The Work of Small Hands by Dawn Felagund

Author's Foreword

Read Author's Foreword

Foreword

I began this story a shamefully long time ago, back in late Autumn of 2005. My intentions were originally to write a story that not only showed the romance that I believe existed between Eärwen and Finarfin but also showed something of the delicate process of reviving the ancient friendship between the Noldor and the Teleri following the Kinslaying at Alqualondë. Being as the House of Finarfin represents a joining of those peoples, it has always made sense to me that Eärwen and Finarfin would have been the key players in this reconciliation.

As stories have a tendency to do, though--at least, my stories have a tendency to do--the story quickly took itself into an unexpected direction. The story became less about Finarfin and more about Eärwen and Fingolfin's wife Anairë, and soon, my purposes behind writing the story had changed to match it.

As with most of my work, "The Work of Small Hands" operates under the assumption that The Silmarillion--and all of Tolkien's stories--are not merely stories but historical documents. Therefore, no single "truth" as told by an omniscient and omnipresent narrator can be reached, and one must take into account not only the story's narrator but how he or she came to knowledge that is presented. In the Foreword to The Book of Lost Tales 1, Christopher Tolkien expresses regret that the true "narrator" of The Silmarillion was never revealed as Bilbo Baggins, with The Silmarillion itself declared to be part of the Red Book of Westmarch:

In The Complete Guide to Middle-earth Robert Foster says: 'Quenta Silmarillion was no doubt one of Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch.' So also I have assumed: the 'books of lore' that Bilbo gave to Frodo provided in the end the solution: they were 'The Silmarillion'. But apart from the evidence cited here, there is, so far as I know, no other statement on this matter anywhere in my father's writings; and (wrongly, as I think now) I was reluctant to step into the breach and make definite what I only surmised.

So any story in The Silmarillion must have passed from its original source through to Bilbo, via the Elves of Rivendell. This complicates canon immensely because what is written has likely been subjected to the biases, errors, and exaggerations of numerous narrators in the course of transmission. It also supposes that we can only know what the historians and loremasters of the original age themselves knew or were willing to reveal. My use of this idea in filling in the stories of The Silmarillion has been the subject of contention to some less flexible-minded individuals. I doubt that this story will be any exception.

Bearing that in mind, "The Work of Small Hands" attempts to address two issues about The Silmarillion that have always weighed on my mind. The first is the Darkening of Valinor: We hear very little about it, yet it must have been a dramatic and traumatic occasion for the Eldar and certainly a turning point in their history, not least of all for the "tithe" of the Noldor who chose to remain in Valinor after the Kinslaying. Aside from the destruction of the illusion of safety in the Blessed Realm, it presents the challenge of a civilization accustomed to perpetual light suddenly in complete absence of it. Most of the Elves of Valinor had never experienced "darkness" as understood by Elves who had once lived in the Outer Lands, and aside from being psychologically traumatizing, it must have posed interesting dilemmas in terms of daily life. "The Work of Small Hands" attempts to address some of these dilemmas, as well as considering the psychological effects of complete and sudden darkness in a place where there isn't even periodic nightfall and most citizens do not even understand the concept of unrelieved darkness.

Secondly, as a fantasy author and a woman, I have always been miffed by the treatment--or lack thereof--of female characters in Tolkien's Ardaverse. While I do believe that The Silmarillion represents something of an improvement over The Lord of the Rings (and are there even any women worth mentioning in The Hobbit?), women in Tolkien's stories are still underrepresented, and even when their wisdom and powers exceed that of their male counterparts, as in the case of Melian, they are subject to the will and whims of men. My Silmarillion stories attempt to address this gap by not only filling in the faces and names of the women of The Silmarillion but recognizing that, in all likelihood, they filled roles beyond that of wives, mothers, and background characters, even if the history does not necessarily tell of it.

Which brings us full circle to the interpretation of Tolkien's stories as historical documents. The reasons why women might have been omitted from such accounts are multiple; one needs only to look at our own histories for examples. And so while pondering how Eärwen and Finarfin might have healed the rift between their people, I found my interests drifting away from Finarfin's role and towards Eärwen's role, as well as Anairë's as the closest remaining "heir" to the Kingship. How might they have aided the people of the Noldor and the Teleri during this dark time? True, it was Finarfin who ascended to the throne following Fingolfin's exile, but it's not beyond belief that Eärwen and Anairë assisted greatly with this, as well as with the recovery of Eldarin civilization following the loss of light.

And whether by ignorance of her role by historians or a conscious attempt to give glory to the king--or simple omission in the interest of brevity--the roles of Eärwen and Anairë in restoring the Noldor were lost. This novella attempts to create one possible version of their story.

I have chosen to share it now in light of the Majority Rules Ficathon on LiveJournal, an occasion that celebrates the possibility of the United States finally having a woman or person of color as President. While I'm not particularly inspired to try a prompt for the challenge, then I am inspired to show my own enthusiasm for this historic occasion, and so I have decided to finally finish the story.

Notes on Obscure Canon

On Anairë’s choice to remain in Valinor:

“Fingolfin’s wife Anairë refused to leave Aman, largely because of her friendship with Eärwen wife of Arafinwë (though she was a Noldo and not one of the Teleri). But all her children went with their father….”
HoMe XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, “The Shibboleth of Fëanor,” pages 344-345

On the Quenya names of the children of Eärwen and Arafinwë:

Findaráto Ingoldo = Finrod
Artaher = Orodreth*
Angaráto (Angamaitë) = Angrod
Ambaráto Aikanáro = Aegnor
Artanis = Galadriel

*Artaher (Orodreth) has an interesting history. While, in The Silmarillion, he is clearly listed as a son of Finarfin, Tolkien later revised this notion to have him as a son of Angaráto and the father of Gil-Galad. In this capacity, Artaher’s Quenya name was given as “Artaresto” and later revised to “Artaher.” For the purposes of this story, although I assume The Silmarillion canon that Artaher is a son of Finarfin, I have retained use of this final Quenya name “Artaher,” given to the son of Angaráto. (HoMe XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, “The Shibboleth of Fëanor,” pages 346-351)

Other names that might not be familiar to readers, also from "The Shibboleth of Fëanor":

Nolofinwë = Fingolfin
Arafinwë = Finarfin

On Fëanáro's speech ...

Fëanáro's speech to the Noldor in the "King of the Noldor" chapter comes from The Annals of Aman (HoMe V), Annal 132: "Let the cowards keep this city. But by the blood of Finwe! unless I dote, if the cowards only remain, then grass will grow in the streets. Nay, rot, mildew, and toadstool."

I found this quote while working on this story, and all I could think of was Eärwen's reaction to his words.

Finally, for those of you out there with a penchant for curwë, following the completion of this story, a fairly extensive discussion was held on the SWG discussion list about the effects of sudden darkness on Elven society. Neuropsychological impact of prolonged darkness in Homo sapiens eldarensis discusses a lot of the ideas and canon that shaped this story.

Departure

Read Departure

I was less angered or saddened than surprised when Arafinwë told me of his intention to follow his brothers. My hand flew to my breast; I could feel my lips parted, numb and unmoving. He looked so serious--or rather, like he expected to be taken seriously. His robes were tidy and so Noldorin: cinched to the throat and of a stiff, dark fabric. He’d looked uncomfortable. There was even a sword at his side, and it was too bright to be believable, catching the bluish lamplight and holding it prisoner there, as his side, in that swatch of metal.

Noldorin.

I wanted to laugh at him. How he reminded me of Findaráto and Artaher, in their youths, when they would play Great Journey in the garden, using sticks for swords and begging their father to play as Oromë. And the expressions on their faces--as though ironed! so grave!--intoning to Arafinwë, “We will follow you,” solemnly offering their stick-swords, which he took, laughing, grasping the “blades,” naïve to the fact that he was slicing off his fingers.

But the blade at his side--it seems he is naïve no longer.

We will follow you.

And now, it seemed, it was my turn to laugh.

But my numb lips would not move. He stepped forward and kissed me--his hands on my cheeks, cold--but I could not make myself kiss him in return.

Shocked, I wanted to laugh but my numb lips just trembled--no sound would escape.

I do not believe that you are leaving.

I heard his footsteps receding down the hall, louder than usual, in his heavy Noldorin boots. I do not believe that you are leaving! He would turn around and return to me; we would laugh and he would shed his ridiculous costume, and he would return to me.

The door slammed then, rending the silence of the house, and my heart--beneath the hand still pressing my breast--leaped, startled, as though to take solace in the palm of my hand.

He had left.

~oOo~

I stand for a long time in the parlor, my hand on my breast, shocked and not moving. I wait for the sound of the door opening; I wait for the sound of his voice; I wait to see a flash of color moving past the door, as he rushes to one or another engagement. Without the Light of the Trees, I know not how much time passes, how long I stand, measuring the hours by the beating of my heart beneath my hand. I wait, and he never comes.

Finally, I draw a cloak around my shoulders and step into the dark street.

Tirion, so beautiful a city--done in marble and gold, a scintilla atop Túna that was hard to look upon at Laurelin’s zenith--looks savage when painted by flame. Dirty shadows mar the pristine buildings. Torches line the street and people become dark, faceless shapes that call to mind the primitive urge to run from the unknown. Fear has been reawakened in us, and we are all skittish in the streets, shying from others as we pass, forgetting that the torchlight also deepens the shadows on our faces and makes our eyes rabid with flame. We fear fire now, too, for it was not so long ago that we watched a man stand on the palace steps, incinerated from within by an unbearable fire that is driving him to--I know; many of us who stay know--his death.

And he is taking my husband with him.

Without the Trees, the air is chill, and I shiver. I pull my cloak tighter around myself, but it does not help. The cold emanates from within, from all of us: from fear, from anger, from suspicion, for now, we watch each other with mistrust and do not even have the decency to pretend that we do not. When self-preservation becomes chief in our thoughts, decency, it seems, is the first bit of extra weight sacrificed to the churning, black fear on which we precariously drift.

I arrive at the House of Nolofinwë--actually, I suppose, it is my sister-in-law’s house now. It is shelter; it draws me into it, even more so than my own empty house. My feet clatter on the walkway as I trip over flagstones in the darkness, but that single burning square of light at the corner of the house draws me. I am starved for it, starved for light.

I let myself into the house and grope down dark corridors, calling as I walk, lest I be mistaken for an enemy. Such fears feel like playacting, like when, as children, we would tell tales of dark things, but the other day, I burst into Findaráto’s chambers and he drew a blade from beneath a pile of underclothes--clothes that I had washed so many times, that smelled warm and comfortable, like my son, like Findaráto--and in his eyes was a feral terror. “Do not--” he said weakly, sinking to the bed, the shortsword clutched still in his hand, his heart pounding so hard that it fluttered the tunic covering the left side of his chest. And so now, in the darkness, I assume my welcome nowhere.

Anairë’s voice answers, a thin voice--once beautiful and full--now diluted by grief, and I move towards it, towards the pulsing candlelight that spills into the hall.

They are all here. Now, we are all here. For--as ridiculous as it sounds to me--I am now one of them: widows to death and exile.

It began with Indis, with Fëanáro’s banishment and Finwë's subsequent abandonment of his family and people. She held her shoulders very straight in the street; her dress and her golden hair were impeccable. I am not grieving, she said to us, never in so many words. For none of us acknowledged it; we simply smiled more delicately around her and avoided talk of children and husbands. We discussed flowers and gowns and new drapes for Anairë’s parlor--silly trivialities--until Indis, not Indis and Finwë, became an accustomed state for us.

And then, Nerdanel came riding home from Formenos. I left him. But we all knew the depth of Nerdanel’s love for the impetuous Fëanáro and knew that she had been driven to leave him. We each took our turn, sheltering her, and--restless like her husband--she moved from house to house, never happy, until finally returning to her father, outside the city, and we had been secretly glad, I know--Anairë and I--because if her love could shatter, held aloft by seven children and a passion that I could not even contemplate, then what could become of ours?

Then came a long peace, and I entertained the selfish notion that it had all been for the best. That the sacrifices of Indis and Nerdanel had secured the peace for the rest of us. Indeed, the world seemed in greater balance than ever before. Nolofinwë ruled the Noldor and, while hesitant at first, he quickly proved himself competent and wise. My husband took to spending long hours at the House of Nolofinwë, as his chief counselor, but I knew that they did not discuss matters of court but matters of family, that Nolofinwë sought the constant reassurance that it had all been for the best. As, Arafinwë repeatedly assured him, it had.

That he had driven his mother and father apart. Separated his sister-in-law--always dear to him--from her husband. Broken the friendship of his eldest son and Fëanáro’s. Trod upon the frail ties that had always kept our families leashed to one another, for if two vessels are drifting in opposite directions, they will only tear each other apart if they remain tethered. Better to sever those ties. All for the best.

And then: Finwë’s murder. The theft of Fëanáro’s treasure. His impassioned speech upon the palace steps. The Oath.

Anairë and I stood at the edges of the circle, clutching hands like little girls. She crushed my fingers in her larger, stronger ones; upon awaking the next morning, I found them bruised and swollen, unable to bend, but then, I felt no pain. My face was soaked--was I crying? Fëanáro’s words were as a blade thrust over and over again into my heart; I was sick with those words, with the grief and agony they contained--and would inspire. I gasped, feeling my lungs, shriveled and airless, screaming for nurturance; Anairë and her strong hands kept me on my feet. She was crying too. Nolofinwë stood at the front of the crowd, leaning on a blade I’d never known he possessed (had she?) and staring up at his half-brother, whose affections had always eluded him. For, unknown to us, he’d also made an oath.

And so Nolofinwë left and, one by one, each of their children followed, casting regretful looks over their shoulders at their mother, who lingered still.

“I must…” she said to me, barely comprehensible through sobs that hunched her straight, proud body, her hands scratching at me. I held her up. “I must follow him!” But she did not. She stayed and wept in my embrace, until his host was gone, until her children were gone, and I carried her to my house, to my bed, and gave her a strong draft of wine spiked with poppies and slept restively at her side, listening to her weep even in her dreams, waiting for my husband to come home.

He came in the morning, and we talked in hushed voices so as not to wake Anairë in the next room, and I should have known then of his intentions to leave, for he would not suffer our eyes to meet, and he tugged his hand from mine to rake it through his hair, a nervous habit of his. I know these things. I know these things because we have been married for many centuries and I loved him in my heart before I had an image to place with my idea of him: gentle and kind, with a voice more apt to rise in song than in anger, of royal blood but delighted by the same simple joys as a commoner. My Arafinwë.

Anairë emerged eventually, stoic and tall once more--a Noldo--betrayed only by her swollen, red eyes. She thanked me for my hospitality with all of the prim grace of a lady of the Noldor, not like a sister to me; she kissed Arafinwë’s cheek and departed. I tried to coax Arafinwë to bed, but he tore away from me and went to his study, where he sat for long hours with his head in his hands while I watched from the doorway.

I should have known. He’d come home, but he would not stay for long.

I should have known.

Queendom

Read Queendom

Now, though, there is a question of exceeding importance, hovering with all the frail tenacity of mist, in the candlelit room.

Who now rules the Noldor?

It was Finwë, but Finwë abdicated and then died.

It was Nolofinwë, but Nolofinwë is now departed.

It should be Arafinwë, but Arafinwë has followed his foolish brothers into exile.

Not one of our children remains: not wise Turukáno or strong Artanis or gracious Maitimo. All that remains is we, the wives and mothers of those always overeager to assume command, to become red-faced and tempestuous over rhetorical questions of inheritance and rights. Who now has the right? Better yet: who wants it?

“You are the Queen of the Noldor,” says Anairë, abruptly, to Indis. The mist dissipates; there is the question. I know Anairë--have known Anairë--better even than some of my children, I suspect. It was Anairë who soothed the fears of a quivering, fearful bride-to-be, then mother-to-be. It was Anairë who tossed her arm around me and laughed at my whispered, “Will I like it with Arafinwë?” squeezing me in an intimate embrace of friendship like none I’d ever known in childhood--born the eldest with only brothers after me--and saying something about ecstasy born of pain. I do not remember her exact words; they were scattered by the intrusion of my nervous, pounding heartbeat, but I do remember: from pain, ecstasy is born. I hadn’t believed her then; I do not find myself believing her now. Arafinwë was always gentle, and I’d believed him incapable of causing pain.

I know Anairë and know the brashness of her voice--the abruptness of the question--is not designed to hurt or offend: After all, it was aimed at the most resilient of us, whom I have never seen weep, even when she was told of Finwë’s death. So like Anairë--tender, brutal Anairë--to hurl her stones at she who is least likely to shatter from them!

Indis gazes steadily at Anairë, who sits draped in a shawl; I see the tassels on it trembling and know her to be afraid of her words so carelessly plunked into our midst. But nothing in Indis’ face or eyes reveal anger, and she replies in a level voice, “I am a widow now. I have never been a Noldo.”

