In Darkness Bound by Fiondil

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Chapter 90: Repairing the Damage

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90: Repairing the Damage

Arafinwë reached the eaves of the woods and, using the forest edge as a guide, made his way eastward over rough country. He glanced back only once to see the smoke billowing out the cottage door. So far there was no sign of anyone from the manse and perhaps by the time they realized what was happening they would be too busy putting out the fire to worry about him. He wasn’t sure what his plans were exactly, but he had a vague idea of reaching Valmar and Lord Aulë’s forge, making his dream a reality. He clutched at the journal, unsure why he had bothered to bring it. At the moment it held nothing but a few recipes and one tear-streaked page with only a single legible phrase on it, yet something had drawn him to take it.

After what was probably an hour of the Trees, he stopped to think things through. He was going to have to start heading in a more southerly direction so he could use the road back to Valmar as a guide. The forest was now bending northward and before him was a grassy plain. He wondered how long it would take him to reach the city of the Powers. Walking obviously was going to take longer than riding and he wasn’t sure if he could elude capture before that, for he knew that the hunt would be up soon enough.

So what were his options?

He could return to Lady Nienna’s and take whatever punishment was meted out to him. He could continue on as he was in the hope of reaching Valmar before he was captured. He could even head north into the wilderness, though that option was fraught with more danger than the other two, for he had no weapons for hunting, not even a knife, and no supplies. He doubted he would last long without any. He could try to cut across country to Vanyamar and find Ingwë, but that would bring him too close to Ilmarin and his master. The only other option was Tirion, but that was too far and he would have to cross the road. That might not be possible if Maiar were patrolling it and he had no doubt that Lord Manwë would be sending his Maiar to patrol all possible routes he could have taken.

He grimaced, absently tugging at the hated collar while he stood there thinking. Finally, he decided to continue towards Valmar. Maybe his luck would hold, maybe not, but he would rather be caught, if he was to be caught, while pursuing his own goals than to either return voluntarily to Lady Nienna’s, admitting that he was naught but a thrall and a very naughty one at that, or be found sitting here waiting to be captured. Having come to that decision, he took his bearings and headed southeast, hoping to find the road sooner rather than later, making a bet with himself as to how far he would get before they found him.

****

He lost the bet.

Or rather, he won; he was never afterwards quite sure which.

He had been forced to walk more slowly than he had planned, for as he crossed the grassy plain, he stepped into the hole of some animal’s burrow and twisted his ankle enough that he was limping, cursing his own clumsiness. He found a tree limb that had been brought down in a storm and used it as a staff after denuding it of its branches. That helped a bit, but walking was painful. Yet he dared not stop. He had no doubt that they would find him eventually, but they would find him standing, even if not very well. He was not sure how long he’d been walking. It seemed forever and he was sweating from the exertion it was causing him to walk. He was thirsty and hungry and he just wanted to stop and rest, but dared not. If he stopped, he feared he would never get up again. So he went on.

His mind wandered as he painfully continued his trek, his thoughts on Eärwen, wondering if she would despise him if she knew what was happening to him, wondering how he could ever redeem himself in her eyes, wondering how he could ever redeem himself in his own eyes. He choked back a sob and clutched the journal close. So lost in misery was he that he was not paying closer attention to his path and before he realized it, he was stumbling, his lame foot caught in yet another hole. He screamed in agony as something snapped and he landed heavily on his side, fighting the nausea and trying not to black out.

It was then that he smelled the sweet fragrance of lemongrass and oricon, and knew that he had been found.

"There you are, Pityahuan," he heard Mánatamir say. "What have you gotten yourself into?" The Maia clucked in dismay as he knelt beside the ellon, gently moving Arafinwë’s foot out of the hole. The Elf sobbed in pain. "Hush now," Mánatamir said softly as he called forth a knife to cut the boot from the foot. "We’ll get you fixed up in no time. I’ll have to send for a litter. You won’t be walking on this leg for a while."

