharply.

He peered closely at the spot where she disappeared beneath the waterline, trying to find the rest of her through the amber silt. He couldn't help imagining that she was water from the waist down.

"How do you define it, then?"

She raised the flower, pad and all, and pressed her face to the imperfect petals. "If it looks like a lily, then it's worth keeping."

His mouth had forgotten how to laugh, but it recalled pieces of old smiles, and patched them together into a new one. She turned toward him at last, her own mouth still hidden against the bloom, balm in her eyes. "Who are you?"

"Glorfindel." A breeze started, twitching a slotted curtain of bare willow boughs between them. "Of the House of the Golden Flower."

Through the vines he saw the pieces of her lower the lily. "I am Goldberry of no house," said she. "Goldberry of the House of Reeds. Goldberry the River-daughter."

III

The winter's cold rains and colder nights coated the trees with ice, freezing the willow curtains in glittering place. They often sat together within the fragile cages, clappers in a silent bell.

The sunlight fractured on every surface, making rippled flames in icicles cored by smoke-dark wood. It reminded him of falling.

She listened to branches crack and break. He watched the lines of shadow split her face.

They rarely spoke. Speaking was for other seasons, when memory was weaker and lilies plentiful.

IV

Spring came, and with it leaves. The lilies, however, were slower in coming, and once again they spent much of their time under the thawed willow. But now their waiting was merrier.

"Why are you here, Glorfindel?" she asked, knee to knee with him, her face quartered by shadows.

"I came here to hide."

"From what?"

"From memory."

"What a strange thing to say! You've done nothing but remember things all winter." She gathered her long limbs tightly to herself. "And you cannot always shut out the night, no matter how little you choose to recall of stars."

What a strange thing to say! As if he were thrusting away something of value. "I am trying to shut out the day."

She laughed. "Then you shall have even less luck."

"It has worked thus far."

Her eyes thinned, her gentle mirth draining away. "Fate brooks no denial. You have a part to play in the great doings of great ages; kings to counsel and kings to hold at bay."

"And you?"

She drew back slightly. "A mastered forest will have need of a mistress." She said it slowly, with an unconvinced certainty; and she paused at the end, face turned to him with an inexplicable expression of hope, as if she wished him to argue her point.

After a moment of silence she smiled with effort and sprang to her feet. "Come!" she cried. "This morning is warmer than the last, I think. We must check for blossoms."

V

The lilies came, and summer followed, and autumn, and winter again, and spring, and in the world outside kingdoms were cracking and shattering and mending as he wasted their precious years being whole.

But Goldberry was right; neither night nor day nor fate could keep its peace forever. And a forest, once possessing a mistress, will seek out a master; and Glorfindel watched the play of leaves too often to care much for their trees.

At times he heard a faint voice singing nonsense, far away.

VI

Glorfindel, too, had foresight. He saw small figures and a great shadow under a bruised sky, none of them Men. He heard himself peddle that dream to a foolhardy king. And he knew that he would need to leave, and soon, and that no matter how swiftly he returned he would have made it too late by leaving.

Goldberry knew, too, and she left his side, from time to time, when they heard the song grow clearer. She returned with a look of having been comforted; reassured, perhaps, that her future held promise. Yet in her glance Glorfindel still saw desperation and hope and futility.

And now, at last, he knew the answer she had waited in vain for, that first spring. "Do you want to come with me?"

"Yes." She turned away from him. "But you asked too late."

VII

He left at dawn, and headed north, to another wood, another river, another Maia-blooded maiden, though this one was younger, and he loved her only as her father's friend.