"Yes, Anairë,” says Nerdanel, her voice hoarser than usual and her eyes tired, “you are the last Queen of the Noldor.”

“Nay,” says Anairë, smiling crookedly. She turns to me. “My husband departed days ago. That right belongs to Eärwen.”

“I do not want it.” My voice is a whisper, barely ruffling the air in the room. Anairë and Nerdanel speak with the brisk confidence of the Noldor; Indis, with a grace none of us can approximate. The sea and the sky--I am the sand beneath their feet, trod upon and unnoticed. Anairë stares at me, with her forehead wrinkled. “You said--”

“I said I do not want it!” I cry out, and my voice cracks and dissolves into laughter. Nerdanel shifts uneasily; Anairë scowls. Indis’ expression remains mercifully unchanged; I want to fall into her, to drown in her sweet, placid restraint. Inside, emotions must occasionally surge, but outside, I might have just blurted out a recipe for biscuits for all the ruffling of her face. I try to trap the laughter behind my hands, but it squeezes through my fingers in graceless brays. Anairë is patting my shoulder now, and I see droplets of water on my wrists and know myself to be crying. But I laugh! I laugh at the irony of this: The wives of men who have sundered themselves from their own blood in a battle over the right to rule this kingdom; now, we fight over the right not to rule. I wonder if we will be likewise sundered.

Anairë clasps me and shushes me like I imagine she must have done once with her children, when they tripped and scraped their knees on the stone path or awakened in a tangle of sheets and senseless nightmares. But I lean into it; I allow it: A Queen of the Noldor does not weep upon her sister’s shoulder.

“She is not a Noldo either” comes Nerdanel’s timid addition. I snort with laughter, feeling suddenly derisive and wishing to wound this woman who had the opportunity to control him and did not; always with her logic, trying to rule that madness that was Fëanáro with it too. And failing. But that quickly, the resentment disappears as though it never was, and I want to clutch Nerdanel and let her weep with me. For she lost a husband and seven children, and they will be damned for their oath, whereas mine walk with no burdens upon their backs, though they go into darkness.

“It is wise, perhaps,” says Indis, “to allow this matter to lie for now, until the grief has passed. Perhaps we shall discuss it anew, tomorrow.”

Anairë’s voice buzzes close to my ear. “The people need a leader now; we are not alone in our grief.”

“Then I believe the new leader of the Noldor has just spoken,” says Indis softly, “since you are the only one to see past your own pain to the needs of the kingdom.”

Kingdom? Queendom, now!

I sob with laughter.

“We will sleep on it” comes Anairë’s quiet reply, bowing to Indis’ delicately brutal logic, burying her face in my hair to comfort me--who laughs--while she silently weeps.

~oOo~

And so the days become weeks. We meet often, hoping that one of our number will lay claim to the queenship--she would be uncontested--but no one ever does. We work as a sort of council in the meantime, fumbling our way through leadership. We have seen our husbands do this but never expected to be asked to do it ourselves. Why, when the House of Finwë was so full of competence and ambition? Someone was always poking his hand above the heads of the crowd to volunteer--me, me, me!

I awaken sometimes and think it a bitter joke: What could possibly have taken our husbands and all of our children from us? There are fifteen children between the three of us; what could make them all leave, in a space of less than a week? Nothing! My better sense cries that it must be a dream. I will turn over and Arafinwë will be asleep in bed beside me, lying on his side with his fist near to his mouth, sleeping (Indis once told me) as he has since he was born. Findaráto will be bustling to his lessons and Artaher will be sleepily emerging from his chambers and wondering aloud about breakfast and Angaráto and Aikanáro will be tugging on their boots as they run--longbows in hand--to meet their cousins outside and Artanis will likely be lecturing one of her brothers about the value of quiet contemplation over ceaseless ruckus.

It used to be that I would fold my head in my pillow and wish for a moment more of silence. Now I want all of those moments back.

I have to force myself to awaken now, rising from bed and feeling as though coated in heavy syrup, perpetually dragging me down to luxuriously painful indolence. I have to force myself to break the silence of the house. I rustle my gowns and stomp my shoes as I dress; I bang pots together as I attempt to make my breakfast. On the occasions when some silly oversight leads to a ruined breakfast, I throw the pot against the wall and shriek and weep--just to break the silence. I run up and down the stairs. I fall. I lie at the bottom, staring at the ceiling, breathing as hard as I can, to drown the silence.

The silence, the darkness: it seems surreal, as though I wander alone in blackness without end, where the vastness swallows any sound I try to make. This is what the Void is like, I think sometimes, before I can choke the blasphemy from my thoughts, striking a flint and lighting a candle to provide feeble, quivering light that dies before I even find the motivation to rouse myself enough to leave the frail circle of illumination it gives.

On this morning, I awaken to find Anairë at my bedside. The last time I awakened to such a sight, I’d overslept and Arafinwë had sent her to my chambers, and she’d waited for me to awaken to tell me the news: I carry a child! A daughter! and how we rejoiced!

Now, her hands are clasped in her lap; her hair is skinned back from her face, so tightly that her eyes are slightly elongated by it. She has made an effort to appear collected, to appear in control; I sit up, realizing that she comes with tidings, and they are bad.

She takes my hand. “Eärwen,” she says, and folds me into her arms.

~oOo~

Better that he had died than this.

Better that he had ended upon the blade than to be so named: kinslayer.

I think: I would kill him myself, with hands around his throat, and rejoice in the light leaving his eyes. I pound my fists into the mattress; my whole body is black and blue in places from such rage, wielded against myself in absence of a suitable enemy, in absence of him.

And the knowledge that--with my awful thoughts--I am no better than he.

But I am forced to wonder: What crossed his thoughts, in my father’s beautiful lamp-lit quay? What drew his thoughts to bloodshed? What did he think of, as he thrust his blade--that gash of light at his side--into the gut of my little brother? What did he think as Alpaher’s blood washed over his hands? Had he wrenched the sword from him, moving on, to do it again? And again and again and again?

Kinslayer!

I weep and pound my fists into the mattress.

Here, while we deliberated the best manner in which to install lamps in the streets, Alpaher died in the bed he’d shared with this wife of less than a year, the wound in his belly non-lethal, at first, but slowly poisoning his body with its own fluids until he thrashed and burned with fever and died as blazing a death as will eventually befall my brother-in-law.

In truth, I knew not whether Arafinwë had wielded that blade against him, but he had been there, and that was enough. He’d been there and stood not on the side of the defenseless--my tenderhearted husband who’d rescued baby birds fallen from the nest and splinted their tiny, broken wings with dowels and strips of silk torn from his own robes--not on the side of those who shared not in the sick fascination with the implements and arts of war that possessed the Noldor. He'd stood on the side of the wrongdoers, the evil, the kinslayers.

I tried, at first, to stride from the city on foot, to return home. How else was I to go? Hire a Noldorin carriage, a Noldorin driver, to transport me to the wounded heart of Alqualondë? Barefoot and in my nightdress, I made it past the gates of the royal square before Anairë overtook me. I slapped her Noldorin face. She caught me and tucked me underneath her arm like a piece of baggage and dragged me back to the house.

She wrapped me in blankets and held my nose until, craven and afraid to die, I was forced to gasp for breath, and she poured a draft down my throat. I choked on it and sprayed it in her face, but she repeated. She repeated until I was too tired to resist, until I could feel it turning my blood to lead, and I struggled no more and slept.

In cruel dreams, I hear my husband come home to me. I hear the front door creak as it opens and then clicks shut; I hear the unmistakable rhythm of his footsteps on the stairs. I imagine him loosening his robes as he walks, as is his habit. Arafinwë has never been comfortable in the raiment expected in the Noldorin court; hungrily, I will tear it from him and let him rejoice in nakedness, claiming his secret places for my own. He will laugh and plunge his fingers into my hair; I hear the bed creak as he falls upon it.

I open my eyes, my heart quickened by eagerness, but it is only Anairë, with more draft.

She puts food in my mouth and holds goblets of cold water to my lips. She carries me to the bathroom. My flesh smells rancid, of hate and sweat and grief, and so she strips me and puts me into my own bathtub and washes me, and I fight her, sobbing, ashamed. She was at all five of my children’s births, and so she knows the intimacies of my body--as I know hers--but the puerility of having to have my body soaped by her, in gentle circles, while she cups my head like a baby’s! I squeal and kick, raising the water in frightful splashes, but she does not relinquish until I am clean, and then I am removed from the tub and the humiliating process begins again with the towel, until I am dry and left, swaying on uncertain legs, naked, clutching the towel to myself in a final futile attempt at modesty, to contemplate her.

I want to spit in her face, grind my heel into her toes, but I lack the energy, and so I stare into her eyes. What do I see? Pity? The thought makes my heart leap, affronted, and my tired fists clench until my fingernails bite crescent shapes into my palms. But, no, that is not it. She reaches out and touches my cheek, pushing the wet, tangled mass of my silver hair from my face, and as I tip into her arms, I realize what it is that makes her eyes too bright in the meager light of the lamp.

Sorrow.

“I have sent word to your father, by way of a Vanyarin messenger,” she tells me, stroking my hair. I wait for the tears to come--my eyes burn in anticipation--but they do not. I lose myself in the simple joy of being held by someone, of warmth of a body close to mine. I close my eyes and force my reluctant hands to let go of the towel and my arms to slip around her instead. “I am making arrangements to have a carriage brought for you, but it is difficult at the moment, as the Vanyar are giving most of their resources to your people, to healing the wounded and the grieving, to rebuilding. To relinquishing the dead. But they have agreed to spare a carriage to transport you. I understand that you want to go home, for your brother’s ceremony.”

I think of my poor little brother, lying dead in Alqualondë while my parents and his wife weep over his body. Now tears begin to roll from beneath my closed eyes, but the rage is gone: Grief is a still silver surface for me, puckered by the occasional teardrop like rain, undisturbed by the black beasts of anger, now swimming too far beneath its surface to be detectable as even a ripple. I think of the Bay at low tide, when I would sit in my father’s arms as a little girl, and the surface of the water was as flat and clear as a mirror. We’d watch the storms come in from the sea, watch the raindrops begin slowly, dimpling the water in increasing intensity until it looked like hammered tin and was no longer flat and peaceful. I whimpered and squirmed in his arms, but he shushed me. “It will return to the way it was, only it will be greater now, because of the rain,” he said, and his arms were so strong around me that I hadn’t a choice but to believe.

Anairë and I hold each other for a long time before I speak. “No,” I say at last, toying with her raven hair where it tumbles down her back in rare disarray. “Leave the carriages for the wounded and the dying. I will wait.”

~oOo~

I lie in my bed that night and sudden grief crumples my body.

He is gone!

He is gone for good now. For even if he returns to me--in forsaking the road or in death--I could not accept him back.

He is gone.

And my children …

I sob. My children.

~oOo~

I cannot stay in this bed.

Anger and grief fill me until I think I might explode. Surely, this is too much for a body as small and frail as mine? It leaks from my eyes and nose; my pores again fill with the sour stink of grief. I clutch the bedclothes, but that is no good: I last clutched them like this for a far different reason, the night before the doomed festival, with Arafinwë poised above me, my legs clasping his narrow hips, mindless of whether the children would overhear our passion or what the servants would think to find the bedclothes torn by my fists.

Passion and anger--how alike they are in that they both generate the overwhelming need to explode.

I heave myself from the bed. I cannot sleep here, not with the torment of such memories. Arafinwë and I gave each other our virginity in that bed; our children were conceived there. The Arafinwë I married--barely past his majority and so quick to smile--cannot stand beside the Arafinwë he has become, with fire-bright eyes like his half-brother and my people’s--my brother’s!--blood upon his hands. And neither am I willing to brand my memories with such a foul label: Kinslayer.

I wander the halls, a woman cast adrift, wringing my hands and weeping. I find myself at Findaráto’s door. I press my palm to it. How many times have I stood here, exasperated, not realizing the gift that was the certainty of my eldest son on the other side? Knocking: Findaráto, the charwoman will be here any moment now, and you’ve yet to bring your washing downstairs. Findaráto, do return that book to your cousin; your father and I are wearied of bearing his poisonous looks whenever we visit your uncle. Findaráto, please help your brothers get dressed for festival. Findaráto …

I once caught him here with Amarië, their golden hair disheveled and lips reddened from kissing. She yelped and quickly gathered the bodice of her gown closed; he blushed and pulled the blanket to his waist, and I ducked from the room. They were going to marry; they were going to announce their betrothal at any moment, once the excitement of the festival waned. I wonder if she walks with him now or if she mourns, like I do. With the thick wedge of night between my home and hers upon Taniquetil, it is hard to imagine that I am not alone in my grief, that it might be shared, even in a measure, by she who was near to becoming a daughter to me.

Even Anairë, the sister that my parents never granted me, is distant to me.

I open Findaráto’s door and ease inside.

I am not accustomed to seeing the room without light; even when he slept, Findaráto never closed his drapes. At times, he would remove them entirely, when he was working on a painting or a sculpture and wished nothing to hamper the light. (How I would fear him in those times! For his eyes became as empty-bright as his uncle’s--only when I called his name, he would turn to me like he’d never been gone, a smile teasing his lips. “Amil, do not look so, as though you have seen a wraith when it is only I!”) Now the room is dark and looks larger than usual--I realize that this is because he has taken almost everything with him.

There is a small bag--it must have been filled to bursting--that he dropped without realizing it on his way out, its contents spilling across the floor. Among the items is a porpoise made out of cloth and given to him by my father when he was first born. The poor thing survived every ordeal of Findaráto’s early childhood, clutched in his arms; it is threadbare and beyond cleaning in places. I pick it up and drift to his bed, left in uncharacteristic disarray, and lie among the bedclothes last warmed by my son’s body. His scent envelops me: It is warm and comfortable, like the smell of fresh-baked bread.

I lie there and cannot will myself to label him as evil. Your own blood! I cry softly and add my tears to the soft flesh of the cloth porpoise, added atop the many infantile tears cried into it before by my son, until at last, I sleep.

The Return

Read The Return

I dream.

I hear the door slam and Arafinwë’s feeble call: “Eärwen? My love?”

I spring from bed and find naught but silence and darkness.

~oOo~

I dream of Findaráto.

I dream of the day we were called by Nerdanel--then his sculpting tutor, before the feud between our families became bitter--to observe his accomplishments: an entire studio filled with people and animals and vines carved from marble, so delicate that they might have been cut from the frosted trellises of Taniquetil. I saw myself among his statues, like looking in a mirror, and laughed.

Arafinwë took my elbow and his breath was warm in my ear, his voice made strange by pride: “He will be what I am not. A blessing to the people of the Noldor.”

~oOo~

I dream of Arafinwë, his slender, sweat-slick body atop mine, moving in the slow rhythm of the sea. It is like lying at the edge of the water and letting the waves wash over me: He surges and recedes. I lament, aching without him. Please. Return to me! Without you, I cannot be complete.

He surges again, and I gasp. Soon, he will not be able to resist any longer; he will not be able to recede. He will fill me, like drowning, becoming part of my body, part of me.

I clutch him to me, to hasten the process.

Fill me.

Gladly, I drown.

~oOo~

I dream.

I hear the door slam. I weep into the bedclothes and will myself not to awaken.

~oOo~

“Eärwen?”

For a moment, I am a new mother again, awaking in the middle of the night, my mouth sticky with sleep, to answer the call of my child. Which child? I do not know. I will determine that when I reach the hallway.

I swing my legs over the bed and stretch my toes toward the warm luxuriance of my slippers, but this is not my bed, this is not my bedroom; the porpoise that falls to the floor in a soft thump of rags is not mine. And I remember …

And I remember also that none of my children would ever call me Eärwen.

It was but a dream.

I fall back into Findaráto’s bed, too weary to even lift my legs onto the bed.

But it comes again: “Eärwen?” and the door opens and admits a shadow carrying a wavering candle that reflects dully in his armor.

In the candlelight, my husband’s face looks haggard, like those lucky few rescued from the Dark Lord, who will not speak of the horrors they’ve seen. There are bruises beneath his eyes like someone has put fists to his face. He smells of stale sweat and the dirt of the road. His hair is nearly brown with it, held back from his face in a knotted, haphazard clump.

I inhale deeply, but the smell of blood--the smell of kitchen accidents and childbirth--is nowhere about him.

I rise from the bed. I mean to go to him, to embrace my dream.

I shrink back against the headboard.

The candle wavers harder.

“Eärwen, I--” He sways, and I am reminded of trees torn by the occasional storms allowed to ravage the land. Most remain standing, bending to the will of the wind. Others snap and tumble, to die a slow death amid the mud and brambles.

Arafinwë collapses to the ground. The candle falls from his hand, scorching the floor. I go to him before he sets fire to the rug and stamp out the meager flame.