There was a flurry of lights and Lady Nienna was there... and Lord Námo. The Valië’s expression was one of exasperated concern; Lord Námo’s expression was less easy to read. Arafinwë lay there as Mánatamir continued to fuss over him. He clutched his journal, gritting his teeth against the pain, as the Maia set the broken bones and deftly splinted his foot. Tiutalion appeared then, the scent of talamorva permeating the air, bringing with him a litter. Mánatamir reached to take the journal from Arafinwë before he would lift the ellon onto the litter, but the ellon clutched the book tightly.

"Mine!" he shouted. "Mine!"

"Pityahuan...."

"Mine!" he screamed and tried to move away from them all, practically crawling on his stomach, not willing to loosen his hold on the book. He didn’t get far, for there was a sudden flash of pain from his injured foot and he collapsed, sobbing over and over again. "Mine... mine....mine...."

"All right, child," Nienna said soothingly. "Hush now. We won’t take your book from you. Come. Let’s get you home."

He felt himself being lifted up and placed on the litter. Someone threw a light blanket over him and then there was movement. No one spoke. Arafinwë stared up into the heavens unblinkingly, refusing to look at the two Valar walking on either side of him. Eventually, though, the gentle swaying of the litter sent him into sleep.

****

They brought Arafinwë to Nienna’s manse and on the Valië’s orders settled him in a small room on the ground floor, removing his tunic and other boot before placing a blanket over him. The two Valar thanked the Maiar and sent them off. Námo was gently removing the book from Arafinwë’s grip which had relaxed somewhat when he fell asleep.

"Let’s see what is so important about this book," he said softly. He flipped through the pages until he got to one particular page and stared at it for the longest time before silently handing it over to Nienna for her perusal. She glanced at the page, her eyebrows lifting, then she flipped through the rest of the book. "Recipes and instructions for cleaning and such," she muttered. "Tiutalion gave him this book for that purpose, but we hoped he would use it to record his thoughts and feelings as well."

"Apparently he did," Námo said as he brushed a gentle hand through Arafinwë’s hair. The ellon never stirred.

"Can you make out what’s been smeared?" Nienna asked.

"Enough to know we have a very troubled Child on our hands," Námo replied. "I think he’s beginning to suffer a psychic break. His actions point to it."

"Where do you think he was going?" Nienna wondered.

"My guess is Valmar, but that is only a guess," her brother answered. "We won’t know for sure until we ask him."

Nienna sighed and gently replaced the book in Arafinwë’s hands. Námo gave his sister a considering look. "What will you do?"

"Once he’s mobile, he’ll be repairing the cottage," she said. "Luckily, only a small portion of the kitchen area was damaged, but he’s going to be here for a while."

"And Ingwë is running out of time," Námo said darkly.

"I cannot just let him go, Brother," Nienna said with exasperation. "You know that. As it is, I fear he’s had an emotional set-back. Something happened in that cottage that set him on this course. I don’t like what I’m seeing. It’s almost as if some part of his fëa has been damaged."

Námo frowned. "If that is so, and I do not dispute you, for I sense it as well, then he’s going to need special handling. We need to find out where he was headed and why. That should give us the necessary clues to determine our next step."

"Well, I’m going to check with Pallando about what needs to be done to repair the cottage," she said, speaking of her Chief Maia. "I’ll have Tiutalion sit with our little troublemaker...."

"Don’t bother," Námo said. "I’ll watch over him."

Nienna merely nodded and walked out of the room while Námo called his favorite chair into existence and sat, contemplating many things.

****

Arafinwë stirred and blinked, trying to figure out where he was. It wasn’t the cottage bedroom or his own room in Tirion. He frowned, trying to remember recent events. His hands clenched as memory awoke but when he realized he still had the book in his grasp he relaxed just a little.

"Awake, are we?" he heard a familiar voice, its rich dark tones sending shivers through him. He turned his head and saw Lord Námo sitting there, watching him.

