Another Man's Cage by Dawn Felagund

Tyelkormo

In Valinor, all the days are beautiful.

It becomes hard to tell them apart after a while, and soon, one learns to keep oneself busy so that they don't congeal into a blinding stream of light. Normally, my lessons keep me occupied for much of the day; other days-my favorites-Atar will take us hunting in the forest or I will ride to Tirion with my brothers. But not this day: today, I have been given a day off in recognition of my youth and my purported need for rest, and the bland beauty of the day threatens to drive me mad with boredom.

I am lying in the field behind the house, and I can hear Atar instructing his apprentices in the forge and Macalaurë playing scales in the house. Hammerfalls occasionally ring from Atar's forge, and like droplets plunking into a still pond, they ripple the silence that stretches over the meadow. I stare up at the sky, cloudless this day, the shape and color of the insides of the robins' eggs that have begun littering the ground, the first signs of spring. The grass in the field is tall, lush, and green like emeralds, and it prickles my back through my light tunic. It is Laurelin's zenith, and the light is searing. I close my eyes, yet still cannot escape: The light is red now, the color of the blood inside of my eyelids.

I do not expect the blackness when it jumps out at me from a tall clump of grass. Its knees land squarely on my chest, and it yells, "Gah!" The wind is forced from my lungs for an instant, before I can gasp and bring it back, and the dark shape laughs at this and kneels on my chest and tangles its little fingers in my hair.

"Turko!" it says.

I open my eyes and stare into the dark gray eyes of my baby brother Carnistir. Only four years old, he is free also on this day, and the warmth of the afternoon has brought color to his cheeks. His hair is sleek and dark and the light on it makes it gleam with gold, like candlelight in a dark mirror. I sit up and knock Carnistir aside, but as quickly as his little, round bottom touches the ground, he is scrambling at me again, to sit in my lap with his head on my chest and his thumb in his mouth.

I feel sorry for him, for he must be as bored as I am. His jet-black hair burns my hand as I stroke it. "What do you want?" I ask him, and he answers, one word, lisped because of the thumb: "Nelyo."

I need no further encouragement, and with a grin splitting my face, must restrain myself from running long enough to take Carnistir's hand and lead him back across the meadow with my back held straight and tall, as I imagine Nelyo would walk, if he were here.

~oOo~

It had been Maitimo who'd started the habit of us calling him Nelyo. At counsels, at festivals, at loose social gatherings, he would always introduce himself as Maitimo-Maitimo, the well-shaped one-taking strangers' hands with an elegant poise that my brothers and I would half-mock and half-envy. But at home, when the halls echo with our greedy cries, seeking him, demanding his attention, it is never Maitimo and always "Nelyo! Nelyo!"

Nelyo is not fond of his father-name Nelyafinwë; I heard him tell Macalaurë once that he thought it pompous and bland. "Third Finwë," a name denoting succession and nothing of the person behind it, while Macalaurë is Strong-voiced and I am Powerful and Carnistir is Dark, he is only a place in line, and a fruitless place at that, for the Elves are immortal, and Atar does not expect to be king much less leave the crown to Nelyo.

But there it is: Nelyo, the name we call him, a derivative of the disfavored father-name. He likes his mother-name-after all, who doesn't like to be remembered as being beautiful?-and I have always liked the way people's voices rise on the first syllable of it when they realize his eccentricities are actually jests. Maitimo! they laugh, and he smiles, rare and beautiful, and the light of his eyes flickers and dances like Telperion on the water. He even has an epessë, Russandol, given to him by our Grandfather Mahtan in recognition of their shared copper-colored hair, and aunts and uncles and cousins call him such to denote familiarity, but always, my brothers and I call him Nelyo.

The way Atar tells it, Maitimo was making his first fumbling attempts at speech when he forever titled himself as Nelyo. He was nearly a year old and fond of grabbing handfuls of whatever was closest at hand and staring at our father with his wide eyes until Atar named it for him. Mud. Grass. Pebbles. Water. He clutched a handful of Atar's hair. "Ai!" Atar said, and Nelyafinwë Maitimo relaxed a bit, and Atar said, "Fëanáro. Atar."

"Fëya ... Atar ..." Nelyo fumbled before reaching shyly to clasp his own tunic, the fingers of his other hand still wrapped in Atar's hair, his eyes locked with our father's, and he asked of himself: "Atar ...?"

"Nelyafinwë Maitimo," said our father, always the overachiever, as though his infant son would be able to handle such an ambitious name. When my older brothers are angry at our father for his strict expectations, they jest with each other to hide the sting of his criticisms, saying that Atar had been born speaking and walking, with a hammer in one hand and a quill in another, decrying the state of midwifery that forced him to be born naked and in such an unsavory manner. But Nelyo had not been so ambitious in his early youth, and his face pursed in puzzlement as he inquired, "Nelyo?"

From then on, he was Nelyo. We-his brothers-were born one by one thereafter, and we learned first to call for Atar and Amil and Nelyo, the three who would come and ease us from our nightmares and into the circle of their arms, cuddling us close to dispel the tremors-was it cold? was it fear?-and kissing away the tears on our cheeks. Maitimo was too much for our young voices, and Nelyafinwë was worse-for us as it had been for him-so we called for Nelyo, and he always came.

~oOo~

During Laurelin's hours, on the days when I do not have lessons, I find myself more often than not with Carnistir, who is only a few years old and at the age where he is able to run and unable to perceive when he should not. Carnistir had been a surprise to me: Even after Atar had explained that I was going to be a big brother, I hadn't believed it. Not really. I was the baby, and I would always be the baby. The one who always had to hold someone's hand when we went to festivals. The one who would ride in front of Atar on his horse when we took our summer trips to Formenos, my head lolling back against his chest and dreaming of the dusty summer air and his heartbeat. The one who earned looks of both amusement and strained patience at mealtimes when I made comments about how I had seen berries identical to the ones Amil had brought home for dessert in a spot of bird leavings. Even when Amil's belly swelled until it bumped me off her lap, I believed that I would always be the baby. Even when Nelyo held me close in his bedroom one evening, and Macalaurë sat beside us and played nervous melodies on his lute, trying to stem my tears-for I had seen the frantic fear in Atar's eyes and I was shocked and terrified by Amil's cries-I believed that I would always be the baby. Even when her voice rose, and mine met it, and a stranger's voice added to the melee, I believed that I would always be the baby. And Nelyo stroked my hair and smiled and whispered proudly in my ear that I was a big brother and took me to meet the baby Carnistir and hold him in my arms.