“I was too late.”

I whirl to look upon him, and with a sigh, his eyes roll into his head and his body goes limp.

~oOo~

I drag my husband across the floor and lift him to the bed. He is small for a Noldo but still much larger than me; it is through great effort that I manage to arrange him on our son’s bed.

I take his armor from him. I hurl it into the corner, ignoring its strident protests as it clamors against the floor. Later, I will wield a hammer against it so that it may never take my place again, pressed so close to my husband to feel every shiver of his body, every breath. Beneath the armor, he wears a tunic and trousers. I put my ear to his chest; his heart flutters as though a frightened sparrow is caught inside his ribcage.

I laugh, for I should bring a healer to him, but the King’s healer had gone with the King--to Alqualondë, to dissect the living bodies of my people with a blade far cruder than a scalpel wielded with the will to heal, not hurt. The healers of the Noldor long ago surpassed those of the Teleri for their willingness to dissect bodies in an effort to “understand.” Our Telerin medicine, by comparison relied on--as Nolofinwë once said, with a pinched smile--“superstition.”

I go to Findaráto’s desk. He did not clear all of the drawers, and I find a scissors, and, with them, I cut the tunic from my husband, expecting to find a wound. His skin has gone white, as though with shock, but I find no injury. His ribs, though, are too prominent, the skin of his belly stretched tautly between them. Slipping the sleeves from his arms, I find that his right wrist is shaped oddly and swollen. I press it with my fingers, and he draws a sharp breath that expels slowly when I remove the pressure, knowing--even in my ignorance--that the wrist is broken.

Over the next hours, he drifts between coherence and sleep, sometimes weeping, telling me that he arrived too late. Too late! I shush him. I ask how he came to be so gaunt, so thin. “I rode straight home to you,” he says, and I realize that he has not eaten in many days. Weeks, maybe? The count of time that has passed since he left has become lost in the darkness. He tells me that, yesterday, while attempting to navigate a dark turn of road, the stars having become buried in cloud, his horse stepped from the road and slipped down an embankment. “That is how--” He attempts to lift his wrist and cries out. “The poor beast broke its neck,” he whispers, “which is well, for her legs were broken, but I was too weak to kill her in mercy.”

With my face against Arafinwë’s chest, ignorant of the putrid stench of pain and sweat rising from him, I weep softly. He raises his good hand to stroke my hair--and the injured hand follows after, to rest against my back, despite the fact that he hisses with the pain of his own doing.

~oOo~

Morning comes … or I think that it is morning. Noise rises from the streets--a confused noise--like a somnambulist groping in the dark for something that exists now only in dreams.

I gave Arafinwë a draft for his pain last night, and he sleeps. I draw a light blanket over him--a blanket scented of Findaráto--and bid him to dream of our son. Of our children, I have not asked, but when I step into the street, to go to Anairë’s, I pause and look toward the gate, waiting. Waiting for them to step through it, wearied by the road, not so strong as their father to ride without stopping to come home to me.

But they do not appear. I draw my cloak tighter around my shoulders. I wait. I am bumped by a peddler and cursed by a man driving a cart, who must navigate around me in the shadowy street, but the only people to pass through the gate are dark-haired Noldor.

At last, I turn in the direction of Anairë’s house, already--I sense--late for our council.

I go to the parlor, calling out first, as is now my custom. Perhaps Fëanáro was right. Perhaps darkness is natural for our people: How quickly we have adapted to inconveniences such as these! How easily we have accepted the fear and suspicion that lurk in the shadows!

Anairë is alone in the parlor, mending a tunic that once belonged to one of her sons.

I stop in the doorway. “Where are the others?”

She looks up. The candlelight dances an odd, erratic dance against her dark hair. I remember asking Fëanáro once, in our youth--we were good friends then, in a time so distant that it might have been a dream--what made mirrors, and he told me that it was a black surface covered with glass. And he made one for me, with a shard of glass and the black velvet of his cloak. “That’s all it takes to capture you,” he said, laughing at my awe over my image, suddenly caught within his cloak. Anairë catches the firelight; I must blink to overcome the sudden illusion that she smolders also.

“The others?” She laughs. “Why would they come here? Our King returned last night. Indis is preparing to leave for Taniquetil and Nerdanel has decided to brave the darkness beyond the gates to go to the wife of Curufinwë, who has apparently also forsaken the road and now grieves,” she pauses to glance up at me, “because he has taken their son.”

“But Arafinwë is not well,” I say.

“He will become well and rule the Noldor.”

“But he is not well,” I repeat stubbornly.

“Then we will make him well,” she says sternly. She tears the thread with her teeth and holds the tunic aloft. “It will be too large for him, but he needs something to wear until new clothes can be made for him.” She smiles bitterly. “It seems that he left all behind on the shores of the sea, in his eagerness to return to you.”

~oOo~

The healers have gone, Anairë says, with her husband. A few remain, but they grieve inside their houses, knowing their duty to those left wounded in Alqualondë but too proud to chance being turned away at her gates.

“For being Noldor,” she says.

And so Anairë sets my husband’s broken wrist, sending me from the room first, “for I know that you do not handle pain well,” she says. No, I do not. I was sicker at her childbirths than my own, but she pushed with a ruthless determination that left no room for pain. Not me: I screamed with it.

I pace the downstairs parlor, my hands pressed over my ears, but I still hear when he cries out--if not in my ears, then in a place deeper within me--and I add my voice to his, jumping up and down on the hardwood floors, pounding the soles of my shoes against the relentless wood, until I shouldn’t be able to hear him, but I do.

At last, I sense that it is over, and I return, trembling, up the stairs to Findaráto’s bedroom, to find Arafinwë sitting neatly in the bed, his wrist set in a wad of bandages atop the blankets.

“He needs a bath,” Anairë tells me, outside the door, and I am reminded of the rare times when my children needed discipline and Arafinwë and I would debate their punishment out of their earreach. “But I will leave that to you. Do not get his bandages wet; they will have to be removed and the wrist set again.” The last is a threat; though delivered in Anairë’s tender, no-nonsense voice, I know Anairë. I nod and agree.

When I return to the bedroom, Arafinwë is asleep. Although I try to awaken him, shaking his shoulder and calling his name, he will not agree to go to the bath. He tries to turn away from me, bumps his wrist, and grumbles. I cannot carry him, not that far, and although I can hear Anairë moving downstairs, putting on a kettle of tea, a strange feeling suddenly overtakes me, jerking my spine and making me feel as though my insides have turned into impenetrable rock. I will not ask for her help; not this time.

And so I go to the lavatory and bring rags and a bucket, and I wash him while he sleeps, turning him gently and ignoring his protests. She would probably laugh at me--and my face burns just at the thought of it--to see me pinning his willful arm that wishes to hide beneath the blankets and scrubbing beneath it, a grimace upon my face, but when I am finished, he no longer reeks and his skin has returned to its normal pallor, no longer darkened with grime.

I allow him to then bury himself again beneath the blankets, muttering in his sleep, pulling the sheet over his head before I have the chance to even kiss him.

~oOo~

I sit in the dark kitchen and drink the tea that Anairë presses into my hands. It burns to drink even once it has cooled, sketching a blazing path down my throat and into my belly, suffusing my limbs with a tingling heat. There is more than just tea in the cup; Anairë smirks at the surprised expression on my face.

But I gladly accept a second cup, when she offers it.

“I did not ask after the children,” I tell her. “I did not ask when they would arrive.”

“Eärwen,” says Anairë, her voice as stern as stone, “they are not coming home. Your children, my children--they have all chosen exile.” Her warm hand finds mine in the darkness.

“But, no, surely--”

“Eärwen. No. Please,” she insists. Her hands massage mine. “Take comfort in the fact that yours did not participate in the kinslaying.”

Her hand leaves mine, and she rises to pour herself another cup of tea. She wears a gray dress; she is a pale blotch against the darkness.

She stands for a long time, longer than it takes to pour a cup of tea, her hands pressed against the countertop. I find that I cannot cry, not in her presence.

Her children are kinslayers. Mine are not. My husband has returned to me, and hers keeps his fateful road, to die in the name of a half-brother who does not even suffer barest cordiality to him in return. Even my brother--slain in the attack--will walk among us again, one day. Her children and husband, it is whispered--the rumor carrying like a reek upon the wind--will be doomed to exile in that cruel, dark land.

I walk to her. Her teacup is still empty, the countertop sequined with teardrops. She has done her hair in the stark, upswept style of Noldorin women, a style she once tried to force upon my own hair, too slippery and fine to be held in place. “I envy the back of your neck,” I told her once, so straight and proud, with nary a loose hair. Her neck is obscured with falling tendrils now; I sweep them aside and make her proud again.

I circle her with my arms, pressing my face between her shoulders, until she erases her tears with an angry swipe of her palm and says, “I am behind on my husband’s ledgers,” turning to kiss my forehead before striding from the room.

~oOo~

I go to sit at my husband’s bedside. Findaráto’s window looks into the street, and if I crane my neck, I can see the gate.

I do not know why I look. Anairë said it: They are gone. They are not coming home.

Is it possible that I might never see my children again? That this should be my hope, even? For if I am to see them again, this would mean that they would have to die to reach me. Trembling, I put my fingers to my lips, as though to stave off a sob, but it doesn’t come. Not even a tear comes.

It is useless. Crying will not change things, and it will make it harder to read the documents that Anairë left me days ago--before the news of the kinslaying--about establishing a Lightmakers’ Guild to encourage those left behind to produce more candles and lamps. And she has written also some thoughts on the safety of such implements. While Fëanorian lamps, obviously, will remove this risk, they take much longer to produce. And we will have to change their name, as people are likely to reject anything they believe to be of his hand. Too much, I realize now, is of his hand; always has the fate of our people been in the supposedly capable palm of his hand.

But I will need to brief my husband on these things, when he awakens.

And so this is to be my life.

I retrieve the documents and return to my chair. Just as easily, I could read in bed, beside Arafinwë, but the urge to sleep is upon me, to curl against his back as I used to do on the nights in Alqualondë when the breeze from the sea became chill and the warmth of his naked flesh seemed the only thing that would save me.

I listen to his breathing, growing steadier and deeper now, in the comfort of a bed at last, and I read. I read of Anairë’s concerns for candles being kept near to papers or on fixtures above rugs. I smile at the irony that, in the absence of Fëanáro, we now fear that the city will burn. Nerdanel has made notes on the making of lamps from stone--perhaps we shall call them Finwion lamps? in honor of our lost King?--and this text makes no sense to me, unskilled am I in such matters. As are most of the remaining Noldor, I realize--like my husband, averse to the pounding heat of the forge--and I sigh with the enormity of our task. Perhaps some of us shall have to learn things that we never have before, I realize. I take a quill and begin to make notes to this effect, to share tomorrow with my husband, about the possibility of creating incentives for the remaining Noldor to learn at least the basics of craft, so that they may serve the city. Mayhap, he would serve as an example? I will wait a while before asking him this, though; he mewls in his sleep, the sound of a wounded animal, and I know that the fires of the forge would be unbearable for him, so soon, with grief a raw wound joining the blood of our hearts.

Perhaps I will learn?

I wipe away that thought. I am a Teler; even the delicate silversmithing at which my people excel, I have never attempted.

The night is heavy, as though the city has been swaddled in a heavy black blanket. Even the crickets are subdued, perhaps afraid to cry out in the night. My quill scratches; the page rustles as it turns, as I squint at the page Nerdanel wrote, trying to make sense of it, scratching some more. The night swallows these sounds. Even Arafinwë’s breathing never achieves the loud depth that it did when Telperion poked his silver fingers between our drapes and left us ever in the light. The night consumes us now.

Come the morning, I hear the rattle of a cart in the streets. The first farmers are arriving to peddle their wares. Inside, I feel empty. This was the time that was once the Mingling of the Lights. This was the time when even nightmares would cease, when birdsong would falter and the world would fall silent, for nothing dared interrupt the unsurpassable beauty of the Mingling. Deep inside, there was a feeling, a kind of quivering, of a spirit confined in too tight a body, of reaching for the Light, of hearing a song to which the ears were deaf, a song that spoke of the Music of Eru in the forming of the world. In these times, I would know my purpose; I would lie awake in Arafinwë’s arms, both of our eyes unblinking and still, afraid of missing even a fraction of a second of that light, flesh pressing flesh, our hearts beating, aching, in unison. We were once the stuff of that Light! I savored it, suddenly feeling very small, a speck within Eä, but a life of significance nonetheless, a gift from Eru.

Perhaps he put a bit of the Music into my spirit?

I was meant to be here, chosen from among the stuff of Eä to make me, Eärwen. Why? Why was I allowed to be born?

I wonder now, bitterly, if it was for this moment.

Did Eru allow the Light to be made, knowing that it would be destroyed?

I am a wife, a mother, never a leader. I am too small for this.

The papers crumble in my hands, my spirit empty and dark without the Light, to think that I was designed with this moment in mind, while the King of the Noldor sleeps in the bed of our exiled son.

I am too small for this.

The Hungry

Read The Hungry

I go to the kitchen to make Arafinwë breakfast, but Anairë is already there, making a concoction with eggs, something Noldorin that Arafinwë has never made and so I have never tasted. It looks sodden and steams obscenely; I grimace.

“He needs his strength,” she says, pushing the eggs onto a plate. There is a tiny, withered orange beside it. I lift it quizzically. “It is all there was,” she says. “The orchards have stopped producing.”

She doesn’t look at me as she dumps a pan full of fried potatoes alongside the eggs.

“If he eats, he can have a draft for his pain. If not, it is too dangerous. It will be absorbed too quickly into his blood; he might be poisoned. Remind him of this, if he refuses to eat,” she says, putting the plate into my hand and nudging me in the direction of the stairs.

Arafinwë is awake when I enter Findaráto’s bedroom. He lies on his back, his injured wrist crossing his chest. He does not blink as I enter the room and close the door behind me, the enticing smells of breakfast curling around the room. Smiling, I carry the plate to his bedside and say, “I am glad to see that you are awake, Arafinwë.”

He closes his eyes.

“I brought your breakfast. Anairë made it. She chose foods that will give you strength and says that you may have a draft for your pain, if you eat.”

He says nothing. His eyes remain closed.

I load a fork with the egg mixture. I poke it at his lips. Aikanáro went through a phase when he was a particularly picky eater; I feel as I did then, a hopeful frustration rising in my chest, as he turns his head from me, listing as though he wishes to roll onto his side but lacks the strength.

“Please, Arafinwë,” I whisper. “You must eat.”

Pools of tears sprout suddenly from beneath his eyelashes and race down his cheeks.

I drop the fork and wrap my arms around him, pressing my face into his neck, while he silently weeps. “Your brother …” he whispers.

I push my finger against his lips. “Please …” I do not want him to go on. But he does.

“I came too late,” he says. “I saw Macalaurë; he was sick, and I went to him, meaning to help. He’d stabbed your brother--or one of them had. Alpaher was still alive, though wounded badly. He--” Arafinwë draws a shuddering breath--“he was screaming. Things were coming out of him, and he was trying to put them back in, and that was why Macalaurë was sick.”

Arafinwë retches then and leans over the side of the bed and vomits. He hasn’t eaten in days and there is nothing to vomit but bile, a frothy liquid that patters against the floor, streaming from his nose and mouth, while I weep and push my hand to my mouth, trying not to be sick myself.

“I was too late,” he gasps. He rolls back onto the bed: His eyes are ringed in red; mucus streams from his nose, covering the lower half of his face. “Too late!” He pounds his fists into the bed, screaming as his broken wrist slams again and again into the mattress, until I catch his hands in mine to save him from breaking his splint, and we wrap around each other and sob our agony into the warm familiarity of the other’s neck, and his breakfast grows cold and forgotten.

~oOo~

I awaken in the afternoon. Arafinwë sleeps, his hand locked in my hair. I gently pry his fingers open, one by one, releasing myself, and I stand and go downstairs.

Anairë is mending breeches in the bluish penumbra of a hissing fire-lamp. She looks up when I enter. “What did he say?”

“Say?”

“About the papers that I gave you. About the construction of the lamps and the need to train more in the forge--” Abruptly, she stops, her face a marble mask, hollowed by shadows in the meager light. “You said nothing to him, did you?”

“I--we fell asleep …”

“Eärwen, it is afternoon!” She leaps to her feet and hurls the breeches at me. The needle sticks into my skin and makes me cry out. “It is afternoon, and you waste your day on sleep!”

There is a feeling inside me akin to the sound made by a twig as it breaks beneath a careless foot, and I take the breeches from the floor and throw them back in her face, careless of the needle. “My brother is dead!” I scream. “I am allowed my grief!”

“Your brother is dead and your husband’s people are starving in the streets! Who do we live for, Eärwen, the living or the dead? The living or the dead?”