"Where am I?" he whispered hoarsely, his throat dry.

"My sister’s," came the reply even as Námo reached over to a side table and poured some water into a goblet, then helped the ellon to a sitting position so he could drink. Arafinwë had to loosen his grasp on the book to do so and it fell off the bed. Before he could retrieve it, Námo deftly scooped it up and opened it.

Arafinwë stared at the Vala in dismay, wondering what would happen next. Námo glanced at the ellon dispassionately and nodded. "Drink the water. It will help," he said as he closed the book and laid it in Arafinwë’s lap. Arafinwë drank the water greedily, only just realizing how terribly thirsty he was.

"Are you in pain?" Námo asked and Arafinwë nodded. "I’ll have someone bring you some willow bark tea in a bit, though I think you could stand to have something to eat as well."

Arafinwë started to protest but his stomach chose that moment to make a growling noise and he subsided under Námo’s amused look.

"Just as I thought," the Vala said. "While Marilliën is preparing something, perhaps you would like to tell me what you thought you were doing burning down the cottage and running away?"

"Is the cottage burned down?" Arafinwë asked curiously.

"Slightly damaged," Námo answered. "You’ll be repairing it once you’re back on your feet. Now answer my question, Pityahuan. Did you deliberately set the place on fire?"

Arafinwë grimaced. "It wasn’t hot enough," he answered.

"What wasn’t hot enough," Námo asked, clearly puzzled.

"The fire. It wasn’t hot enough. I went to get more wood but when I came back there was smoke and flames but it still wasn’t hot enough, so I left."

Námo sat there considering what he was hearing, looking deeply into the Elf’s fëa, not liking what he was seeing. Arafinwë was clearly near the breaking point emotionally and if he was not handled correctly....

"Where is the fire hot enough, Pityahuan?" he asked quietly.

But Arafinwë would not answer, staring down at the book, running a hand over its cover.

"Arafinwë."

The ellon looked up at the sound of his true name and tears began to fall unbidden from his eyes. "Eärwen said...she said, either the collar or the crown... and if I wanted to be... to be with her, I had to take the crown. The fire wasn’t hot enough, it wasn’t hot enough. I have to go where it’s hot enough. Eärwen...." He clutched the book to him and wept, feeling defeated. He would never be able to reach the forge now. They wouldn’t let him. Eärwen...

But he couldn’t finish that thought and wept the harder, lost in misery and despair.

"Do you want to be Noldóran, then?" came the question.

Arafinwë shook his head, wiping the tears from his face with the sleeves of his shirt. "No, but I want to be with Eärwen. I can only have her if I accept the crown. I don’t want the crown but I want her. I have to go where the fire is hot enough. She told me...."

He stopped, afraid he had said too much. It didn’t matter. He was stuck here and they would be watching him like a hawk. He would never be allowed to leave. He would never reach the forge. He would never be free of the collar. He would never see Eärwen again.

He slumped back onto the pillows, closing his eyes in defeat, wishing he could just fade away into oblivion. There was a knock on the door and then it was open and Marilliën came in bearing a tray. "Some broth and willow bark tea," she said, putting the tray down on a dresser. Námo thanked her and she gave him a curtsey before leaving. Arafinwë did not move, not interested in eating, feeling too much pain to care about anything. Námo stood and went to the tray, pouring some tea into a cup.

"We’ll skip the broth for now," he said. "Why don’t you have the tea and then try to sleep. We’ll talk again later."

Arafinwë wanted to protest, but in truth, his foot was throbbing and his head felt as if it would fall off his neck with the slightest movement, so he struggled back up into a sitting position and drank the tea down in four quick gulps. Then he settled back down, tucking the book under the covers by his side and lay there, letting the tea do its work. Námo started to hum something that sounded like a lullaby to Arafinwë’s ears and the soothing sound of it soon put him to sleep.

****

Námo sought out Nienna and discovered that Manwë was with her. He told them what Arafinwë had said. When he mentioned Eärwen, Manwë nodded.