But once Carnistir was born, I learned to enjoy the special regard of being one of Fëanáro's elder sons. And the six of us make a perfect portrait: four sons, enough to earn our father the regard and envy of one extraordinarily blessed, for four children is practically unheard of, I am told, and Atar and Amil are still very young at that.

The blessing is ours, says Nelyo, and he is right: Never are we alone, not in joy and not in sadness. Even in moments of solitude, the house is filled with voices and laughter until it seems barely able to be contained by wooden beams and stone foundations, until I want to open a window to let it free, to fill the world. Our house is just outside of Tirion, on a plot of land situated that-should you stand atop our roof on tiptoe and crane your neck as far as it will go-you can see Tirion rising over the trees to the south, a beacon in a rugged green sea. Our house is a sprawling stone monstrosity onto which Atar likes to add whenever he begets another son or one of his begotten gets an itch to pursue a new trade or hobby, and the size of his land supports his assertion that he will beget a thousand children before our mother gets tired of it all and makes him sleep in a bed by himself. The wings of the house link into each other and back into themselves like one of the puzzles that Nelyo will give Carnistir and me to do when he wants to keep us out of the way-puzzles that we have determined are impossible to solve-wings enclosing courtyards and gardens and fountains, rooms leading into rooms or opening upon hallways that convolute along the length of the house, leading to honeycombed clusters of yet more rooms with stairs leading up or down into secret places that can be accessed nowhere else: small secret coves or else long, winding stairs that end atop towers where I can lean upon my belly upon the railing-arms spread wide and feet treading only air-and pretend that I swim among the stars, until I hear feet upon the stairs and a voice calling me to chores or supper, and my feet are wrenched back to the ground. Productive noise always echoes through the long hallways, and every day of the week but one, I am part of that productivity: banging out awkward crafts with my mother or father, rustling through stacks of parchment, scratching out lettering exercises with my ragged quill. But for this one day, I am granted freedom-an ambiguous gift because I am deemed too young to wander the forest on my own and my two elder brothers are always busy with their own pursuits-and those noisy halls become very lonely.

Carnistir has lessons only three days out of the week-a day of craft with our mother and two days of lore with our father-so he is left in the bustling and lonely halls more often than I. Sometimes, we wander into our parents' workrooms, where we can slip underfoot, unnoticed in the commotion of nervous apprentices quietly trying to gain our parents' attention and regard, our footsteps softer than the gentle nips of chisel on stone or the soft hiss of steam cooling steel. And then-beneath the apprentices in skill and regard-there are the assistants, trying to earn apprenticeships through industrious loyalty: keeping the floors swept and the tools sharp and the babies-as they called Carnistir and me-out from underfoot.

We evade their notice for as long as possible, darting among legs and crouching beneath worktables, to watch our parents at their work. My mother is patient and gentle, a natural teacher, and she always pauses to answer the apprentices' timid inquiries, softening each criticism with a sprinkle of praise. But Atar, who commands the most promising apprentices in Aman, never even turns from his task when he answers their questions, and his answers roll from his tongue with the nonchalance of a raindrop falling from a leaf, and it is he whom I love to watch the most. His forge is the most unpleasant place on the property-hot and dirty, and always with the odor of hot metal like bloodied, fresh-carved meat-but I love it. I have yet to begin my own training there, for my day-long lessons with him are being carried out for now in his laboratory, setting gemstones and engraving designs on jewelry-tedious work that makes my eyes cross and shoulders ache-but I have always assumed that I will eventually take my apprenticeship beside him in his forge. What is the son of Fëanáro and Nerdanel if not a craftsman? My elder brothers, mysteriously, only do a day of work each week with our father, in the forge, crafting everything from farming equipment to gold necklaces to beautiful and blunt ceremonial swords. The rest of the week-even their day off-Nelyo spends in the library and Macalaurë spends in the music room, and Atar never protests.

Carnistir and I pass his forge now. It stands a bit away from the house, and I cannot resist slipping inside, darting with Carnistir beneath a worktable when the nearest assistant turns at our father's command to work the bellows. The floor is warm and grit grinds beneath my boots, and I clasp Carnistir in my arms to keep him from moving from underneath the worktable and revealing us both.

I will be the crafty son that I know our father longs to teach, and I make myself love the forge for his presence alone, kneeling on the hard and gritty floor beneath his worktable, watching him craft ceremonial armor for Manwë. One of the assistants holds the slab of gleaming steel to an anvil, and I watch Atar rear back again and again to strike it with a sledgehammer, while the assistant winces at the reverberations buzzing through his bones. But Atar never flinches. He is slender in the way of our people, in a way that doesn't betray his strength, but when he lifts that hammer, his muscles flex and the fires of the forge gleam gold on sweat on his arms, and he looks more a Vala than an Elf: or as though he was himself torn from the earth and made of bright gold.

Inevitably, one of the bustling, disapproving assistants spots us, and we are lifted under our arms and deposited outside before Atar even had the chance to turn and see us. But I wish for him to turn-oh, how I wish for it!-and I twist my neck back to stare at him, hoping. Would he turn, I know he will see my eagerness, and I will be allowed into the forge beside him-a mark of maturity, for the forge is a dangerous place, but certainly a place for one of Fëanáro's elder sons-and I won't have to squint at engravings and tiny bits of diamond any longer. But I am on my feet in the cool grass, and the door to the forge thumps shut behind us.

Laurelin has waxed fully, drenching the day in brilliant gold that stings my eyes, and Carnistir winces and whines, and I put my arm around him and say, "Let's go find Nelyo."

Nelyo, we have learned, is the best to seek on these days because Amil's workshop is more open than Atar's, and she is less distracted by her work, and she always spots us within a few minutes and leads us outside by our hands, her voice only thinly veiled with patience. And, besides, I do not like my mother's work. Chipping sculptures from blocks of stone is too like chipping shaky engravings into pendants-too tedious for my liking. And Macalaurë would not see us at all, were we to enter the music room that Atar has built for him, because he becomes nearly blind when he starts plucking chords on his harp and scribbling down music notes to be sent to his Telerin tutor in Alqualondë. And were we to make our presence known, he would become angry and chase us from the room and prop a chair beneath the doorknob so that we could not reenter. Music isn't to my liking anyway, except for listening to after supper, and Macalaurë's ceaseless repetition of scales that are perfect the first time he sings them wears on one's nerves after only a short time.