She has flown from the settee; her hands clench my arms and she shakes me. The feeling is like being tossed on a frothing, stormy sea, as though each second is being stretched to painful proportions, each motion makes my stomach lurch sickeningly. I can hear my teeth clicking together; her eyes bulge fearfully in her reddened face. She releases my arms long enough to slap me across the jaw, driving me to the floor with the helpless weight of a sack of stone. My forehead cracks the floor; my teeth close on my lower lip and blood dribbles down my chin.

Blackness squeezes the sides of my vision. I see the pointy toes of her prim Noldorin shoes come into my vision; the sounds of her heels against the floor are sharp, driving like nails into my ears. My heartbeat roars beneath, in pain and anger. She reaches down and lifts me by the back of my gown. She tosses me onto the settee.

With a mother’s tenderness, she wipes the blood from my face with a handkerchief. From the folds of her skirt, she produces a vial of salve, which she dabs on the black bruises that she has made on my arms, leaving tingling warmth in the wake of her touch. She takes my chin firmly in her hands. “Eärwen,” she says. “Our crops are not producing. The animals in the forest are slowly starving too, and so we have no meat. We cannot survive on mushrooms and salted venison forever.”

She rises and begins to pace. Her figure is tall and proud, her back forming a soft curve between shoulders and buttocks perfectly poised, feet stepping delicately and noisily against the hardwood floors. Her hands twist at her waist, worrying each other mercilessly. Her stiff hairstyle is beginning to disintegrate; strands tumble about her shoulders. A feeling of numbness settles on me. Let her take control …

But she will not. “Your husband is the king,” she says. Her gray eyes reflect the wild, blue flame of the lamp. “You know as well as I that the people will not listen to you or I--or even Indis--as they will listen to one of Finwë’s own blood. You do not go into the city, Eärwen; you do not know.” Her pacing becomes more frenzied, her heels ringing louder against the floor. “I went this morning. I went to speak with one of the few remaining blacksmiths about training others to make Fëanorian lamps. You do not know. You were not there. You did not feel the desperation. Parents are choosing--" her voice wavers for a moment; steadies again--“parents are choosing to feed their children in lieu of themselves. A farmer’s cart was overturned when it was seen that he had nectarines. More farmers are not coming at all: They are hording their harvests for themselves. Green things do not grow in the dark, Eärwen. Yavanna will help us--in this, I have faith--but the Valar have rightfully turned their attentions to Alqualondë for now. The Noldor here are blameless, yet we will starve for the folly of our kin.”

She comes to me. She takes my hands. Her hands tremble--or maybe it is mine--or maybe it is both. She presses them to her lips. “Surely, you must see, Eärwen. Your husband must come forth and reassure the people. We must devise a solution, but first, he must reassure the people that the rational blood of Finwë prevails in the palace; that the madness has gone with the exiles.”

“But where?” I ask. “Where will we go for food?”

Although I know: I see in my memory, I see the wide fields of seaweed that grew across the top of the sea, nurtured with only the light of the stars. I see the ponderous nets full of writhing fish, strained by the weight, water streaming noisily as they are hoisted to the decks of the white swan ships.

Alqualondë.

~oOo~

I go to Arafinwë’s bedside with a smile painted onto my face.

His eyes are closed, his face turned into his pillow, but he is awake. I hear the change in his breathing as he listens to my movement around the room. In my quivering hands are the papers that Anairë has given me and my notes.

“Arafinwë,” I say. “There are some things that I must tell you.”

His eyelashes flutter, but his eyes do not open.

“The city … the city is not well, Arafinwë. With the light gone, we are having trouble with our harvests.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. His fist contracts on the bedclothes, his knuckles whitening.

“The people are hungry, Arafinwë. We must--" I place my hand on his shoulder, to feel the minute trembling of his body. His skin is hot, as though with fever. “We must go to Alqualondë and beg for their forgiveness. You must ask for the mercy of the Valar. We must bring food to the people.”

Slowly, his eyes open, and he lifts his head from the pillow. He does not so much as glance at me as he grabs the pillow in his fist and presses it over his head, blocking the sound of my voice.

~oOo~

Anairë and I work until my eyes ache from squinting at papers in the darkness, until my shoulders throb with the strain of sitting motionless for so long. She writes the letters, for her handwriting is better than mine. The Teleri do not prize letters as do the Noldor. But it is hard to write without light; impossible to see the ink in the darkness, and at times, she dips the quill too deeply into the well or not deeply enough, without knowing it, and a page is ruined, and she must start anew.

And Arafinwë sleeps.

We write that Arafinwë is ill, and we are taking the rule in his stead, until he recovers enough to handle his obligations. We write and rewrite our letters--one to my father and one to Manwë--groping blindly for the thin line between pleading and dignity. I do not even know what time it is; buried as we are in the depths of my house, we cannot hear the noise from the streets except once, when there comes the fearful sound of shouting and the terrified whinnying of a horse and the sound of wood shattering upon stone. Anairë and I sit with our arms around each other, waiting for the inevitable moment when the door will break open and the desperate people of the city will surge inside, to take what they can from us. But that sound never comes.

With Anairë remains a single loyal handmaid, and on occasion, she brings up a meal: tepid mushroom soup with hard, stale crusts of bread; old wizened potatoes that have begun to sprout new plants from the eyes, which she has carved out dutifully, leaving the potatoes pitted with craters. The flesh is dark and tasteless. I begin to add salt but Anairë tells me not to: Animals have begun dying in the streams, having starved, and the water is poisoned.

“We must wait for rain, and we cannot exacerbate our thirst for hedonics alone,” she says tenderly, calling to her girl: “Bring the last bit of butter for my sister, if you would.”

I weep. Anairë catches my tears with her napkin so that they do not fall into my potatoes.

~oOo~

Arafinwë will not eat, but it is just as well. There is not much left to give him.

I wrap his meals and open the door and creep carefully into the streets. Beneath my cloak, hidden with greater shame than I hide the private parts of my body, I wear his sword.

People huddle around fires; I see something that looks like a dog turning on a spit made from a shattered broom, and I kneel, swallowing desperately, for to vomit would waste a good meal on the gutter.

There is a young woman nursing a skinny, fussy baby at her breast; her eyes are much too large in her face. I take her to an alley, away from the hungry eyes of two large men who make no secret of staring at us, blades worn openly at their hips, reddened menacingly with the glow of the flames. The girl kneels in the alley and stuffs the moldy bread into her mouth with trembling fingers while I hold her screaming infant, a trickle of milk more like water dribbling from his mouth. It has been a long time since I have held a newborn infant, but I know that I should not be able to feel his bones as I do. I cradle him with one arm; the other hand rests on the hilt of Arafinwë’s sword. My eyes flicker constantly toward the entranceway of the alley. The girl eats the wizened apple that I have wrapped with the bread, even eating the seeds and the core, suppressing a burp and swallowing it, as though afraid of losing even that little bit of nourishment to the air.

“My Queen.” She takes my hand that rests on the sword and kisses it with thin, dry lips. “My Queen …” Her tears patter against my skin. Sudden disgust and loathing for myself rises unbidden in my bosom; again suppressing the urge to vomit, I hand back to her the caterwauling infant, tearing my hand from hers, and race from the alley, making it to the gutter before my supper returns in painful heaves, undigested gobs of bread and apple mingling with the rotted leaves and filth.

There is an eager scamper of footsteps behind me.

I flee the street and do not look back to see the fate of my regurgitated dinner.

~oOo~

I will leave for Alqualondë the next morning, on Anairë’s horse, and so it is important that I sleep tonight. I go to Findaráto’s bedroom, from where my husband refuses to move. Gone is the fresh, warm smell of my son; the room smells sour, like sickness. Still, he is my husband; I love him. Guilt drives me to his bed, to wrap my arms around his pale, wasting body and press my face into his hair, once as soft as silk but now dry and crackling beneath the meager pressure of my cheek.

His breathing is shallow; his eyes crusted shut with mucus. He moves from the bed only to relieve himself--sometimes, lately, not even then. Not that there is much for him to excrete: He won’t eat and laps only weakly at the water that I dab onto his lips with a washrag. His belly has caved in on itself; it feels as though I could fit my fist underneath of his ribs and place my hand against his weakly beating heart. Perhaps I would understand, then, why he rode so far and faced so much only to choose this slow and gruesome death.

I am making a choice, with each day that I do not seek a healer, I realize: I am choosing to let my husband die. Seeking a healer--knowing that most of them have left with Nolofinwë and Fëanáro’s people--would take hours from the time I spend in counsel with Anairë. I haven’t even had the time for a bath or to wash my teeth in many days--but neither has she, and we politely ignore the reek of the other’s body. Furthermore, bringing a healer here--should I find one--to the palace, would take her from the people of the city who need her more. Who do not choose their condition, as does Arafinwë.

I speak to Arafinwë, uncertain as to whether he can even hear me. I tell him of my journey tomorrow, to Alqualondë. I tell him that I will kneel before my father and beg forgiveness for our people, beg that we ally as we once did, so long ago, that they help us in this time of need. I will plead to Manwë on his behalf, if I can, on the behalf of the Noldor.

I tell him these things, in a frantic whisper. My hand presses his heart; I feel it beat faster with my words.

“So you hear,” I whisper. “You do hear me: Then, why, I must ask? Why do you choose this fate?”

He draws a shuddering breath. I have lost hope.

These words he does not speak, but they seep into my thoughts. Images flicker across my mind, of the days of Light, of our children playing in the garden, of Findaráto on a dark road, turning to look back, his beautiful gray eyes very bright, even in the darkness, but then he turns away, and walks briskly to catch up with his brothers.

“There is still hope, Arafinwë. The Noldor need not fall into ruin. Our children have gone, yes, but that is no reason to let so many more suffer. Please. Don’t you see? Others’ children will die by your inaction. Tomorrow, I will ride to Alqualondë. Why will you not eat, gain your strength? And you shall ride to Taniquetil, to kneel before the Valar and plead for their mercy, for their aid.”

Roughly, I roll him onto his back. His eyes are opened to slits, contemplating me as I loom over him.

Fëanáro was right. And if I go to the Valar, and they won’t help? If I die, they cannot withhold their aid from the innocent for harboring a rebel in their midst. I only wanted to say farewell to you …

I flop back onto the bed beside him. I rest my chin on the sharp boniness of his shoulder; tenderly, I stroke his cheek. “It need not be that way,” I whisper fervently, and his hand rises and weakly clasps mine. He turns his head and places his lips against my forehead.

“You are a fool, Arafinwë.
You will leave me with this burden? Because of your pride? Your fear? If they reject you, then take the road behind our children. Leave the city. But you must try.
Perhaps they do not know the condition of our city, busy as they are in Alqualondë. Because you stupid, proud Noldor--" tears burble in my voice--“in your stupid pride, you will not humble yourselves to ask for help. This is about your pride, Arafinwë. Do not kid yourself. Do not kid me. I have not lived among you and your foolish brothers for so long not to know that.”

He sighs. His bony fingers weakly caress my wrist. “That is not it, Eärwen,” he whispers.

I am so shocked at hearing his voice, the first time in days, that I twitch. He sniffs, the closest to a laugh that I have heard since he arrived back home.

“You and Anairë,” he says quietly, “will lead the Noldor better than I ever could. I was born to the wrong father. I am no king.”

“You have no choice in that, Arafinwë. Eru chose your father. Are you suggesting that Eru made a wrong choice in this?” He is silent; relentlessly, I continue in a fierce whisper. “How unlike you--how deplorable--to choose death rather than the destiny Eru made for you!”

“It is not easy, Eärwen,” he says.

I drive my fists into the mattress. “You speak to me of what is not easy? Do you think that it has been any easier for me? For Anairë? You are not the only one who has lost your children--and she has also lost her husband! And we were not born the son of a king. It is not our place to rule the Noldor. I am not even a Noldo! They do not care to listen to me. They want to hear from you, but you are lingering here in your selfish sorrow while the city collapses around you! And you leave me to sweep up your mess, when I belong with my people! Not yours!”

He is trembling. His heart is pounding beneath my hand; his breath is short. “What would you have me do?” he asks weakly.

“I would have you eat the food I bring you. I would have you leave the bed and not piss yourself like a child. I would have you--I would have you be a husband again. I have been so alone, so afraid. What kind of marriage do we have if we cannot lend our strength to each other, in times like these? I cannot stand alone, Arafinwë.”

His lips touch mine, but it is not a kiss. He slumps in my arms; his eyes fall shut.

And the weight of the mission falls on me.

Alqualondë

With apologies for the delay in updating this and gratitude to all who have been reviewing it nonetheless!

Read Alqualondë

I know I need my rest, but I cannot sleep, and so I rise early to draw my bath.

Anairë is also awake; I hear her rustling in the kitchen downstairs. Descending the stairs carefully in the dark--I no longer need to press my palms against the wall for guidance--I find her in yesterday’s clothes, making a pot of tea, and I know that she never left last night.

Her fair face is marred by shadows beneath her eyes. She has abandoned her proud, upswept hairstyle, and her normally luxuriant black tresses are knotted and clumped by oil and tied back with a bit of yarn. I do not need a looking glass to know that I look much the same.

She turns at the sound of my footsteps and smiles weakly. “Sit,” she commands. “I have made you some bread and jam and lemon tea.”

I force myself to eat, sick with the memory of the hollow-cheeked woman and her fussy baby who surely need the food more than I. As though sensing my thoughts, Anairë says, “This is an important mission. You need your strength.” She places a paper-wrapped package on the table. “I have given you the best of what bread and fruit we have left. It should be enough to get you to Alqualondë. They will have food there.” I nod and nibble my bread and jam. With the sour-sick feeling in the back of my throat, I cannot taste it, and it is hard to swallow against the rising bile. Anairë lifts my chin and forces me to look at her. “Do not give it away, Eärwen. You will do more good by hording this tiny bit of food with intentions of providing for all than to be slowed in bringing help to our people. Do not give it away.”

She releases me.

I take a long bath, using the lavender-scented oils that Anairë gives me, soaping my hair with a foamy white conditioner that will restore its silver sheen. Anairë has laid out a set of silken undergarments, and after drying myself, I put them on and go into my bedroom, where she waits at the vanity to brush my hair. Her warm fingers are soothing against my damp scalp; each languid stroke of the brush draws a degree of tension from my shoulders. If I squeeze my eyes shut tightly, this might be a happier time. My wedding day. Anairë brushed and plaited my hair then, too. I squeeze my eyes tighter. That tight, sick feeling in my belly is for an entirely different reason. Arafinwë waits downstairs for me, probably just as nervous as I am. I could come downstairs with no hair at all, and he would still love me. I do not know why, then, I am so nervous.

And when I open my eyes, there will still be light.

Anairë sets the brush aside, and I open my eyes to the throbbing, orange candlelight, a tiny speck within endless dark.

She plaits my hair in a simple style that will wear well for the two-day journey and will not look shabby as it begins to deteriorate. I put on the best of my gowns and drape around my neck the pearls that Arafinwë gave me after Artaher was born. Anairë tightens the laces at the back, accentuating what slender curves I possess; this was the latest fashion among Noldorin ladies before the Darkening. I remember sitting in the parlor with Fëanáro and Nerdanel while he complained of the impracticality of it, sketching in the air with his wine goblet. And I’d envied Nerdanel’s ample curves, so lovely in such fashion. How petty the stuff of our conversation was then.

On my quivering hands, I slide silk gloves. Anairë drapes my shoulders with a velveteen cloak, arranging the hood to protect my hair. Catching a glimpse of myself in the looking glass, I laugh bitterly, for I am one of them now--a Noldo. We have no food but we have silk gloves and sweet-smelling bath oils. I array myself as though to kneel before the Valar, not to visit my father in the place of my birth.

Anairë’s deft, competent fingers smooth wrinkles that I do not see, shift the pearls differently at my throat, as though they will remain so over the two-day journey. “You are beautiful,” she says. “Dignified. He cannot refuse you, right? You are his daughter.”

My throat is too tight to speak, so I just nod, not quite sure: to what am I agreeing?

~oOo~

The dark streets are strangely empty. In front of the house, a farmer’s cart was overturned. He’d been bearing stores of jarred pickles; in the people’s hasty greed in tipping his cart, most were broken in the street, the pickles ruined amid the broken glass. Nonetheless, Elves pick among them, brushing slivers of glass from the pickles with bloodied fingers.

Anairë gives me a leg up onto her horse. The beast snorts and shifts beneath my meager weight; we are not the only ones hungry, tired, and scared. I stroke his neck and whisper to him of fairer days to come, if only--please, please--he will bear me safely to Alqualondë.

At my side, I again wear a sword, at Anairë’s insistence. She kept Arafinwë’s sword and gave me one smaller and lighter, better suited to my size and strength. “It is my blade,” she said. “Nolofinwë insisted that I keep it, never knowing that I might actually need it.” Beneath my cloak, tucked safely away, is the paper package of food that Anairë made for me.