"Obviously it was a dream, one that our Little Hound tried to make into reality."

"So you think he was attempting to remove the collar," Nienna said. "The stove’s fire wasn’t hot enough so he decided to go where it is — Aulë’s forge."

"Where all this began in one sense," Manwë agreed with a nod. "Interesting, don’t you think, that the motivating factor here is his desire to return to Eärwen. The crown is secondary to his love for the Swan princess. And the book, what significance does it hold for him that he would defy you to keep it in his possession?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, Manwë," Námo admitted. "Except for the one smeared page he hasn’t written anything down of a personal nature, just recipes and instructions. Yet, obviously the book means something to him."

"The book, or what is on that last page," Nienna countered and she told Manwë what they had found when they examined the book.

"A plea for help," Manwë said with a nod, his expression contemplative. "And the question remains: to whom is the plea addressed?"

"Not to us," Námo said with a quirk of his lips. "We’re the last people from whom he would ask for help."

"Well, he’s not getting help from his own people," Nienna retorted. "None of them even know where he is."

"There is only one to whom that plea is addressed," Manwë said equably, "though I doubt if Arafinwë is conscious of it. His is a desperate plea to the Abyss and the Abyss will answer."

"Atar," Námo said with a nod of understanding.

Manwë just smiled.

****

The next week for Arafinwë was pure torture. Not that anything bad happened, but he was forced to lie in bed until the bones were healed sufficiently enough for him to hobble around with a crutch. He spent much of his time staring at the ceiling, thinking about his life and the decisions he had made. They had not been good decisions and he wished now that he had done things differently. He wished desperately that he could see Eärwen, try to explain to her why he had done what he had done, but he could not even convince himself as to the rightness of his actions; he doubted Eärwen would be any more convinced.

Once the foot was completely healed, Tiutalion took him back to the cottage and showed him what had to be repaired and how to go about doing it, for he was as ignorant of carpentry as he had been of cooking. He was not allowed to stay at the cottage, but returned to the manse to eat and rest. It took several weeks for him to finish the job. All that time he was guarded by one Maia or another, left alone only when he was resting, for they locked the door to his room and there was only one small window so he could not escape that way. With nothing to do when left alone in his room and with sleep still far off, he began to write in the book, for Lady Nienna had given him a quill and ink so he could jot down the carpentry instructions given to him. There was a small table and a chair and he sat there and wrote. Unlike the first attempt at writing his thoughts, he was less frantic and more dry-eyed. He began writing about his life from his earliest memories as an elfling in his atar’s court to the present. He did not set out to write anything coherent, simply putting down his thoughts, however jumbled they were, onto the pages.

He wrote about his feelings towards his family: the atar who barely acknowledged his existence, the amillë who sought to instill a sense of worth in her youngest son, the older brother whom he adored and the other one who sneered at him and never let him forget he was the least of their atar’s House. He wrote about his courtship with Eärwen and the births of his children. It was about them that he spent the most time writing, cherishing their memories. His children whom he would never see again; his wife....

He sighed and stilled his quill. Eärwen was as lost to him as his children, unless he could find a way to remove the collar. The thought of accepting the crown and all that it represented scared him, but the thought of never holding his beloved in his arms again scared him even more. He was willing to take on the burdens of kingship if it meant that Eärwen would be beside him, supporting him and loving him.

There were some times when he felt no need to write anything. Rather, he would spend the time re-reading what he had already written, always starting from the first page and going forward to where he had stopped, and with each successive reading he began to see a pattern. In spite of his own lack of self-worth, he had always acted out of a sense of honor. He had always tried to do what was right rather than what was expedient. He had thought himself humble, but he came to see that he had been practicing a kind of arrogance. His humility was... passive, and that was the only word he could come up with to describe it.

Yes, it had been passive. It was not an active humility born of a true sense of his worth and a disregard for what others thought. Instead, it had become almost a badge of honor, as if in attempting to be humble he was in fact letting everyone know that he was just as good as anyone else, even if he didn’t really believe it.