Nelyo is always busy too, and he works in the library that our father built when he first built the house. Ours is the only house I know that has a library-besides Grandfather Finwë's palace, which has a library for use by his lords and scholars-because our people can remember what they will for as long as they wish, and there is little need to write things down. Before my father was born, a Noldo named Rúmil devised a form of writing that was handy to use when sending messages, and the Eldar thought writing quite revolutionary, if not a bit useless in daily life, made more so by the fact that-while easy to represent our Noldorin dialect and, to a lesser degree, that of the Vanyar-our Telerin kin found their own speech hard to render with Rúmil's letters. It was my father who first fell in love with the peculiar little scribbles of script, but he found them flawed and rewrote Rúmil's alphabet so that redundancies and inconsistencies were erased and so that the speech of the Teleri and the Vanyar-even the Valar, if one were so inclined-could be represented as easily as his native Noldorin. It was not long before he discovered the beautiful practicality of books, where facts and ideas could be scribed and shared by many without the inconvenience of wearying travel and long counsels. He was young when Aulë took him as an apprentice-an appointment that took up most of his time-but he wrote often to our Grandfather Mahtan, then the greatest smith of the Noldor, and to the jewel-smiths and miners in Formenos, sharing his ideas and asking for theirs in turn. Grandfather Mahtan would tell us of our father in those days, jesting that Fëanáro was his most avid apprentice, although he never met his diligent young student until he opened his door one day to find a handsome black-haired Noldo standing on his front step, asking for his daughter's hand in marriage. " 'Who are you, Moriquendi?' " Grandfather Mahtan would growl in his most intimidating voice, and Carnistir and I would shrink against each other, " 'I give not my daughters to dark strangers!' And the cheeky little brat raised his eyebrows at me and said, 'A stranger I am not-less I am Moriquendi-for I am Fëanáro, son of High King Finwë, and I have been apprenticed to you for the last ten years. How can you know me not?' " And all would laugh, Grandfather Mahtan the loudest of all, although everyone knows this wasn't the way it had happened at all.

Few have Atar's love of books, but my brother Nelyo does, and Carnistir and I enter the library to find him seated at his desk that sits facing our father's in a patch of light flowing through the high windows, scribbling furiously onto parchment. When Nelyo closes the doors-as is his habit, to muffle the noise of the workshops and forges-the library becomes a high-ceilinged oven, and even the dust in the air gleams gold, as though aflame. Carnistir sneezes when we first enter, and I have to give him a sharp look of reproach to keep him from wiping his wet hand on my sleeve, as is his wont lately. I take his hand (the dry one) and lead him over to where Nelyo sits, so furious in his writing that he doesn't hear Carnistir's sneeze or notice our approach.

"Nelyo," I say just before we reach him, because one time I'd touched him before speaking his name, and he'd been so startled that he left a long black smear of ink across the parchment and ruined a nearly-finished page. Carnistir is dragging his feet and waving his free hand in the direction of the piles of colorful illustrated parchments that Atar set to the side on a table, so I haul him behind me without taking my eyes from Nelyo. "Nelyo," I say again, and he finishes the word he is writing, and sets down his quill.

"Tyelkormo. Carnistir," he says. The corner of his lip curls into a smile.

"Nelyo," I say again, nearly panting in my eagerness to stand before my eldest brother's knees, yanking Carnistir's arm and making him whimper. "Nelyo."

And then I'm there, before his knees, looking up at him and doubting that I'll ever be so tall, and he turns in his chair to face us and says, "Little ones! What is the matter?"

"We're bored, Nelyo."

He nods. He was given the day off too-as was Macalaurë-but Nelyo doesn't seem to understand that his day off is supposed to be spent doing things that he doesn't do every other day of the week. Macalaurë doesn't understand that either. Nor do Atar and Amil. Carnistir and I, it seems, are the only ones to understand the freedom of a day without obligation.

"What is Macalaurë doing?" he asks, and I roll my eyes at him, and he nods and says, "Mmm. I suspected as much," and I can see his lips trying to stay stern, but inevitably, he smirks a bit, then breaks into a wide grin, and Carnistir and I tussle to climb onto his lap first. I, being larger and older, win-as I always do-tossing my legs across both of his to bar Carnistir from climbing up beside me. Triumphant, I settle against his shoulder, and Carnistir whines and pushes at my feet, little pinkish spots rising to color his cheeks. "Now, now," Nelyo says, and I can feel his voice in my ear as well as hear it, and he gently lifts my legs so that Carnistir can scramble up, pulling at great fistfuls of Nelyo's clothes in his graceless manner and settling opposite me, his lips pushed out in a pout and his big dark eyes brimming with tears.

Nelyo says, "Now, what exactly do you suggest I do for you, Turkafinwë Tyelkormo?"

"Take us hunting in the forest!" I learned long ago to ask first for that which I know I will never receive in order to get what I'd be content to receive. Nelyo's arm tightens around me, and he says, "Tyelkormo, I wish I could, but I am very busy today. Could I hold your interest with a bit of reading?"

"Perhaps my interest could be held," I say, trying to emulate his noble manner, but I sound silly and make myself laugh.

Nelyo draws Carnistir and me closer against his chest, freeing his arms a bit so that he can lift a book from the desk in front of him and riffle through the pages. The book's cover is exquisite: bound in rich, dark red-brown leather and inlaid with silver letters and designs. The cover alone, I know, must have taken our father days to construct, just as the sheaves of parchment within have taken Nelyo many laborious hours to produce. There is no mistaking Nelyo's hand, for it is neat and precise, each letter exactly like its brothers in the sentences beside it, no stem longer than another, no spacing wider on one page than the next. Like our father's, only our father's is less stilted and at times flows into graceful excess that make his letters superior to Nelyo's. Or so Nelyo says.