“May Oromë guard your road,” she says, as I take up the reins. It is an old Noldorin blessing, from the time of the Journey, one that was oft-repeated as a casual salutation in the Bliss of Aman. “May Oromë guard your road!” Arafinwë and I would call, as Nolofinwë and Anairë departed down the path after a night of wine and supper, waving, our arms twined around the other’s waist, kisses dancing upon laughing lips.

“Anairë?” I ask, and she looks up at me. “Will you look after Arafinwë?”

She glances back at the street when she answers, “Of course.” She smacks the horse’s backside and sends me on my way, without farewell.

Which I hope I do not regret.

~oOo~

When I was small, my father used to sit me in the safe circle of his arms and tell me tales of the Outer Lands.

“The darkness was so heavy that you could feel it,” he would often say as way of beginning, ghosting his hand in front of himself as though he could still stroke the darkness, even in the Land of Light.

“What did it feel like?” asked I, the clever daughter, unable then to comprehend “darkness” as anything more threatening than a band of shadow beneath the wardrobe door. The Light of Valinor was persistent, seeping into every corner of our lives eventually: through cracks in the curtains, between the door and the doorframe, even squeezing between the threads of the blankets that I tugged over my head in an effort to replicate the darkness of which Father spoke.

He sighed; pondered. Finally, he spoke.

“It had a life unto itself. It was thick and warm, like the pelt of a beast, but yet it yielded to your touch, like water. You would hold out your hand--" he stretched forth his hand, fingers reaching as though seeking again that feeling--“and your fingers would disappear into it, like you’d dipped your arm into oil.”

In Tirion, there is still light: flickering patchwork-squares stretch down the street on either side of me. A few have erected lamps in front of their homes, but in the chaos, some have been overturned, and the hedges bear the scars of flame. The streets are mainly empty, and those who walk do so with the wide, vacant eyes of the wraiths in the scary stories my father once told me, those that were always preceded by the palpable darkness.

My horse’s hooves ring against the cobblestones; some of the patches of light in the street ahead of me are obscured by faces; curtains are hastily drawn. A few children run into the street, thinking me a farmer with a cart, and they follow the horse with their small, pale hands fluttering in the darkness like moths. “Lady? Lady? Have you any food?” I keep my eyes trained on the road, resisting the urge to nudge my horse into a trot. The neat squares of light in the houses smudge and run like smeared paint as tears burn my eyes. “Lady?”

In the lower circles of the city, the light lessens. Windows are shuttered tightly, as though the inhabitants are trying to horde and keep the light for themselves. In some places, gates are broken and broken carts force me from the road.

I approach the gate out of the city, dread seizing my heart.

Do not pass into that!

Thick, humid darkness looms past the gate: the darkness of my father's stories. My horse has stopped in the road, his ears pinned back, tossing his head. I tighten my legs on his sides; I urge him forward.

I squeeze my eyes shut tight.

~oOo~

Father was right. I can feel it.

I can feel the darkness drift upon me, worming into my nose and ears and pores, making me sick with it. The sky is covered by a canopy of black clouds, blocking even the starlight. Once, I lay upon my back in the grass with Arafinwë, his fingertips resting in my palm, and we watched the clouds billowing overhead, dancing on the wind like the banners atop our fathers’ palaces. I asked him to find me a shape, and he hesitated for a long moment before pointing straight up and saying, “Pliers?” and I laughed until my sides hurt. “How Noldorin you are!”

I suppose that the clouds are the same, but in the darkness, they become menacing.

It is hard to see the road, and I understand now how Arafinwë came to be injured. I wonder about my own fate, about the wisdom of this quest.

And yes, I feel a whisper of bitterness toward my husband, who should be here. Not me.

~oOo~

We would take this road often, between Tirion and Alqualondë, between Arafinwë’s family and mine. I never paid it much mind then, riding in the back of the carriage, safe in the half-circle of Arafinwë’s arm, our children darting between windows to point and ogle at the sights. “Aikanáro, really. Please stop kicking my feet. Artanis, keep your gown over your knees. You are not a boy.”

I long to have back that time.

I pass the orchards outside of Tirion. It used to be that the farmers would meet us in the streets with plums for the children. Now, the trees are stripped bare, the streets sticky-sweet with trampled plums. Flies buzz in annoyed clouds around the horse’s legs, settling again in our wake, dining on the feasts of our folly.

I stretch my arm in front of me and, shuddering, watch the darkness devour my hand.

~oOo~

There are small towns between Tirion and Alqualondë, but I dare not stop, although I linger in the meager orange light that they provide, glancing behind me with regret when I must step into the darkness once more.

The horse knows the road, and so I sleep astride his back, dreaming strange dreams where I arrive in Alqualondë and Fëanáro sits upon the King’s throne, smiling sardonically while I beg him to tell me, Where is my father?--crushing plums in his fist and his hands and mouth bloodied red with the juice.

I awaken with a start that upsets me from the horse’s back, and I slide to the ground, striking my knee on a sharp stone and hissing in pain. He stops and waits for me, turning to regard me with complacent, patient eyes. I decide that I will leave him in Alqualondë. Such a loyal beast does not deserve the torment that is Tirion.

At times, we must pass through stretches of forest and primitive fears awaken in me then as I dissect the shadows, frantically searching for movement--almost wanting to see it so that I have something from which I can run--cringing against the horse’s neck when an owl calls out in the night, swooping low over me to scoop something from the shadows beside the road, something that keens with the fear of death as it is carried off.

Tree branches, lost to my eyes in the dark, occasionally grab my hair, and I scream, at once feeling foolish when I discover that the skeletal fingers upon my scalp belong to a tree, but unable to calm my racing heart. Like a drum, it thunders in my chest. I imagine that it is drawing dark things near to me with the brilliant efficiency of a beacon. I press my hand to my chest and a whimper wriggles from between my lips, not unlike the sound made by the small animal carried into the night that is probably now dead or dying.

When we pass out of the forest, I sob with relief, my quivering hands covering my face with the shameful puerility of a small child. This is still Valinor! Yes, but if the Light could fade, then what else is possible?

~oOo~

Shortly, a feeble glimmer appears on the horizon in front of me.

Valmar.

By the time I think to nudge my horse into a canter, he is already loping awkwardly on the dark road, in the direction of the light.

And so we keep Valmar in our sights.

We pass through the Calacirya. “Pass of Light”--I shudder at the irony of it, for the mountains on either side clench against the road, and I do not want to pass between them. The clouds overhead have rent and a meek scattering of stars lights the road. In the Calacirya, though, the helpful sky is reduced to a weakly sparkling ribbon overhead.

I keep my neck craned, my eyes on Valmar, until the stone sides of the Calacirya block even that from view.

Findaráto once loved the Calacirya. Sitting upon his father’s lap, no more than four years old, he stared open-mouthed at the pale rock walls rising beyond our sights on either side. He wriggled to be free of Arafinwë’s grip, strangely belligerent, whining until Arafinwë slid closer to the window and let Findaráto grip the lower sill, tilting his head out of the window, staring raptly at the contrast of gray stone against the jewel-bright sky, nearly tumbling from the carriage in his eagerness to stretch and let his baby fingers brush the rock, while Arafinwë laughed nervously and clutched his legs to keep him from falling.

For Findaráto … I think, and I let my fingers brush the coldly luminescent stone. For I hope that Death does not hasten his return, as Light no longer awaits.

~oOo~

The last time I was in Alqualondë was for my brother's wedding less than a year ago, and the city had been in celebration, for it was not often that we rejoiced in the wedding of a prince. Arafinwë's and my marriage did not seem so far away then, nor did our promises to my parents that we would not become distant, though I had chosen to follow my beloved to Tirion. But time and ever-increasing obligations warp the best of intentions, and the last I had been to the city of my birth--my inheritance--was almost a year ago. Had I known that my next return would be under such circumstances, perhaps I would have made greater effort to keep that promise made to my parents centuries before. I realize now that even the simplest delights of Alqualondë, taken for granted, will now live only in my memory--the tracery of silver light upon the peaks of the cottages at Telperion's zenith; the tattoo of golden light upon a cobalt sea--and the darkened city will never be the same again.

But had I known of this--of Darkness--many of my choices I would have changed.

I am glad to leave the Calcirya behind me. Overhead, the sky widens again and pale starlight lights the road in front of me. Clouds race endlessly now across a once-cloudless sky, dark and ragged like uncombed wool, and the stars are blotted out, then emerge again. Then darken … and so it goes: light to dark to light, ne'erending. The way of the world--even Valinor now--I suppose.

And down the narrow road paved with bits of crushed shell, lined with marble and adorned with pearls, that winds down from the hills to the beach is Alqualondë. Always has Alqualondë lain within the dimness, made bright by the multitude of colored lamps lining the streets and strung high upon the masts of our ships. But those ships are gone, and the streetlamps strive alone against the darkness. Alqualondë is a small pulse of light against a sea that no longer bears any trace of light. It is as black as the horizon, as the mountains piled behind us, even the sky overhead, when a clot of clouds skims silently across the face of the stars.

The horse's hooves are too loud upon the road, though he--like I--is draw to the light. My heart pounds for a different reason now, and I realize that I stand at the brink of a quest fulfilled or failed, and that the fates of the people of my husband rest in my small Telerin hand. How did it come to this, I wonder? And had I known when I gave my hand to Arafinwë that one day I would seek my father, not for consolation or to share in grief, but with my hand outstretched for alms, still would I have spoken the Name and sealed the bond? To lose my children to the fey and the dark and my husband to the slow death of his own cowardice? Tears sting my eyes and the hundred points of light from the hundred lamps of the city become a single fuzzy glow upon the brink of Valinor, suddenly precarious, as though that light stands to drown in the darkened sea.

Alqualondë was once a beautiful city, and though it filled my gaze from the day of my birth until the day of my marriage, never had I tired of emerging from the Calcirya and--hand pressing my chest--gasping at the sight of it on the brink of the waves: one thousand cottages carved from soft pink stone and each with lanterns gleaming within. The Noldor had taught us that: how to carve from rock and move the stones upon boards laid upon the beach; how to delve foundations and raise homes upon them that kept out both the heat and the rain. From the sands of our beaches, they made glass as flawless as the air itself, and our silversmiths twisted tiny cages to act as lanterns for the lampstones the Noldor wrought and so generously shared, and the city was spangled with lights of every color. The city itself became like the sea, hard to look upon when illumed in full glory, yet it was impossible to turn away.

I remember once returning from Tirion to Alqualondë with Fëanáro as my escort, for he was wed by then and already a father, and so it was appropriate for him to accompany me upon the road. Years before, we had been friends in childhood, each the eldest child and heir of a king, and I was surprised how after long years of his absence to the mines and villages in the north, my ease with him rekindled as though those years had never been, and the two-day journey passed like naught. And we came laughing through the Calcirya that day--the cause of our mirth, I do not remember--and he stopped upon sight of Alqualondë, for it was near to the Mingling and the lamps of the city were very bright. "Do you know, Eärwen," he said, and his eyes had become dark and mirthless, and I forgot again the childhood friend and recalled only the prince who had defied his father and King, "that the mingled Light of the Trees is in fact every hue of light known to creation, mixed in equal measure? It is all that is and all that shall be, and so it is perfect. And when I gaze upon your city--" how he'd said it: my city!--"then I think of that light, for Alqualondë and its lamps look like that light broken into its various hues, each brought to its fullest splendor." And never again had I come through the Calcirya and caught sight of the city--my city--without thinking of this, of Light broken and beautiful, and of him.

As I think of him now, with a tightened throat and a tongue that tastes of the metal that he'd adored, with which he'd murdered my brother.

The city still looks as white light broken, yet too feeble to be healed anew, and alone against the darkness, it is not splendid as it once was but sad. As I ride carefully down the road from the hills and draw near to the gates, I see that many of the lanterns in the windows have been extinguished, and I know: as the blood of my people pounds through my body, I know that each lantern extinguished is a life lost in that house, and the city--as my people--is dimmed by it, and some houses stand in complete darkness.

Alqualondë once was a city filled with mirth and music, and a harper on the wharfs might sing a tune that catches in the ear of a messenger, who hums it on his way to the palace and infects one hundred others, who carry it to the farthest corners of the city, until all of Alqualondë is loud with song. Or the calls of street vendors, the bright bells upon their carts, the shouts of the fishermen to each other as they pass, one going in and one coming out, beneath the arch. The slap of waves against the side of a ship and the endless susurration of the surf upon the beach: I ride through the gates--and they are guarded now, by guards wielding blades they don't know how to use and with eyes hooded with suspicion--and the voice of Alqualondë has been silenced. I pause at the gates. "I am--" and I am curtly interrupted. "We know who you are, Princess. Hurry along," and they are already scouring the road for the next to emerge from the darkness, imagining it as the harbinger of more hurt and death. For that has happened already, has it not, and why not again?

The city is silent, but the streets are not empty. There is too much to be done, and people hasten to task with heads lowered and lips pinched tight to withhold voices once wont to rise in song. I ride through the crowded streets, and the people stop, all but those bearing the dead upon carts we'd once used to take fish from the wharfs to the market. There is no time to spare to curiosity for them, and Vanyarin healers wearing white cloaks to mark their station hustle amid them too, cloaks parting to reveal bloodstained clothes beneath. But the others stop and stare. Empty eyes lift to find my face. I see a little girl's lips form the words Princess Eärwen before her mother jerks her into silence.

Suddenly, I am painfully aware of the silken gloves, of my hair twined tightly into braids. I am aware that I come not as one of their own but as a princess of the Noldor, now the Queen, they assume. A few women dip their knees to the dust as they curtsy, but they quickly rise again, eyes lowered. Upon the faces of my people is etched plainly the pain of the deeds of the people whom I have come to save. Voices have forgotten how to sing and lips have forgotten how to smile. Hearts are too tired to hope.

I dismount from my horse, and with a pat to the flank, I dismiss him. Someone will find better use for him, and in the meantime, he can feast upon the last gardens to succumb to the darkness. I catch the hand of the woman nearest to me. Darkness dims a face further blurred by my tears, but I know her voice, when she speaks, though it is roughed by grief: "My husband was--you do not remember--"

"But I do," I whisper. "I was but a girl, and my horse had a stone in the shoe that I could not dislodge and he--"

"Yes," she laughs in a voice that burbles with tears. "Yes he loved to tell that tale, like it was still the days of the Journey, and he had saved you from the Shadow--"

And I laugh in answer, "Perhaps not, but certainly my father's wrath," and in such half-thoughts and interruptions, I know that her husband was one of the murdered, and her son too, and she is alone, like so many now in this city. One by one, I move between them, beneath the lanterns that dim and are long in being rekindled--but we have grown accustomed to the darkness. My husband's people behind me, my heart has momentarily lost room for them, and they will survive for yet another night while I heal the hurt their kin has caused in Alqualondë.

The Funeral

Read The Funeral

I come to my father's palace sometime later, shabby, as Anairë was careful to avoid when dressing me. But I have given my pearls and my gloves to two little girls orphaned during the Kinslaughter and think it a worthy sacrifice. With dusty shoes and raiment in disarray, I climb the long stairs that I'd once bounded up with the carefree joy of youth that assumes that joy will last forever. The stairs that I'd ascended with Arafinwë to announce our betrothal. My first pregnancy and each after. And now--

The main hall is lit only with candles for, I will learn, my father has torn down and cast into the sea the lamps that were a gift of Fëanáro and were counted as the most beautiful in the city. His influence is everywhere, I see; the mosaic floor made of iridescent bits from the insides of oyster shells was of his hand and mind as well. With subtle alteration of color, he formed the shape of a ship rising upon the crest of a wave, and as one moved across the floor and the light shifted, the waves seemed to turn and the sails billow, and many times, my breath was caught at the beauty of it. The corner of the floor has been shattered, a hammer lying abandoned in a pile of shards of shells. My father's work, I know. The ship lies untouched, but in the candlelight, the effect of motion is lost, and the illusion is as still and silent as the city.

In the middle of the floor lies my brother upon piles of pillows that I recognize as the finest from my mother's parlors. Alpaher's head lolls in my father's lap, and the King, the man I thought incapable of weakness or tears, sobs without end and lets his tears wash the face of his beloved son, as though his grief will destroy death, and my brother will rise again unscathed.

I have never before seen death, and I linger at the back of the hall, unnoticed and afraid. Alpaher has been wrapped in his finest clothes, and I see no mark or wound upon him yet know by the bloodless pallor of his face--and the memory of Arafinwë's words--that it lurks beneath his clothing where it now shall never heal. The candlelight casts his face in ruthless shadow even as it dwells poignant as a spark upon the marriage ring upon his right hand. The light of fire upon metal reminds me of his death and his loss and the hand by which both were delivered. I close my aching eyes and wonder if there are tears left to fall.