That was a sobering thought and he spent much time contemplating it, critically examining his past actions and seeing them in a truer light. No wonder his atar had despised him. He shook his head in dismay. He thought about his time as Lord Manwë’s thrall. He had suffered humiliation (or so he thought), yet he had not learned humility. The Valar were correct to say he was no less arrogant than any of the rest of his family. It had simply taken on a different, more subtle form. He started thinking about the people he knew and wondered if any of them showed true humility and came to the conclusion that it was best embodied in Lord Manwë himself, yet he could not articulate why. Still, the thought would not leave him, and as he continued to work on the cottage his mind often wandered down strange paths as he thought back to his time in Ilmarin and what he might have learned while at the Elder King’s feet.

He never knew that occasionally, when he finally succumbed to sleep, Nienna and Námo would come into the room and, after making sure the ellon would not waken prematurely, read what had been written, holding a silent discussion with Manwë and the other Valar over it.

****

He did not see any of the Valar, not even Nienna, during this time, for which he was grateful. He kept wondering what form his punishment would take once he had completed repairing the cottage, though he thought the work punishing enough, or at least his thumbs did, for they seemed to get hammered more than the nails. Yet, in spite of his initial clumsiness in handling the tools, the work progressed well enough and he began to develop a confidence in his workmanship that initially surprised him and then later gave him deep satisfaction. Thus, in a matter of weeks it was finished. He was putting the final coat of turquoise paint on the new woodwork when Lady Nienna finally came by to inspect his work, nodding in approval.

"Better than I expected," she said at the last.

"Tiutalion is a good teacher," Arafinwë replied shyly as he rinsed the brush and began putting everything away.

"Yes, he is," Nienna said, "and since you have been a very good student, I think you no longer need remain here with me."

Arafinwë stopped what he was doing to look at the Valië with concern. "What do you mean, lady? Where will I go?"

"Oh, it’s not what you think, child," Nienna said cheerily. "I only meant that you can remain here at the cottage if you like."

"With a suitable guard, no doubt," Arafinwë couldn’t help saying with a wry twist of his lips.

Nienna shook her head. "No. I am trusting you not to try to run away again. You will find the consequences of doing so very unpleasant."

Arafinwë nodded, recognizing the truth of the Valië’s words. "My word that I will not attempt to leave without permission," he said gravely, then gave her a sardonic look, "for whatever a thrall’s words are worth."

"They are worth much if sincerely spoken," Nienna countered. Arafinwë bowed and thanked her. Satisfied, she left and a short while later, Tiutalion came with a hot meal and his personal things, including his book, and when he saw that Arafinwë had all that he needed, he departed. Arafinwë ate his meal and then settled himself on the sofa to read. The book of poetry he had chosen did not hold his attention long and soon he was nodding. He thought he should seek his bed, but he did not feel like rousing enough to do so. Instead, he stretched out on the sofa and allowed himself to slip onto the Path of Dreams, unaware that Lord Irmo was there to guide his dreams, for there had been a long discussion among the Valar and in the end it was decided to give their thrall a vision, one they hoped would bring him fully to himself.

"That’s it, child," Irmo said gently, stroking the ellon’s hair and sending him further into sleep. "Dream a true dream and let us see if you waken as Pityahuan or as Arafinwë. And for all our sakes, I sincerely hope it is as the latter and not the former."

"Násië!"

Irmo looked up to see his brother and sister standing in the middle of the room, their expressions ones of mingled hope and concern, and he nodded, never stopping his ministrations. Arafinwë, oblivious of the Valar’s presence or their wish for him, dreamt on.

****

Oricon: Heather. The word is taken from Tolkien’s ‘Qenya Lexicon (1915)’, see Parma Eldalamberon XII. Its orthography has been updated to reflect mature Quenya.

Talamorva: ‘Ground apple’, another name for chamomile.

Násië!: Amen!