I love to listen to Nelyo read. Just as I love to listen to Macalaurë sing (when he isn't singing the same bar over and over again for two hours, that is) and love to watch my parents at their work, I love the sound of Nelyo's voice reciting the words that he has written-or sometimes, words that our father has written, or one of the other excellent craftsmen north in Formenos-his voice caressing those words in a way that you know that this was how our language was meant to be spoken, leaning my head into the soft spot just below the bones of his shoulder and absorbing his speech with all of my senses. With my ear to his chest, his voice rumbles beneath his heartbeat, and the side of my face is warmed by him, and I can smell the clean cottony smell of his tunic and-just beneath-the unique Nelyo-smell: light through leaves.

I raise my face to study his, the most beautiful of my brothers. Between us in age-though closer to Nelyo than to me-is Macalaurë with his chocolate-brown hair and gray eyes always wide in a guise of innocence that tends to dissolve the moment our parents are out of earshot. Then Carnistir-the baby-with his dark eyes and strange ways that are easier to ignore than understand. And me, with my hair the color of honey and enough blue in my eyes that I was often mistaken for a Vanya when I walked in Tirion. At times, I complain of my blue eyes, which set me apart from the rest of my family, and Atar soothes me by saying, "That's because I was looking up at the blue, blue sky when I begot you," and Amil blushes and nudges him in the arm, Nelyo grins, and Macalaurë looks vaguely uncomfortable.

Lately, I find it harder to complain because, set beside Nelyo, I see that none of my features set me apart from my family the way that, unprotesting, he is set apart. Even my dark blond hair and bluish eyes-I still deny that they are, in fact, entirely blue-rare among the Noldor, are inconsequential next to Nelyo. It isn't exactly that Nelyo has any attributes that are rare among our people, for his features, taken individually, are common enough, but rather that he seems to have inherited the most radical traits of each of our ancestors. His hair, from a distance, is vividly red-not the rusty, orangish hue that isn't uncommon in some families-a deep copper, like our mother's. His hair is deceptive, however, for if one looks close enough (as I often do, sitting on his lap in the library), it becomes clear that the stunning color comes, not just from the red, but from the blond and brown strands that thread throughout: Grandmother Istarnië and Grandfather Finwë, respectively, I've always assumed. His height and imposing stature come from Grandfather Finwë as well, he who was a warrior and a protector of his people before he was ever a husband, father, or king. His sonorous voice belongs to Grandfather Mahtan, whose laughter can capture a room and rare anger terrifies us. And his face is Atar's, beautiful enough to be one of our mother's sculptures of the Valar.

Nelyo's eyes are the only trait that are his own, as mine are my own, but unlike mine, his at first seem typical for the Noldor: gray like our steel, gray like our work tunics, sullied by ash from the forge, gray like the stones we used to build our houses. Nelyo's eyes are gray like all of those things yet like none of them at all, for there are specks in his eyes that are almost silver and shine at times like mirrors. Atar always credited Telperion, for Nelyo was born beside a river as Telperion waxed at her fullest, and Atar told us that the first light to fall upon Nelyo's eyes was the sparkle of silver light upon laughing silver water.

As he reads, I feel myself falling asleep-and I do not want to fall asleep! I do not want to miss his words! I glance over at Carnistir, whose dark eyes are closed, his eyelashes like velvet on his cheeks, and fidget until my forehead presses uncomfortably against Nelyo's collarbone, where I am sure I will not sleep. His voice falters; I look up, and his eyes meet mine, and I realize that he fears that I am uncomfortable. Indeed, I will soon grow out of being able to sit like this with him. Will he miss it? Or will he be grateful to have only one little brother to make his feet numb and fall asleep and drool down the front of his tunic? (As Carnistir is doing, I notice with some annoyance.) I glance up at him again, and his words falter, and smile teases his lips. His arm tightens around me.

Most of the time, I can't even tell you what Nelyo reads to us. It involves the work he does with our father, I know, but I don't really know what that work involves. There are no rooms in our Tirion house that are off-limits to us: the workrooms, the library, even my parents' bedroom are ours to enter freely. But, sometimes, on the days that Atar works with Nelyo, they go into Atar's laboratory and shut the door for hours. When Amil gives me breaks from my lessons, I roam the hallways for my ten minutes of freedom, desperate to stretch my legs but more desperate to press against the laboratory door and try to hear what is being said. Once, I took the doorknob in my hand and went to turn it slowly, to ease the door open and slide into the room unnoticed, as I do into Atar's forge and Amil's workroom, but the knob stuck in my hand, and I realized-with a surprised lurch of my heart-that the door was locked.

Nelyo is said by our father to be inquisitive but not very artistic. He likes to figure out puzzles; he likes to categorize things and decipher meanings; he likes to pick apart webs into individual, smooth strands. He likes neat, clean explanations. Metals and stones sing to my father in a language none of us can understand-except, perhaps, our mother-but to Nelyo, they each represent a specific set of tendencies that beg him to classify them. This was what he reads to us now: the attributes of each of my father's metals and alloys and the extrapolation of the results of experiments (what was extrapolation? what were experiments? the words made me cold and anxious) to discern the components of each. Components. Everything, to Nelyo, is components within components within components. I feel dizzy and a bit detached from my body to contemplate it; sliced away from oneness with Arda, from oneness with our people, but Nelyo likes to sever those connections into components and drop them into neat little compartments in his mind. I asked him once, what is a component? And he said it was a part, like the Noldor are a component of the Eldar, and the House of Finwë is a component of the Noldor, and the House of Fëanáro is a component of the House of Finwë, and I am a component of the House of Fëanáro. I wondered what components were within me. My hands? My feet? My bluish eyes? Components of Turkafinwë Tyelkormo, component of the House of Fëanáro, of the House of Finwë, of the Noldor, of the Eldar, of the Quendi, of Arda, of the-what went higher than that? Grandfather Finwë speaks at times of the Valar, but Atar and Nelyo grow quiet and tense in those moments, and I believe that they question the Valar's role in their scheme of components.

The side of my face is drowned by Nelyo's sleepy warmth, and his voice is buzzing like dragonflies over the hot rocks beside the lake in Formenos, and I jerk my head upright. Stay awake! Nelyo's hand cups my head and strokes my oddly-colored hair, and I hear myself whimper a bit as he lowers my head back to his shoulder. Opposite me, Carnistir's brow furrows and he fidgets, kicking me in the leg, jarring me back to wakefulness. Nelyo has stopped reading again, and I look up and meet his eyes. "Are you tired? Do you wish to sleep?" he asks, and I shake my head furiously. "Wait here a moment," he says, and I am bumped from his leg so that he can stand and lift Carnistir, cradling him gently so as not to wake him, and lay him on the couch in the corner. There is a cloak thrown and forgotten across the back of the couch and-lacking a proper blanket-Nelyo covers Carnistir with it. Carnistir pulls his knees to his chest and sinks into the cushions, and Nelyo kisses his forehead and smoothes his hair and leaves him to his sleep.