"Eärwen?" Surely that feeble voice belongs not to my father, but we are alone in the hall, and I open my eyes to find his face turned to mine, cheeks glistening with tears. "Eärwen, you have returned?"

"I have returned," I manage to whisper after a moment.

"Come and see him," my father says, "for Uinen shall soon take him, and only our memories will remain. I am afraid--" he says, and then he stops. He passes a hand over his face, as though by dispelling his tears he erases also his fears. His voice is low, but in the high and wide hall, it carries to me nonetheless. "I am afraid to forget his face," he says at last, and against the fear and pain in my heart, I cross the floor to my brother. I do not want to remember him like this, I realize, even if it means I must forget his face. I wish to run from there, from Alqualondë--but to where? The darkness has no end, and there is no place left to run.

I hesitate then. But wisdom passes across my frantic thoughts like a cool hand upon a fevered brow. Go not to the dead but to the living. The voice of Wisdom, I realize, with a smile strange and secret in the midst of darkness, sounds a lot like Anairë. Is that not why you are here?

So I take not the cold and insensate hand of my brother but the warm, living hand of my father, for Alpaher is beyond me now, but my father may yet be healed.

~oOo~

"Since you have returned to us," says my father at supper that night, "then we have decided that Alpaher's funeral will be tomorrow."

He only picks at his seaweed salad. At the other end of the table, my mother--always a small woman--appears to have shrunk on herself, her shoulders hunched inward and her chin upon her chest, the tablecloth beneath her stained dark by tears. The plate of food before her is untouched.

"That is--" I start to say well, but it is not well, to commit one's lost brother to sea. I swallow hard and suffice to nod.

Supper is a spread like none I have seen since just after the Darkening, before we in Tirion realized fully the implications of an utter loss of light. There is seaweed salad and cold shrimp in spice and a crab soup and tuna cooked scalding hot on the outside and still cool and red in the middle. Ulmo's great weeds are bountiful, for they have lived long without light, and his fish among them; those of our people not immobilized by grief are proud to row in small boats to collect food for the rest of us.

I am trying my hardest not to appear as ravenous as I am. I take careful, measured bites of salad. I sip at my soup. I think of my brother; my appetite diminishes. One of the maidservants serves me a filet of tuna, but its insides--flayed and red--remind me too much of the violence upon these shores. I see Alpaher's pale face and his raiment carefully arranged to hide the wound in his belly, and I think of this fish draw from the water and similarly sliced open, and I push the meat aside. But my fingers--tremulous with hunger--will not stop picking at my salad.

"We are glad that you have come home to us," says my father in a flat voice as the maidservant bears away most of the food to be given to the compost.

~oOo~

We have never had cause to develop funerary traditions, so giving our dead to the sea was something borne of the Kinslaying, a feeble attempt at both symbolism and closure, attaining fully neither. It started, it is whispered about the city, when a husband and wife perished both in the slaughter, and the husband was caught by the waves and taken to Uinen's bosom, and his daughter gave also her mother to the sea, wishing that her parents should not be parted, even in death. Now, our people line the beach each day at the low tide, when at last they are ready to bit farewell, and leave the dead for Uinen to claim and cradle with hands of foam, and come the passing of the high tide, one who returns to the beach finds it empty of living and dead like.

I do not sleep well the night before in the bedroom of my girlhood. Once upon a time, I collapsed upon this bed with a smile splitting my face: He loves me! Once upon a time, Arafinwë knelt beneath my window with a small harp and coaxed me from dreams with song because he wished to watch the morning Mingling upon the sea--but only with me at his side. Once upon a time, a week before our wedding, Arafinwë sought to climb the wall to my window but ended up cutting his arm on an outcropping of sharp rock, and so the evening meant to be spent in the bliss of love was spent instead binding his wound and trying to wash his blood from my bedclothes before the servants found it, and how we'd laughed at that! "It is my due," he said, blushing, "for seeking such a right without marriage."

At last, doomed to insomnia, I rise from the bed and go to the balcony. With the sea and the sky an indistinguishable wall of darkness, I might be seated at the edge of the world.

Tirion seems very, very far away.

We are glad that you have come home to us.

How easy it would be! I think. How easy to stay here and allow my grief to well and to forget the problems of the Noldor and care for my own people. I think of my brother dead in the hall behind me. His wife keeps vigil at his side this night. My sister, I think. My sister … not Anairë. Not Anairë with her quick voice and her proud neck and her pointy shoes. It is easy to believe that. I want to believe that.

I should stay.

I am summoned some hours later, so it must be morning. Two white-cloaked Vanyarin healers stand in the hall. Alpaher has been laid upon a stretcher, the pillows discarded in a heap in the corner. The only sound in the vast hall is the gentle murmur of unceasing weeping, its source unknown for it comes from everyone at once. Sometimes, it sounds like my voice. My throat is raw and sore.

The healers move with haste through the streets. There will be others after Alpaher to commit to the sea, and they have not time to dawdle. Already, Alqualondë smells faintly of death. The streets are empty this early in the morning save the procession to the beach: the fleet-footed healers each followed by a clump of mourners staggering as fast as their grief will allow, clutching hands and weeping with sorrow-hoarsened voices. In front of me, my father walks with long strides, a lantern our only source of light and swinging at his side, casting odd and shifting shadows across the cobbled street. My mother clutches his arm. Her foot catches a swatch of shadow where a stone is missing from the street, and she falls, and he does not notice. He keeps walking, fast, after the healers and the body of his son.

She is on my arm now, so I must have gathered her from the street, though I do not remember it; my arm is around her waist, and I am all that holds her up. She is too light in my arms. Artanis as a young girl did not feel so frail. It feels like an age to trudge across the sand. I concentrate on lifting my feet high so that I do not have to think of similar trips across this beach, chasing young Alpaher, shrieking, to the sea, where Ossë rose against us and knocked us both from our feet and Uinen caught us and cradled us and bore us back to dry ground. The dunes are a mosaic of light and shadow and, at times, the contrast deepens, and I know that we pass other families, like ours, committing their dead to the sea, their lanterns turning the shadows on the sand to black. I do not look up to see then. I concentrate on walking; I listen to the mutter of the sea and let it drown the sounds of grief.

And then my mother stops, and I have no choice but to look. My brother is laid upon the sand; my father has collapsed at his side, silver hair pooled upon a chest that no longer rises with breath. Alpaher's wife--my sister--weeps alone. And there is the sea, presiding over it all: an endless expanse of black, the same hue as the sky but without stars. The sea is calm, as though it, too, is in mourning. The waves are capped with orange sparks from our lanterns.

In voices barely louder than the surf, the Vanyarin healers read the words prepared in haste for these ceremonies. They try to speak slowly and with feeling but their voices have the threadbare sound of those long ago exhausted, for whom sorrow has become rote.

Unprovoked, my thoughts arrive suddenly at Anairë, pacing the kitchen with a candle stub in one hand and a parchment in the other, reading aloud to herself about the dangers of drinking from streams in the forest with so many animals dying, nodding at some points and scowling at others, marking changes upon the parchment with a quill kept tucked in her hair.

But this is my brother's funeral. Tirion is far away.

Uinen, take this child of the sea to your bosom, and may Ossë bear him gently to the arms of Ulmo, and may Ulmo learn his face so that he may speak unto Námo of the grief of this day and the beauty of this spirit now committed to his Halls. May he be chosen to walk among us again with a heart cleansed of the hurt done against him.

Manwë, grant us the strength to commit this day to bitter memory.

Alpaher's wife has broken the strand of pearls around her neck, given by him at their betrothal, and she is scattering them about his head and trying to fold them into his hands, but his hands have gone stiff with death, and they will never again close in answer to her touch. The Vanyarin healers are done with their rites and give their condolences to each of us in turn, but none answer; I suppose that they are used to that. My mother groans and swoons against me. I hold her up, though my arm aches even with her meager weight.

The other mourners leave the beach in ragged clumps, and their loved ones--our dead--line the shore. Father will not move, though my youngest brother tugs his sleeve. The sea washes over Alpaher's feet. His knees. His waist. My arm has gone numb from my mother's weight. The sea is at his chest. My eyes sting, so I close them. Upon my feet and aching, I dream.

I dream of a lady in the water. She is clad in water streaming unceasing like silver silk and her hair is dark and slick like the kelp that traces filigree upon the foam. Her hands are pale and soft. Her hands are the foam of the sea, and she is gathering Alpaher into her arms; she is kissing his death-pale face. Water streams from her eyes, seawater or tears, I do not know: both taste of grief. I am sorry, my child. I am sorry. Come home with me.

And I awaken with a start.

My father is collapsed over the place where Alpaher's body was laid, now only an impression in the sand framed by pearls.

The Caravan

Read The Caravan

I decide to stay.

I sit at the vanity table given to me by my father when I was a little girl, brushing my hair. I have to slouch to fit my full reflection in the mirror, and I do not recognize my face. When did I age so? When did weariness pull harder at my face carved by shadows? When did my mouth fall so naturally into a frown?

No mind. I am home.

I wait for the burdens of the past few months to lift from my shoulders. I try to hum a tune--a Telerin lullaby--but it sounds flat in my voice, like a dirge. But why? I am home. Behind me is a window full of darkness. It used to not be that way. It used to look at the Calcirya and the golden bar of light from Ezellohar; it used to make me think of Arafinwë in his father's court, restless and looking toward the sea, toward me, as I looked constantly toward him. Our fathers had been so pleased at our betrothal, for we united our peoples. Our fathers had long been friends, since the days of darkness at Cuiviénen. "I named Finwë," my father told us once at the feast held in honor of Arafinwë's and my betrothal. "He doesn't like to admit it because the word--which I chose because I liked the sound and it matched his face--came to mean 'he who never shuts up.'" Laughter. Finwë raised his wineglass, and by the touch of color in his face and the mirth in his eyes, I knew the story was true. My father answered his toast. "We are kin now," he said. Though there was a smile on his face, his voice was grave. All laughter ceased. "After an age and so much strife, at last, I can name you my brother."

"Arafinwë is probably dead by now." I say it out loud. I say it out loud, again and again, as I brush my hair to the rhythm of my words. Arafinwë is probably dead by now. Dead by now.

Dead.

But I know that he is not.

"I am home," I say. My voice breaks on home, and I see the Treelight in Tirion; I see my children scampering down the long hallways of our house and their father behind them, no weariness on his face from their games, his smile broadening at the sight of me, stealing a kiss before having his hand tugged by Artaher: "Atar! Atar! Hurry! It is your turn to hide!"

I am not home, I realize. My home is forever gone.

In the darkness in the window behind me, Arafinwë waits; Anairë waits; a whole people wait on a single woman to save them: me.

~oOo~

For a long time, I stand outside the door to my father's study. It used to be that it was impossible to stand here motionless for so long without being smacked in the face by the door as one of Father's lords or counselors exited, calling over his shoulder, laughing, even as the door fell shut, or being bowled over by one of the many waiting to see him and crying greetings as they went. It used to be that voices and laughter and the sound of the wind and the surf through the opened windows rioted in that room and became senseless noise--but oh, so joyful! It used to be that one had to raise one's voice loud and shout because one's joy competed with that of the others: joy, not pride like the Noldor. Not anger and dissention and the endless lust for power. Father, may I go to the market? I had to shout to be heard over the laughter. No more.

Now, only silence fills the room behind that door. Yet my father is there: I watched him enter. And he is alone. I watched him banish with a wave of his hand all of the lords and counselors gathered grave-faced in the hallway. Not today … Tomorrow, maybe, his eyes downcast and his shoulders sagging. And they eased down the hall, faces strange to see so lined and shadowed, as my own had been in the mirror. Just yesterday … his son, I heard muttered.

But I am his daughter. His heir. Always, I have been permitted entry to the chambers of my father, even when all others were barred.

But my hand does not want to lift and touch the handle to the door. I know what I must do, but the words lie like a stone at the back of my tongue, and I cannot imagine uttering them into the stillness of the room beyond this door. In my hand, I hold Anairë's letter, but even as I stand there, knowing what I must do, then I know that I will never give it to him. I cannot imagine asking my father to endure hearing what I am about to request.

But I must.

With a hand heavier than if it lifted a bag of sand, I raise my fingers to rest against the wooden door to his study. In the silence, the light scratching fills the room beyond; I hear the rustle of my father's robes as he rouses himself. "I am taking no counsel today. All should return to their homes," he calls in a thin voice.

"It is I, Father."

The door falls open in front of me. Did I cause that? Surely, my father must be able to hear my heart pounding in my chest. How can you do this? part of me screams. How can you not? the other part answers, in that rational voice that sounds like Anairë. We have committed no crime; our lives are as innocent as those lost of your mariners. I fold my hands in front of me so that they do not tremble, crumpling her letter within them. I do not bother to smile; it would look false, and it would not sway him. Sway him! The outraged voice erupts again, louder than the rational one. You are no better than a slithering diplomat seeking political favor! An image comes unbidden upon me: of Fëanáro pacing the steps of the palace, lit by the flames of the torches borne by his people, of his voice, loud and shrill, so easily drowning the steady, temperate voice of my husband.

"Father, I have come to speak on the behalf of my husband's people."

There it is. I wait for his reaction. Dulled by grief, his hand only passes quickly over his face, pausing briefly to rub at his eyes where tears have long dried into grit in the corners. "Daughter," he says at last. "Eärwen. Do not make me lose two children this day. Do not make me--" He stops, and his chin tips forward slightly. But I know the words he cannot speak: disown you.

That is a chilling thought. Before I was a queen--even a wife--I was a daughter. There was a time when my father's disapproval was the worst punishment that I could imagine, for he was great and flawless, and if he saw an error in me, then what did that say of me? The vestiges of that sentiment remain. Have always remained. After I have lost so much! comes the lament: first my children, soon my husband, now my father? I feel my body leaning toward the door. For what purpose?

For something larger than you, Eärwen. That is not Anairë's voice, nor Arafinwë's. It is my own: clear and sweet and uniquely my own. I feel my head bow. I speak.

"Father, not all of the Noldor committed crimes against our people but remained in Tirion, loyal not to the rebels but to the Valar and the traditions that people have long held there. Yet they, too, suffer for the evil of their kin. Father, Tirion is a wreck." I draw a shuddering breath. I remember the upturned carts, the scorched sides of trees, the hungry woman and her crying baby. I think of my husband dying in his bed while I work over plans for lamps and water purification. Anger touches my heart. "The people are starving, Father," I say in a voice that quivers. "Many have already died, and more will follow if we answer their cries with inaction."

"Answer?" He spreads his hands wide and indicates the dark, silent study around him. "This is our answer! This darkness, this grief, this endless hurt! This is our answer to their bottomless pride and lust! How can you dare to ask for more?" Anger is rousing itself on a face that has forgotten all save sadness. I am reminded of storm clouds gathered suddenly on the horizon; the first bite of a bitter wind and the urge to turn the rudder and sail home--or Alpaher's wind-whipped face and bold words: "We can weather it, Eärwen."

"It was the Noldor who brought darkness to this land! It was the Noldor who admitted evil into their hearts! It was the Noldor who forged the first swords and the Noldor who wielded them against those they had named brothers and sisters, just short years before! What the Noldor suffer, they have earned. And that is my answer." Roughly, he stands, knocking back his chair. He strides to the window to gaze out on the dark. There is Fëanáro's mirror: the glass over the blackness; I can see the tears streaking my father's face.

"Not all of the Noldor," I reply.

"I saw your husband's banner among the kinslayers, Daughter. If the gentle boy I loved enough to grant to him the hand of my daughter has hands red with blood, then, yes, the Noldor in entirety have indeed fallen."

"No, Father," I say. "No. It is not as you think. He came home to me. He abandoned his brothers and their foolish quest. He came home in a grief just like ours because he could not change the past, bring back the dead; he could not save us or the Noldor from their greed and folly! He was too late, and the deed was done when he arrived, and he can no more change it than we can. But he would! He would, Father, if he could."

"Then why," said my father, turning, "is he not here? Why is he leaving my daughter to do work meant for his hands?"

"Because he cannot change the past!" I expect silence as the only answer to my father's logic, and my voice alarms me, so sudden and brash. He flinches; it alarms him too. "He is welled in grief, for he cannot change what was done by the hands of his brothers' people. And just like the stubborn, proud Noldo that he is, that which remains beyond the reach of his hands haunts him. He cannot forget it. But he has forgotten that our people are young, and what we've lived is only a blink in the long years of our existence. He has forgotten the living in favor of the dead.

"But I have not, Father. And that is why I am here."

"You ask me to aid those whose kin murdered my son? Your brother?" His voice breaks.

