The Work of Small Hands by Dawn Felagund

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The Return

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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.