And returns to me. I bound into his lap before he even settles fully into his chair, and he laughs and clasps me close. "Ilúvatar in Eä!" he chides, a mild swear that he and Macalaurë like to use, learned from our father, that makes Amil scowl. But Amil is not here right now, so I am free to laugh and sit more comfortably with my legs draped across both of his, without sharing his embrace with Carnistir, who is still young and daft and falls asleep and gets relinquished to the couch.

"Turko," he says, and his fingers stroke my hair, find a knot, and begin to unwind it. I try to swat his hand away, but he jams me into his chest with his other arm, and I know better than to fight, or I will end up with Carnistir, relinquished to the couch. Anyway, it isn't too bad; at least Nelyo is gentle. He works at the knot without yanking at my head, as Atar and Amil have a tendency to do, although I suppose that years of untangling first Nelyo's hair, then Macalaurë's, and now mine and Carnistir's gives them limited patience for the task.

"Don't call me that," I say, for I protest the name Turko-a shortened version of my father-name Turkafinwë-that Nelyo and Macalaurë have recently decided to call me. Now they have Carnistir doing it too, tailing me around the house, chirping, "Turko! Turko!" and stepping on the backs of my feet.

"Why should I not call you that? You call me Nelyo and Macalaurë Cano. Do you not?"

I don't know how to respond to the truth of his observations, so I sit silently and let him work the knot from my hair.

"Tyelkormo is too cumbersome," he goes on. "Awkward. I think Amil was a bit mad when she chose that for your name, and perhaps, you were a bit mad when you asked to be known by it."

I have always liked my mother-name, Tyelkormo. It means "hasty riser," and while I don't know if this is in fact virtuous, I like the idea of being the first of my family at task in the mornings. It seems efficient and conscientious, something Atar would admire, for him to someday enter his forge right as Laurelin began to blossom, still yawning and fumbling with the ties on his work tunic, and find me already intently at work. I say as much to Nelyo: "I like Tyelkormo better. I like mornings."

The knot unworked, he runs his fingers through my hair a couple of times, and meeting no further snags, embraces me with both arms again. "I'll tell you what, Turko," he says. "If you stop calling me Nelyo and start calling me Maitimo, then I shall call you Tyelkormo forevermore, until you have settled yourself completely in Atar's shadow and decide that you would rather be known by your father-name."

Nelyo's tone is overly sweet, and I know that he is teasing me. He and Macalaurë both tease my ambitions at times, and once I was hurt by it, and Amil took me aside and explained that Nelyo and Macalaurë both had the same ambitions once, and worked very hard to achieve them, and discovered that their feet fell not on our father's road, and they thought themselves disappointments. How could that be so? I asked her. How could they ever doubt their worth to him? Did Atar not spend hours in private counsel with Nelyo? Did he not celebrate Macalaurë, who he said would one day surpass even the Telerin minstrels? And Amil said, "Atar loves not your choice of trades or even your talents but that you are his son, created from the union of our marriage, the gift of our eternal love."

"Atar goes not by his father-name and neither shall I," I say indignantly to Nelyo. "You and Macalaurë prefer your mother-names-and even little Carnistir does-and I shall never be known as Turkafinwë."

Nelyo laughs and swings me into a half-lying position across his lap, submissive, with his one arm binding my knees and the other curled around my torso to bind my arms. My head is cradled in the crook of his elbow. Part of me wants to fight, to prove that I am old enough and strong enough to break free, but it is so rare that he allows himself to treat me as he had before Carnistir had been born-when I was still the baby-that I resign myself to enjoy it, and settle against his arm. I feel him relax as well, until I am no longer restrained, and he says in a gentle voice, "You have a temper, little one," and I realize that, to him, I must have sounded quite cross. Laurelin is bright, and golden light floods the library and spills onto us-Nelyo and me-coaxing the gold woven amid the red of Nelyo's hair until I don't feel like I look so odd at all. I am filled with quivering joy, and Nelyo cuddles me close, and I knew he feels it too. I tip my head back and watch the dust dance in the golden rays that spill through the high windows and think that even something as insubstantial as dust can find joy here, and I laugh for no reason, utterly inappropriate and utterly free. Nelyo's laughter joins mine, and I lean back on his arm, watching the dust dance and feeling Laurelin's light making my limbs grow weak and heavy, and I close my eyes to escape the brightness.

I stir and find Nelyo's arm missing from around me, and I am cold. I murmur protests and realize that I lie on the couch, opposite Carnistir, covered with the bottom of the cloak. The Trees are mingling.

I pull the edge of the cloak to my nose and breathe in: not Nelyo's smell, not daylight through the leaves, but the scent of winds before a storm, the air singed by the promise of lightning. Atar.

My feet press against Carnistir, and I stretch, meaning to rise, but my limbs won't listen, and I flop onto my side, holding the cloak to my nose and pressing my feet against my baby brother, trying to find warmth.

I feel myself melting into the cushions, and as my eyelids lower, I see Nelyo working intently once more, his hair now a vibrant red beneath the mingled light of the Trees, and I feel a shock of anger with myself. If I had stayed awake, I would have stayed with him, I would not be cold. Young and dumb and alone, I fall asleep.

~oOo~

The door to the library bangs open.

"Do you know how late it is, Nelyo? I had forgotten that we have to prepare supper tonight, and the apprentices are dining with us as well!"

I spring up, as though alarmed by a predator, suddenly awake, my heart pounding, but it is only Macalaurë. Nelyo, too, is startled, and he stops in mid-sentence to spring to his feet and glance at the light pouring through the windows, light that is rapidly turning silver.

"Ilúvatar in Eä!"

Macalaurë is dressed in a white tunic and loose gray trousers, barefoot, with his hair unrestrained, but Nelyo is a mess. Summer is imminent, and the library is sweltering. (Had I awakened, freezing, just a short while ago? It seems doubtful now.) Nelyo's clothes are bedraggled; he's shed all but a short-sleeved tunic unlaced to mid-chest and a pair of breeches rolled off his ankles; his boots have been kicked under his desk; half of his hair is tied in a knot to keep it off his face and the rest is stuck to his neck; his lips are spotted with black from licking his quill or sucking the bristles of his brushes into points.