"They are no more evil than we, Father. Fëanáro once had his own chamber, right in this palace. You loved him as you loved his father. Nolofinwë, too, dwelt with us for a time, and Maitimo and Macalaurë, or do you forget? Do you forget that they shared your table many nights when Macalaurë had lessons with the music teachers in Alqualondë? That you welcomed them as you would one of your own house? Perhaps the Noldor in Tirion could have done something differently to change what happened at the harbor that night. But share the blame equally, Father! They were our friends too! You named their lord Finwë your brother, remember, and his kin your own? We are divided, you think, but we were once united, and any blame of those in Tirion is ours as well. And I would not see them starve for misspent vengeance anymore than I would stand and allow you to starve your own people for the folly of their friendships."

I am trembling when I finish speaking. My father laughs, but it is a cold, humorless laugh, and I shiver: that such a sound should replace the mirth that once filled this room!

"Allowing the children of the Noldor to perish shall not bring back our own," I add in a whisper, and his head snaps up; the laughter abruptly ceases. He ponders me. "We have both lost sons. We have both lost brothers. Aman was not supposed to be such a place. We can stop it. We can reclaim our people in the name of compassion and love. But we must do it. No other will."

Silence grows thick again in the room between us. My father's head tips forward to rest against the cool windowglass; his eyes have closed, but the tears endlessly course down his face and drip to the floor, the weathered boards of which have grown sated on the salt of the sea but have never known the taste of grief until now. This room was built around the shape of laughter; no one ever imagined this. The silence persists until I think it thick enough to close my fist upon it. My father makes no answer.

I prepare to leave and to tell him that I will return to hear his answer and give him time with his thoughts. But there comes a whisper, furtive and not quite to be believed. Yes …

"P-Pardon?" I stammer.

"Yes," he answers. "We must."

~oOo~

My father requests aid on behalf of the remaining Noldor from those who would give it, but he makes neither demands nor decrees. "I cannot force the healing of their hearts, Daughter," he says with a weary smile, "nor can I force understanding and compassion to reluctant minds. Let those who would serve do so with joy than to allow bitterness to take its hold too on our people."

But it has ever been the way of the Teleri to find joy in service and in sharing: in pearls given freely or songs that are no sooner touched to a harp for the first time and are being taught to others, sung by others, shared with the entire city. Many come. I wait by the gate, and the first lanterns bob out of the darkness, fixed to the halters of horses drawing carts laden with fish and seaweeds. For many hours, I am busy, compiling lists and ledgers for Anairë, sending messengers ahead to prepare her for our arrival. The fishermen say little to me as I work, and I wonder what they think to see their crown princess aiding those of the same people who had slain her kin. I wonder what memories they hold in their own hearts of the Noldor they will journey through the dark to save.

Whatever they may be, they clog the street with fishermen offering aid, and none turn aside.

As I prepare the messengers to depart ahead of the caravan, I see a cluster of widows just beyond the crowd at the gates. One speaks feverishly, gesturing wildly. A few from the crowd gathered around her straggle away, heads shaking in disapproval. Others press closer, their eyes shifting in the dark, before the whole crowd disperses suddenly, each heading for her own house, it seems, with strides long and purposeful.

I force my attention elsewhere. "My sister will know what to do," I tell the messenger. "She will make all of the arrangements for the provisions. Be as quick as you can upon the road, but beware the dark." He is young and trying hard not to look frightened. My thoughts wander unbidden to my own sons--Aikanáro is not much older than he--and the road they keep. "May Oromë guard your road," I tell him, and I hand him my lantern.

"And may Oromë guard yours, my Princess," he answers, and he is gone.

I turn to finish readying the caravan. Behind me stands the widow who was at the head of the group moments before. Her hair is unkempt. Grief lines her face.

Behind her, the other widows are assembling. In their hands are the lanterns extinguished in the name of the dead. They are fumbling with flints; the lanterns are flaring to life once more.

"My Princess," she says. "You will need light to keep a safe road."

~oOo~

We move slowly along the road with the fishermen and the carts at the center and the widows with their lanterns at the edges. Every now and again, one calls warning of a hazard upon the road, and we must slow even further to navigate around it. As we walk, they sing. They sing a song brought from the Outer Lands, sung in words that only the oldest and most learned among us know, in voices raw and keening: one need not know the words to understand that it is a lament.

When each finishes her verse, she speaks the names of all among the dead that she knows. Sometimes, the names go longer than the verses.

The song comes to me. I sing the verse with a tongue made awkward by strange syllables reminiscent of the dance of starlight upon dark waters. Others add their voices, softer, to mine in low harmonies that are like the gathered shadows beside the road. And so our caravan moves onward as a clot of light and song.

I come to the names. "Alpaher," I say first and then, softer, "Findaráto"--for is he not also dead, gone with a madmen to a land of darkness to face an indefatigable foe? None challenge me, so I go on. Each of their names is like a blade in my heart. Will this grief ever subside? "Artaher. Angaráto, Aikanáro. Artanis." I pause. "Arafinwë."

As we pass through the Calcirya, another of the widows walks at my side and holds my hand in hers.

Máhanaxar

Read Máhanaxar

They are going to Tirion, but my destination is a different one. I cannot ask my people to sustain the Noldor forever. The Valar need to turn their sights back to us, to lend their aid in restoring our city in such a way that we can survive, even if the darkness persists.

That is a strange and difficult thought, I realize, as we pass through Calcirya and the lights of Valmar come into view upon the plain. It is impossible to imagine this darkness lasting forever. In my mind, I might wake up tomorrow to Light. As a people who has weathered so much already, the death of hope in the hearts of the Eldar will signal the beginning of our fading. But it is as I told my father: Our lives upon Arda have just begun. We are long from that point. And so, with tears yet upon my face and grief sore within my heart, still I hope. Still I hope.

We pause to rest at the first of the towns. The Teleri give food to all who ask, and many do. The light-bearers, as we have all come to know them, describe how to dry and preserve what is given. And when they depart again, halfway now to Tirion, I follow them no further.

I go to Taniquetil, to Máhanaxar, to beg the Valar for aid for my husband's people.

"Have they not become your people too?" I ask myself out loud as I begin the slow uphill trek from the town to Valmar, a stout walking stick in one hand and, swinging in the other, a lantern that was granted to me by one of the light-bearers; a lantern that had once been darkened in memory of her husband, I know. Now it has flared anew, a tiny light creeping through the dark. "After all of this, you would name your actions only charity and good favor?"

"No," I answer myself. My breathing is loud and labored, but I have no time to feel the exhaustion heavy as lead in the marrow of my bones. Through a haze of exhaustion, Valmar blurs into a smear of light before me, growing nearer with each step that I take. "I--" But I stop there, for I have no good answer. Not for the first time, the thought comes to mind that I have a home no longer. My home was filled with Light and the voices of my children. "What else should I do with my life?" I ask aloud, and my voice is watery and strained. "My children are gone, and Arafinwë is dying, or maybe dead." I walk harder up the road. Valmar shimmers nearer, filling my sights with light.

"It is not fair," I say, continuing my conversation with myself as I walk. My voice is thick with tears: tears of exhaustion and frustration and, yes, grief. Grief, I know, will be a companion yet through all of the days of my endless life. "It is not fair that my people were murdered. It is not fair that I lost my family for the actions--the madness--of Fëanáro." I fall silent and let my thoughts wander to the lonely sound of my footsteps crunching up the path to Valmar. It is true: that statement of injustice. It is not fair. And I know that this would serve perfectly well as an excuse to turn away or to care no longer what becomes of the remaining years of my life or to take Arafinwë's path and die of the grief in my heart. Or even to rest beside the road for a while and think not of the Noldor and the children that might perish of hunger while I tarry. With the darkness upon us, none would question me if I did these things.

"But a lot of things aren't fair," I add. I stride harder. "It is not fair that the Noldorin King was slain. It is not fair that Melkor was released and given leave to spread his lies. It is not fair that Fëanáro--with the single-minded grief of a child mourning his mother--was placed such that he became the soil in which they would grow in the first. It is not fair that Míriel Þerindë died, or that Arda was Marred; any number of things were not--are not--fair."

And each of these injustices, I know, is a preface to more injustice done in the name of hurt and grief and anger, all emotions very justified, but the acts? The acts are those of weak hearts, I know now. The realization falls heavy upon me, and I know that for all of his bold words, Fëanáro was not strong enough for forgiveness or to rise above those burdens placed upon him. Nay, he wallowed in them.

"Not me," I say in a paper-thin voice trumped easily by the crunch of my aching feet against my endless road. In these days of darkness, it is not as Fëanáro's oath, spoken rashly and loudly in a circle of flame; there are none present to hear my words, and perhaps none shall make me keep them.

But I stride harder.

~oOo~

Valmar is a familiar place, but in the dark, it is like meeting a friend from childhood and discovering that she has aged and bears the torment of years, and though her face is recognizable, I no longer know her. Valmar of many bells, it was once called, for at every mark of the hour, each house tolled a bell, and the sound of bells rippled across the city, and they chimed in patterns and chords borne of chance yet no less beautiful for it, and each hour brought a song upon the city that was new and, seemingly, more beautiful than the last. The Vanyar have ever defined "purpose" differently than the Teleri and the Noldor, both of whom tend to act only with a destination in their sights and would not be content to, each hour, set aside their nets and their tools and their bright trinkets to simply toll a bell and set the city alight with music.

In the darkness, I suspect, the Vanyar of Valmar have lost their purpose, for in my long climb up the road, not once do I hear the tolling of a bell.

At the gates, I am met only by a young, reluctant guard who looks shamed for the armor he wears and the sword at his side. He hastens me through the gates without question. "My Princess, it is just that we do not know--" and I shush him and ask in a voice that I try to make strong, would he escort me to Máhanaxar?

The city is dark and silent, and the thought comes to me of the rare days where--by the slow hand of Uinen, we are told--Ossë's mischief is quelled and the sea lies in peace. But no, I realize: It is more as though the sea has dried up, and all of that power and passion and capacity for joy simply gone, disappeared. That is Valmar this day. We pass, on occasion, one of the citizens in the street, and he speaks greetings with the soulless voice of habit. As though he hears my thoughts, the guard says that "Many have gone to your people to--" and there he stops, for he does not need to speak of the healing and the comfort that the Vanyar offer the Teleri; not to me, who knows it too well.

"And the bells?" I ask.

"Oh, they would make sound, if summoned, I am sure," he says. "But it is as if we cannot lift our arms to ring them."

Arafinwë and I were married here, as is tradition for Eldarin royalty, in Máhanaxar before the Valar. We walked these same streets with our procession toward the western gates, and all was festooned with flowers and the bells tolled all the while. It is a different man at my arm this time, and a different purpose.

As we approach the broad avenue that issues from the western gate, the guard tightens his grip on my arm and we stop in the street. He will not meet my eyes. "It is hard to see--" he begins and falters.

After several awkward ticks pass in silence, I offer, "In the dark?"

"No." He shakes his head so that his armor rattles; it is ill-fitted upon him, I see, without surprise. "It is hard to see … them. The Trees. Like they are. Dead," and he lifts his face at last, and the meager light of candles in the windows of the houses that line the street swims and multiplies itself in the unshed tears in his eyes.

I had not thought of that. When Arafinwë and I walked her to be wed, the Mingling was nigh: the symbolism, Finwë said, of the union of silver and gold, Teler and Noldo-Vanya. The fiercest fire of both Lights was quelled, yet still my breath caught in my throat and my footsteps faltered to see them, especially where their branches have come to touch and entwine in the middle, and the irrational thought comes upon me then that one held the hand of the other as together they died, and I think of Arafinwë alone in Tirion with only blankets scented of our son to clutch as he sighs his final breath.

Oh, Arafinwë! That the day of our wedding--our love, the union of our people, the joy of all of Valinor--has come to this!

And though I doubt my own words, I touch the tears from the young guard's eyes with a mother's hand, and I assure him, "I am strong."

So we walk on.

The western gates are open, for who would come here in malice? The damage has been done. There is Ezellohar, the color of charcoal without light to reveal its verdant splendor, and the broad plain around it where the Vanyar used to come and all of us brought our children, when chance took us to Valmar. The hill used to be covered with grass as thick and luxuriant as a carpet and scattered with blossoms of every hue and the Light … the Light was like sinking into a soft bed at the end of a wearying day; the Light was refreshing like the deepest sleep sparkled with dreams of delight from which one never wants to awaken … yet it was wakefulness, the Light. It brought bliss into life beyond what anyone could imagine.

At first, I keep my eyes fixed on the hill as we pass, but my gaze is shortly compelled upward. I have looked on the face of my brother in death, I think, and consigned my husband to the same. How can this be worse? Yet as my gaze reaches the Trees, it is. They twist, clots of shadow, against an already blackened sky. Even the meager starlight cannot gild their branches, and I know that no life will ever arise from them again. Light--and with it hope--is caught in the grasp of Melkor.

So much wasted! I realize: so much light turned to darkness! So much hope squandered in folly!

My breathing is very loud, and I know my escort must hear it. But I suppress the urge to cry out. I look away. I look back at our feet, striding one beside the other in the corona of light from the lantern I still carry. In the periphery of my vision is a shadow that I know is the husks of the Trees: beside us, now behind us. Yet my breathing does not ease and my knuckles have gone white upon the arm of my escort.

"I would like to tell you that it becomes easier with each passing," he whispers. "But it does not. I wonder sometimes: Why is it that it still hurts so badly? So many months have passed--even in the dark, I know they must have!--since the Light was taken and yet--" From the corner of my eye, I catch him glance at me. Perhaps he remembers who he escorts and checks himself, for his next words come, barely audible: "I wonder sometimes how we can survive with this hurt forever," and I have no answers to give to that.

~oOo~

Máhanaxar should be fair-wrought, I used to think, carved from alabaster and graced with gold. If anyplace in Valinor deserved that, then it was the Ring of the Valar, where so much has been decided; where, indeed, the history of my people--the Eldar--began. Yet it is not. It is a ring of stones as humble as a Moriquendi shrine in the forest, each Vala having brought a stone from a different place upon Arda, and each stone worn by the slow caress of time into a throne that perfectly fits the one who sits upon it until she or he seems sprung from the stone itself and made of the same substance as the earth. It is not shaped by chisels but by time, guided only by purpose. It is not fair-wrought and yet it is more beautiful than one can imagine.

I have been here only once before: on the day that Arafinwë and I spoke the Name before all of the Valar and became husband and wife. Even a princess by blood and marriage of all three kindreds, I was never important enough to be invited here again.

It is unguarded. My escort leaves me at the gate, two trees arched low across the path. Dew-laden leaves once bathed one's forehead of the sweat brought forth by Laurelin's heat and dusted one's shoulders with one thousand blossoms no larger than the head of a pin and in perpetual bloom. No longer. The leaves of the trees have dried and curled upon themselves in the absence of Light. Dead petals whisper as they are crushed beneath my feet. Perhaps Yavanna could save them, but there are more important things to be done now. I come to do one of them.

In enter Máhanaxar for only the second time of my life: the mind of the world, I heard it called once by one of the Vanyar, steeped in silence yet sizzling with thoughts crackling amid the dark spaces between the thrones of the Valar.

Once, Arafinwë and I went with his father to meet Finwë's people in the far south of Aman where the land is yet restive and largely barren. There, they pull sapphires from the earth that are the size of my fist and contain deep within the shapes of stars: tokens of the ancient friendship of Varda and Aulë, hidden in the earth at its shaping. Standing in that place--most like to Arda at its beginnings than anywhere else in the world, it is said--there was a deep silence and the feeling of something portentous, of something going on beneath my awareness but soon to reveal itself. Then the earth shifted, a mild feeling like the transference of weight from one foot to the other. And yet the silence--and the feeling--endured.

That is Máhanaxar this day.

At my wedding, in Máhanaxar, the air was noisy with horns and bells and voices lifted in song. But now--now, it is different, and not just on account of the darkness. Now, there is the same feeling as that day in the south of Aman, right before the earth moved. There is the feeling of something much bigger than me doing its slow work and come patiently to fruition. Only I cannot perceive it.

Each Vala sits upon his or her throne, even Ulmo, who prefers the company of my people on the coast to the pomp of Valmar. Yet no voice ripples the silence, and it is as Fëanáro is rumored to have said in his madness to the herald of Manwë: that the Valar sit in idle grief, assailed by impotence. Yet it is not. I feel their voices as a prickling upon my arms and a mutter in my heart.

"Eärwen of Alqualondë." The voice of Yavanna used to make trees sprout from rocks and birds wing suddenly from the empty air. Now, it is wearied. Now, it has done too much. She is still finite, I realize, even though she is Valie. There is not enough of her to sustain a world of Light gone suddenly to darkness, though she is exhausting herself in the attempt.

I bow low before them all. They are shadows piled upon the rocks on which they sit, betrayed only by the sparks of their eyes. For a moment, my body is buoyed, much in the way of a ship when a whale glides, silent and out of sight, close beneath. I know that, beneath my awareness, they speak of what to do with me.

"Eärwen of Alqualondë," says Yavanna again, "if you have come to seek our counsel, then we will let you hear our voices, if you would give your consent."

I nod.

Then the dark is alive with sound and color, even scent and sensation coursing the length of my body, all fused into a single perception that defies anything that can be described by any single sense alone: the voices of the Valar, those that exist beneath words and the perceptions of even the keenest of the Eldar. There is a scarlet hiss of alarm--that is me!--and then a pale blue ribbon of song, meandering drowsily upon a warm breeze, a single low note as one sustained upon our largest flutes: Irmo of Lórien.

Do not be alarmed, Child. His voice comes not as words but as the scent of poppies, for he must have known that I would be frightened by the onslaught of their "voices." But then there is another voice, flashing like the light upon the vertical-slitted pupils of a serpent hiding in the grass, thinking always of utility before mercy: Námo of Mandos. Yes. We have been expecting you. His words are oily and cold. A flickering tongue tastes my thoughts. His perceptions are keen as prescience and, next that I know, my thoughts are flayed before him, and I need not even speak my purpose before he knows it.

It is all there: the panic and the desperation, biting and bright, all underlain with the endless ache of grief. I feel Yavanna's thoughts in a burst of green and then an answering riot of colors like fireworks the Maiar of Aulë used to put up over the eastern sky to delight the children of Alqualondë. I taste tears and the angry, choking tang of metal at the back of my throat. There is a feeling of one launching himself from a chair with his hands; the feel of palms upturned in capitulation, yet the Valar remained seated, shadows except for the glimmer of their eyes. I hear a rain of notes upon a harp that is Nienna pleading for mercy for the Noldor and an answering flash from the serpent's eyes as he strikes this time: an ache of poison delivered deep into the flesh. The same you begged for Melkor. The image of the darkened Trees, seared into my sights; a scream of grief. Then, atop it all, the roar of a gale strong enough to rend even the sturdiest-woven sails and--

Then I am thrust above it, and all is silent.

The Valar sit facing each other in the dark, and they might be stones but for the sparkle of their eyes.

A Maia handmaiden stands touching my arm. "Queen Eärwen? They will have an answer for you on the morrow," and I follow her touch from the circle of stones, glancing back to find only darkness and silence, though the smalls hairs at the back of my neck stand on end and my heart will not be stilled.

~oOo~

I am given a room at the house of Ossë and Uinen, a house that is as ever little-used but familiar from my childhood, for my family stayed here during festivals. It is only after I let the door to my chambers close upon the last of the handmaiden's inquiries that I realize that I hadn't even noticed--much less lamented--how the house has changed in the dark. In the weariness of grief, I realize, I am becoming acclimated.

I am too wearied to feel hunger or thirst or even the filth of my long-unwashed flesh, and so I have turned down all of the comforts offered to me to stretch across the bed without even removing my shoes. It has been many days since I last rested, much less in the comfort of a bed, and it feels strange to have the weight off of my feet without having to shift to avoid the discomfort of rocks. That is my last thought before the dreams of Estë take me deep.

When next I awaken, it is sudden and to find the handmaiden standing at the foot of my bed. Someone has drawn a blanket across my slumbering body that has all the weight of sea foam and retains its blissful coolness, even where it rests against my body. My shoes are aligned neatly beside the bed. "My Lady Eärwen," says the handmaiden, bowing slightly. "The Valar have summoned you to Máhanaxar."

My heart lurches in my chest.

"They have an answer to give you, my lady."

Weakly, I nod. I force a smile, but it feels strained even to me and probably looks more like a grimace to the handmaiden. I realize that this is the moment for which I have strived--Anairë and I have strived. I think of her in Tirion. I wonder, what passes in that once-fair city? I imagine the Valar descending upon it in grace and light, Yavanna restoring the crops and the orchards with a touch. I remember the comforting ribbon of Irmo's thoughts and wish the same bestowed upon the grieving. And Aulë … may Aulë restore their purposes! I think of Anairë's Lightmaker's Guild, hampered by the incompetence of our untrained hands, coming to fruition. Let them! I beg silently. Let them not forsake us!

But my darkened heart knows differently.

Máhanaxar is, as ever, silent. The Maia handmaiden leaves me at its center and disappears with a breath behind me. I bow low. My knees tremble. Confronted with his father's poise, Arafinwë once laughed, "I am too nervous to ever be a king!" Finwë met all news, both good and bad, with a slow nod and a steady gaze; it is said that even word of the exile of his favorite son earned no more than that. And meeting the doubts of Arafinwë the same, he said, "Eru made us well, Arafinwë, for he put our hearts inside the secret darkness of our bodies, where they may pound themselves into a fury of terror or rage, and none ever need know." Smiling, then, for it was a futile question: Arafinwë would never be king.

I think on his words, but they are useless here. The Valar know. I see by the spark in Námo's green eyes that he knows how my heart races. I see by the pity in Irmo's and the renewed tears in Nienna's that they would save me from my terror, if they could. Yavanna's face is placid; Ulmo's full of angry righteousness; Aulë's worn by grief. Manwë is, as ever, inscrutable. But it is Varda who speaks.

"Yours is the first word we have received from the remaining Noldor," she says at last. Her voice is firm yet not lacking utterly in tenderness. Today, I will not be trusted into the midst of their thoughts, nor they into mine, though I sense their unspoken words shimmering in the air around me. "Our griefs here and in Alqualondë have led us to believe that the tithe remaining Noldor survived and persisted in the same stubborn vein as that people has always done. We see now that we were wrong in that assumption.

"Yet we would know of you, Eärwen: Wherefore do you stand in the place of the Noldorin King? It is not the place of a wife of a low-born prince to beg aid in the midst of Máhanaxar, and we wonder: Do the Noldor, in fact, want our aid? And if they do, then why do they trust the humbling task of asking it to a princess not even of their people?"

"They do," I whisper. "They do, but Arafinwë--"

"The third son of Finwë turned aside after the kinslaying at Alqualondë." It is Námo's voice now, and he does not bother with fair words or kindness. All is spoken as a statement of fact, for it is: He has been burdened with sights beyond those of any on Arda. "Arafinwë breathes even as you stand before us in his place," and I gasp, a heart I thought resigned to his death quivering suddenly with new hope.

Arafinwë lives!

"Yes, Eärwen, your husband lives. He lives, and you are here? Why?"

But he knows why. Green eyes kindled in the dark, his robes seemingly made of the same marble as the throne upon which he sits, he knows all that passes and has passed, and much of what will come to pass as well. He even knew--this realization settles upon me with the weight of a stone when the flash of his eyes meet mine--the suffering of those who remain among the Noldor. He watched us starve and strive against each other in the streets for the remains of a trampled plum. He knew, and yet he waited. Why?

My thoughts written plain across the dark heart of Máhanaxar, he answers, "For the King to come forth, Eärwen. The King."

Námo never shouts, yet his voice fills Máhanaxar as high as the dark, star-scattered sky above it. Nienna begins to softly weep. Ulmo leans forward upon a throne shaped of the porous rock that lies beside the sea, hands lifted and pleading. "Now …"

"You are not the King of the Noldor, Eärwen of Alqualondë," says Námo. "You are not and never shall you be. And so the rights of a king are not yours, and that includes begging the Valar for the aid of the Noldorin people. That right belongs solely to the King Arafinwë son of Finwë, third-born among Noldorin princes. Varda my kinswoman spoke truthfully that the pride of the Noldor, as ever, keeps from them what we would gladly give. The foolish pride of your husband who would sooner die than atone for the deeds of his people is why you stand here, no matter the noble cause you believe that you pursue.

"None shall adequately lead the Noldor until their King comes forth to beg for both forgiveness and aid, no matter the purity of her intentions. And that is our word."

With the same finality as a boulder rolled in place across a path, our hopes are no more. Tears fill my eyes, and Máhanaxar becomes a blur of blackness. I think of Finwë and his steady fortitude. Our hearts are not just inside of us! I think. Námo is right that I am no king. My heart is in many places, in Alqualondë as well as Tirion, as well as on the earth of this Ring, free to be shattered. As has been done.

At the sight of my tears, Varda says serenely, "You may come again on the morrow, Eärwen of Alqualondë, and make your case before us yet again, for our wills may yet change," and I perceive many long days of my thoughts ripped open and exposed before them, of reliving the myriad griefs building my road here, and I know by Aulë who will not meet my gaze and Manwë who says naught--and most of all, by the merciless green eyes of Námo witnessing my agony, unflinching--that it will make no difference.

King of the Noldor

Read King of the Noldor

I return to my rooms, and my thoughts toss and seethe like a storm-raged sea. I think on the pride of the Noldor, that which has brought so much evil upon us: of whispered suspicions nurtured in a heart that will not hear them spoken aloud and cleared, of a dying prince lying in his own filth rather than kneeling and admitting his errors and accepting his crown. Of all of them, even Anairë, huddled in their darkened city rather than asking for aid.

Of torches thrust high and a dark figure at their center, driving his people forth to serve and die as mere tools in his selfish cause: the pride of the Noldor.

What was it that he said? Let the cowards keep this city! Yes, Fëanáro, but when does pride become so obstinate as to become cowardice? Are they not often the same thing?

Let the cowards keep this city. But by the blood of Finwe! unless I dote, if the cowards only remain, then grass will grow in the streets. Nay, rot, mildew, and toadstool.

I think of the darkened, barren streets and the chaos of Tirion; I think of Arafinwë, willfully dying and as silent as the Valar, and I know that what Fëanáro spoke of has indeed come to pass. I think of a room dark but for a candle flame and four queens vying for who should not hold the crown, passing the responsibility like a gaggle of laughing children at a game of hot potato. Not me, not me, not me! All of us: proud. All of us: cowards.

In the dark, stagnation and rot are indeed what have come to pass.

"Ai, Fëanáro …" I whisper. "You spoke truth in your madness."

And that leaves me with a choice. I can remain in Valmar and plead my case again on the morrow, and again, and again, until there is nothing in Tirion left to save. Or I can--

I am fastening my cloak again around my shoulders. I suppose that is my answer.

~oOo~

It might be a day later when I arrive in Tirion, upon a horse loaned to me by the young, shame-faced guard at the gates. "I suppose I still believe a little bit in hope," he told me as he passed the horse's reins to me. "Or maybe, I just like the sight of someone who does."

Tirion has gone dark. All but a few lamps have burned out, and with the light has gone the chaos. The Noldor--only briefly sustained by the aid of my people, already long gone--possess the energy for neither anymore, I suppose. The clop-clop of my horse's hoofbeats is the only sound in the streets for a long while, as I ascend to the royal quarter atop Túna. I pass a man scooping water from a rain barrel, his trousers tied around his skinny waist with a rope. He stares after me, and my heart can't even be fooled into thinking that he sees hope in my arrival. No, more likely, his hungry belly knows the sight and scent of horseflesh. Hungry mouths will eat their weight in food; the city's larders quickly grow bare once more.

Yet the Noldor are here; curtains twitch and shadows shift, and I know that I am watched, and that no house stands empty that was not empty at my departure. At times, I catch a whiff of cooking fish or the pungent tang of the sea air that is the scent of kelp. The Teleri have come, as promised, and returned to their grief. The Noldor must make the next step on their own. I hear Varda's tender, rational voice in my mind: Do the Noldor, in fact, want our aid? Do they? Soon, I shall know for certain.

Silence is thick upon the royal quarter, but then most of the lords of Tirion have followed Fëanáro and Nolofinwë. Houses stand empty, doors long ago flung open and the houses ransacked for any forgotten bits of food. Yet a lamp burns in front of my house, the only one on the street. My horse is trotting, now cantering, hoofbeats loud upon the cobblestones. He must be drawn to the light too, I think, before realizing that I am urging him even now, faster and faster, until we are in front of that familiar house, with my feet upon its familiar path and my hands fumbling the knob of its familiar door, my horse forgotten and already wandering down the street. I throw the door open. "Anairë!" The scent of cooking fish assails my nose. "Anairë!"

"Eärwen!" A small voice answers me at the back of the house, from the direction of the kitchen. I find myself wondering how it will have to be done. If Arafinwë lives, I suppose he will have to make an official declaration of abdication. If he does not--am I already the king? Or does Anairë need to--I am not certain. Inheritances and abdications and rights--always bloody rights, spoken in that tone of righteous indignation--were the purview of the males in our family. My pounding feet carry me from room to room, calling Anairë's name as I go. My people have bought them time, yes, but not much. I must return to Valmar and convince them of the legitimacy of--

The dining room is empty, as is the kitchen, but cooking pots stand on the stove, steam still rising from water recently used. "Anairë!" I call again.

"Here!" she answers. "In the parlor."

I start down the short hallway from the dining room to the parlor where we once entertained guests before meals. "Anairë," I begin as I jog down the hall, "I have decided to accept the kingship! I must accept the--"

I round the corner into the parlor and stop. There, Anairë sits on the settee beside my husband. Arafinwë! I think that I might have spoken aloud, but no--it was only a thought shot into the space between us, one that his mind catches and keeps, one that makes his lips turn into the smile I was pleased to have forgotten.

"Eärwen, no," he says in that gentle voice, the likes of which I have willfully forgotten and thought never to hear again. He is skinny, yes, but there is color in his face; he has been eating and has even washed. There is too much color in his face, I realize: a bruise beneath his left eye, still swollen but healing with the application of salve. He rises from the settee and comes to embrace me. By the stiffness of his movements, I know that there are more bruises beneath his clothing. I shoot Anairë a sharp glance over his shoulder as his arms gingerly enfold me. She tucks her swollen knuckles into the folds of her dress.

"That is not your duty, Eärwen." Arafinwë's voice is close to my ear, his lips tracing it. "It is mine."

I sink into his embrace and bury my face into his neck. The scent, the warmth of him, the steady pulse of the vein in his throat, quickening as I press a kiss to it, the gentle chuckle of his laughter in my ear, joy in darkness--I never expected any of these things again. How can it be?

Perhaps sensing my query, Arafinwë explains, "When the aid of your people came, Anairë saw that I was well taken care of. I am ready to accept my crown, and I will ride to Valmar tonight to make amends for my people before the Valar. Humbly, we will accept whatever aid they see fit to give."

Over his shoulder, I meet Anairë's eyes. There is so much to say to her, so much to tell her, beginning with my gratitude, but my throat is thick with unshed tears, and I find myself unable to say any of it. Yet she smiles and rises. Stiff fingers stroke my hair before she places a kiss in the middle of my forehead and leaves me alone with Arafinwë.

She knows.

Epilogue

Read Epilogue

Epilogue
Beyond the thick doors of the king's palace, there is a great deal of noise: voices competing with the minstrels and even the occasional sparkle of laughter across it all. "I think they have all come," says Arafinwë. He is not Finwë. He looks nervous, picking at his robes and touching constantly the golden crown upon his golden hair, offsetting it so that I must step in and straighten it again.

"Of course they have. The first speech by their new king is an occasion to behold."

Arafinwë wanders toward the thick doors, as though he can intuit the better the size of the crowd beyond them if he stands closer. His hand lifts to his mouth, but he gnawed all of his fingernails to the quick days ago; the hand drops again, just as quickly.

He turns to face me. "You should be here. Not me. You deserve it more than I."

It is Arafinwë's nature to doubt, and doubt he has done, again and again, in the days leading up to this event, his official coronation ceremony. With the ugly business behind him of begging for aid and forgiveness before the Valar--upon his knees, hands lifted in supplication--and the slow tedium of restoring Tirion, he wants to put upon me honors that he believes I deserve more than he, justified by the travails I endured during the dark days of his despondency. "None of this would have happened but for you," he tells me constantly. "Tirion would be wasted to nothing and I--well, I would probably be dead."

"That was because of Anairë," I remind him, "that you are not."

"That was because of you and Anairë. Without you to go to the Teleri and Valmar, then Anairë would have gone, and I would have died in her absence. So, yes, I owe my life and the lives our people to you. This crown is yours if you want it."

I laugh gently. "I do not want it, Arafinwë. All that I want, I have already received."

But his face will not smooth. It is his nature to doubt; it is about time, I think, that the Noldor have a king capable of it.

From outside the door, a blare of trumpets announces the imminent arrival of the new Noldorin king. Arafinwë sighs and straightens his robes; I catch his hand before he offsets his crown again and give it a squeeze before taking my place as his wife, beside and slightly behind him.

As the porters open the doors for us and we step forward onto the balcony to the accolades of a crowd that--Arafinwë might well have been right--could possibly include every Noldo of Tirion and some from beyond, I lift my hand to rest upon his back, between his shoulders. It is a familiar sight for the women of our people, I think: the broad shoulders of a man with a woman's small, pale hand in the middle of it.

Gently, I press him forward.