"It's hot in here! How do you work in here?" Macalaurë asks, fanning out his tunic to cool himself off. "This is worse than working in Atar's forsaken forge."

"I hadn't noticed," Nelyo says distractedly, gathering his books and papers together in a jumble.

Amil is always chiding Nelyo for his tendency to become lackadaisical about his appearance while working. "Tie your hair off your face with a proper tie, for Manwë's sake," she is fond of saying. "Or better yet, get your father or me to braid it for you in the morning. I named you for your beauty, Maitimo, but you seem determined to look slovenly." Atar generally finds Nelyo's carelessness amusing, until he is in one of his restless moods, when he subjects everything to extra scrutiny. "I wish you'd stop licking ink and paint all of the time, Nelyafinwë," he complains. "You look like an orc."

(Carnistir and I also get accused quite often by our father of being orcs. What an orc is, neither of us is exactly sure, and Nelyo won't tell us, but the accusation is generally made whenever we cause enough noise to disturb Atar in his work. Also, usually, a term applied while he is in one of his restless moods.)

My eldest brothers come to gather Carnistir and me from the couch. "Come, now, Turko, it's time to prepare supper," Nelyo says with a gentleness honed by practice borne of easing three little brothers awake over a span of nearly forty years. He takes my hand and tugs me-swaying a bit and sleepy still-to my feet. Macalaurë is less skilled in the ways of handling small children: He throws the cloak from Carnistir, who sleeps curled on his side with his thumb in his mouth, and lifts him from deep sleep before Nelyo can stop him. Carnistir lets out a wail like a small animal being carried off by a winged horror-certainly not the mild protest of a child being lifted into the arms of his older brother-and bucks in Macalaurë's arms, his teeth gnashing at Macalaurë's wrist, his face already flushing red before pausing, perfectly silent for a moment, breathing in; I wince, waiting, and feel Nelyo do the same, for a moment later, Carnistir shrieks with every bit of air in him, pounding at Macalaurë's shoulders with tiny, bruising fists.

"Oh, for Manwë's sake, Macalaurë," Nelyo says, and my hand is dropped, and Nelyo gathers the cloak from the couch and drapes it over Carnistir's shaking little body, swathing him tightly and taking him from a grateful Macalaurë.

"Atar! Ataaaaar!" Carnistir shrieks, his crimson face soaked with tears.

"How was I to know that he was going to do that?" Macalaurë protests.

Nelyo cuddles Carnistir, and he wriggles free from the cloak a bit, enough to cling to Nelyo's neck and press his face into his shoulder, muffling his screams a bit. Whether the cloak has fooled him into believing that Nelyo is Atar or whether he doesn't care-as long as it isn't Macalaurë-I am not sure, but Carnistir's cries subside. "He's just a baby, Macalaurë. Just a baby," Nelyo croons, more to Carnistir than to Macalaurë, bouncing him gently. "You're fine now, Carnistir. No one's going to hurt you. No one's ever going to hurt my baby brother. Don't cry, now, little one, don't cry."

"I wasn't trying to hurt him," Macalaurë says, with bewildered indignation.

Nelyo is brusque. "Take Tyelkormo, would you? We need to get supper started."

I hold my arms up to Macalaurë (such ploys had stopped working on Nelyo shortly after Carnistir was born, but Nelyo is too distracted by pacing and shushing Carnistir to advise Macalaurë that I am perfectly able to walk to the kitchen on my own), and he lifts me, groaning at my weight, which makes me smile over his shoulder, and I squeeze my arms around his neck.

I watch the rooms and hallways of the house recede over Macalaurë's shoulder as we walk. Carnistir's wails have subsided to whimpers, his face buried and lost in a spill of hair on Nelyo's shoulder, his little hands clutching fistfuls of Nelyo's tunic. Carnistir is utterly unpredictable, I've learned: complacent and even a bit jovial one minute and a wailing horror the next. Macalaurë, unaccustomed to my weight, has allowed me to slide towards the ground, so I grab a handful of his hair and tug until he hoists me back up to his hip, muttering with annoyance and pain.

Nelyo pushes into the kitchen and, sensing that he is about to be abandoned, Carnistir renews his efforts, his voice rising in a crescendo of protesting moans. I am deposited onto the floor, and before I can run to Nelyo and add to the melee, Macalaurë catches my hand, and I am dragged behind him into the cool darkness of the pantry.

"Here," he says, turning me to face him, "hold out your arms." I do as instructed, and my hands and arms are piled with vegetables, cheeses, and breads until I can barely see over the pile.

"Macalaurë ..." I complain.

"I'll lead you; you'll be fine." His voice comes now from the back of the pantry, where Atar keeps the wine. I stand, teetering, as a block of cheese threatens to topple to the floor, until I feel Macalaurë's hand on my back, guiding me into the kitchen.

Nelyo has found success with Carnistir, at least a bit. He's convinced our little brother to sit at the small table in the middle of the room, although Nelyo is still pressed next to him on the bench, and Carnistir, red-eyed and flushed, is still wrapped tightly in Atar's cloak. "Stay here, little one," Nelyo whispers to him, planting a quick kiss on his forehead before darting forward to meet me, right as the cheese topples from my arms.

"Tyelkormo, can I trust you with a knife?" Nelyo asks me, as he unloads the ingredients from my arms and moves them to the table. I give him an insulted stare, and he sighs. "Of course I can. I suppose you've handled much worse in Atar's workshop, have you not?" Before I can answer, he bustles over to one of the drawers and pulls out a long, silver blade. My breath catches as Telperion's light glints off its edge; my father's work, I know, beautiful. Nelyo seats me at the table, across from Carnistir, and gives me rapid instructions on which cheeses to cube and which to slice. "Make sure you keep the edges even," he tells me, "so that Macalaurë and I can cut them into flowers."

"I want to cut flowers!" Carnistir's voice rises suddenly. "I want to help!"

Nelyo tries to restrain it, but I hear a quick sigh of frustration pass his lips, and his eyes flutter shut, covering something that he doesn't want us to see. I keep my eyes on my work, determined to slice the cheese evenly and perfectly, and don't look at Nelyo as he rushes to get a bowl of water for Carnistir to wash vegetables. I hear Carnistir shriek when Nelyo tries to unwrap Atar's cloak. "You will need your hands free, little one," he says, and Carnistir allows him to tie the cloak around his neck, even though it pools on the floor behind him and he is nearly pulled backward by its weight. Carnistir is given a pile of vegetables to wash. Behind me, Macalaurë is banging pans and heating the stove to boil water; I glance over in enough time to see Nelyo as he shows Carnistir how to wash the dirt from the vegetables, rippling the water ever so slightly as his hand moves beneath it, cupping Carnistir's hands in his. I chance to look up, and he smiles at me.

"Do you see that, little one?" he says to Carnistir. "Just like that." He kisses the point of Carnistir's ear, making him giggle, and stands up. As Nelyo passes me, he touches my shoulder, and my knife knocks against the wooden tabletop with renewed vigor.

What I would do to please him. To please Atar.

Carnistir drops a potato into his water bowl, laughing as water geysers up and splashes us both. Behind me, Nelyo and Macalaurë are speaking rapidly, their words overlapping and interrupting each other, punctuated by the clatter of pots and pans. "Here take-ah, no!" I hear a wet crack and know that they have dropped an egg. Carnistir peers around me, his eyes bright with interest, water dripping off the end of his nose. "We'll get it later," I hear Nelyo say, both authoritative and reassuring. "Hand me another."

Trays are shuffled into the oven, pans are set on the stove and stirred, and within a half-hour, my elder brothers are sitting at the table with us-Nelyo beside Carnistir and Macalaurë next to me-cutting vegetables for salads and speaking of subjects they tell us-when we ask-are beyond Carnistir's and my comprehension. Macalaurë perches on one leg folded beneath him, his elbows on the table, and his eyes bright and eager, but Nelyo sits straight-shoulders squared-chopping lettuce with an even motion, the only clue to his demeanor being the quick smile on his lips.

"So they shall all be here then?" Nelyo says.

"Yes, that is my understanding. Even ..." Macalaurë lets his words trail off, and he raises his eyebrows at Nelyo.

Nelyo doesn't give him the satisfaction of looking up. "Today would be the day that we are late starting supper. I only hope everything turns out well."

"She would not care if you fed her sawdust and furnace slag, as long as it was you serving it."

"Whatchoo talkin' 'bout?" Carnistir chirps, devolving to the casual baby talk he has been forbidden to use after recently starting language lessons with our father.

"What are you-" Nelyo corrects in a warning tone.

"What are you talking about?" Carnistir repeats, his words careful and measured, a lot like Nelyo's.

"We are discussing social interaction," Nelyo says carefully, and almost at the same time, Macalaurë says, with a giggle, "We are discussing maidens."

"Shh!" Nelyo kicks him under the table, and Macalaurë drops the cucumber he was slicing to grab his leg and moan, "Ai!"

"Serves you right," Nelyo grumbles and he gives the lettuce a few extra-stern whacks. "She is Atar's apprentice, which all but squanders any hope."

Macalaurë protests, "Why? Atar married his master's daughter."

"Yes, but, no offense meant to Atar, for I realize that my own existence is contingent upon his and Amil's premature marriage, but I desire not to follow in his stead."

"Nelyo, you are already older than Atar was when he wed our mother. Ilúvatar in Eä, you are already older than Atar was when you were born! You are only three years from coming of age. I hardly think that you are jeopardizing propriety if you ask to court his very lovely apprentice."

Nelyo stares at the growing pile of chopped lettuce for a long moment before responding. "I will do no such thing."

"Nelyo-"

"If you find her so 'lovely,' " he says acerbically, "then why do you not ask to court her, Macalaurë?"

Macalaurë grins and said, "She is not smitten with me, Nelyo," and, laughing, swings his legs onto the bench before Nelyo can deliver another kick to his shins.

My eyes meet Carnistir's, and he lets a bored whoosh of air through his nose (which is running, I notice with disgust). Nelyo turns to him and wipes Carnistir's nose with a rag. "That's enough, Macalaurë."

"Ah, I suppose that my conversation is making Carnistir's nose run."

"No, but you are boring them, and they get into mischief when they are bored. And we do not need their mischief to add to our woes tonight."

"So you do care!"

"Enough, Macalaurë."

"I knew it."

Nelyo's eyes dart to meet Macalaurë's dancing gaze. Macalaurë always pushes Nelyo a smidgen beyond what Carnistir and I dare, even though we are too young to have any fear of Nelyo kicking us underneath the table. But Nelyo holds confidence with Macalaurë in a way that he does with no other-even Atar, with whom he sometimes spends the better part of the day-and the two of them are always going off together to feasts and picnics, from which they return well into Telperion's hours. Or so I assume. I always try to stay awake until I hear their footsteps on the stairs, but Telperion's silver light makes my eyes heavy and my limbs melt into my mattress, and when I awaken again, Laurelin is blossoming, and Nelyo and Macalaurë are deeply asleep, often not even awake in time for breakfast. They are usually in a languid good humor for days following these excursions, smiling easily and taking each other into laughing confidences, but on a few occasions, Nelyo has returned home in a poisonous mood that cut the words from my throat and made Carnistir hide under the bed. Even Atar seemed to treat Nelyo gentler during their lessons together. I asked Macalaurë once what had put Nelyo in such a black humor, and he whispered that Nelyo had been "jilted." Jilted? I knew not the meaning of this word-and dared not ask-but it sounded painful, like some kind of wounding. The last time Nelyo had been "jilted," I slipped into his bed beside him one night-after his anger had subsided a bit, of course-and gently patted his body while he slept, but found no sores to justify his moodiness. I leaned into him, and he circled me with his arms without awakening-many years of practice made it a reflex, I suppose, first with Macalaurë, now me-and I wished that I was bigger and stronger so that I might find he who had wounded my beautiful and kind brother and "jilt" him in turn.

The vegetables are all chopped, and Carnistir and I are permitted to toss them all together in a big bowl while Nelyo and Macalaurë set out in the dining room the heavy ceramic plates-the good plates-with Atar's eight-pointed star gilded at the center. The light flooding through the kitchen windows is predominantly silver now, and I know that soon we'll hear the nervous footsteps of the apprentices coming down the hall. Macalaurë shoves a handful of knives and spoons at me and a handful of forks at Carnistir, and we circle the big oval table in the dining room, setting them out as Atar taught us while Nelyo follows behind and folds the heavy linen napkins into shapes like flowers and straightens our work.

Nelyo and Macalaurë converge in the kitchen and begin ticking off tasks on their fingers. This is in the warming oven; that is in the pantry to keep it cool; we set out the-oh, no! They scramble for the four wine bottles Macalaurë had taken from the pantry and set them out on the table. Back in the kitchen, they breathe and appraise each other and turn in unison to look at Carnistir and me.

We are dragged-my hand in Nelyo's and Carnistir's in Macalaurë's-to the washroom behind the kitchen, Atar's cloak still dragging behind Carnistir like some kind of absurd ceremonial train, where we are propped up on a bench and vigorously cleaned. My hair is soft and fine and does not tangle easily, but Nelyo, unsatisfied, tears a comb through it a few times anyway. My hands have been in the raspberries that were picked for dessert, and the pink is scoured from my lips and fingers.

"They need a bath," Macalaurë says with some disdain. He has a comb tangled in Carnistir's hair-which is not nearly so soft and fine as mine-and the only thing that keeps Carnistir from screaming in protest is his preoccupation with removing the string holding Macalaurë's tunic closed.

"We don't have time to bathe them," Nelyo says, for which I am glad. "We have-" he studies the silver light pouring through the small high window over the bathtub-"ten minutes. No more. And we have to get ourselves ready as well."

"Of course," Macalaurë says with exaggerated sincerity, and Nelyo shoots him a sharp look. Neither notices that Carnistir has unlaced Macalaurë's shirt until it hangs open nearly to his ribs. I think of saying something, but Carnistir is occupied and quiet, and I do not feel like hearing his screeching when his fun is foiled.

Carnistir pulls the string from the last holes in Macalaurë's shirt and tucks it in his mouth.

Nelyo is smoothing my clothes. "Where are your shoes?" he asks, and I struggle to remember. "Never mind. I will bring a pair from your room when we're done."

"This child is filthy," Macalaurë complains, scrubbing Carnistir's hands with a rag, and Carnistir grins at me with strings poking from between his teeth. Macalaurë sighs, and Carnistir's lips close quickly over his teeth, as Macalaurë holds him at arm's length and surveys his handiwork. "It'll do, I-" His hand flies to his chest, suddenly noticing that half of his tunic is undone. "What has happened to my-" He looks at Carnistir, whose dark eyes are wide and innocent. "What did you do with it?"

Nelyo sighs and leaves me to walk over to Carnistir, pries his mouth open, and draws out a long spit-sodden string. He thrusts it at an appalled Macalaurë. "Here."

"Ugh." Macalaurë takes it between two fingers, studies it for a moment, and sets it on the edge of the basin. Carnistir reaches for it, but Macalaurë grabs his hand away and concentrates on removing Atar's cloak from around his neck. Carnistir stares at him in vague confusion for a moment, then-as though realizing what was happening-lets out a piercing shriek and sets his little teeth into Macalaurë's hand.

"Ai! Ilúvatar in Eä! Why do I always get stuck with him? He hates me." Macalaurë shakes the sting out of his hand and glares at Carnistir, who is warming up to a full-blown tantrum. Nelyo studies Carnistir, who is impeccable except for the long, wrinkled cloak tied around his throat, and says, "To the Void with it. Let him wear it." Carnistir's whimpering slowly subsides into hard little breaths and then into nothing, with only the color in his cheeks as evidence of his outburst.

Nelyo and Macalaurë turn their attention to themselves. Macalaurë delicately rethreads his tunic, scowling and trying to touch the soggy string as little as possible, and Nelyo pulls the comb through his hair, which is sticking out at all angles, clotted with a mixture of sweat and food and Carnistir's tears. Macalaurë finishes lacing his tunic and takes the comb from a frustrated Nelyo with a delicacy that he rarely shows to Carnistir and me. "Here," he says, "let me do it," and he twists the sides of Nelyo's hair off of his face and fastens them behind his head with a clip. "You look so much better with your hair out of your eyes."

"Thank you. Amil will be pleased."

"It was not Amil about whom I was thinking," Macalaurë says coyly, and Nelyo scowls.

"You wish me wed so that you can have my bedroom? Is that it?"

"No, I wish you wed because-" He gestures sharply at Carnistir and me, placated and standing on the bench, watching them. I have a hold of Carnistir's hand to keep him from teetering off the edge, and with his other hand, he is gnawing on the edge of Atar's cloak. "Look at them. Five minutes and they drive me to Irmo, but you-you are meant to be a father, Nelyo, more than anyone I've ever met. I would betray Eru's intentions if I didn't encourage you to fall in love and marry. I wish love for you more than I wish it for myself."

Nelyo stares at Macalaurë with skepticism, but when Macalaurë's eyes don't skip from his, his expression softens. "Come," he says, his eyes very bright now that they are not veiled by his hair, and he lifts Carnistir, who becomes instantly limp in his arms, "or we shall be late to our own supper."

~oOo~

Atar and Amil always have two apprentices each, young Noldor around Nelyo's age with hesitant hands and nervous eyes. Perhaps because they are of their cohort, Nelyo and Macalaurë always get along well with the apprentices, and often they are tailed by one or two when they go off to their feasts and picnics. But Carnistir and I watch our parents' protégés with uneasy eyes, and I must confess to delighting in their vexation.

Amil's apprentices will have been with our family for a year at the end of the summer, and Atar's senior apprentice Vorondil is a fixture permanent enough that Atar trusts him to tutor Carnistir and me when Atar and Nelyo are traveling. (Vorondil thinks he knows everything: How I love to find every tiny error in his ways and pick at it, like stubborn fingers over a scab!) But Atar's latest apprentice is a girl-the only one ever taken by either of my parents, for most girls tend towards softer crafts like needlework or painting, certainly not metalworking, which is her specialty-and she has been with us for less than a month and has yet to take a meal with our family. Annawendë is her name: I hear it spoken in Atar's brusque voice, making the syllables no more special than those he uses to describe the tools in his forge, and by Vorondil and Macalaurë, affectionately, as one mentions a friend. Nelyo speaks her name the least, and I suspect that this means that he thinks of it the most.

We are not back in the dining room for two minutes-Nelyo and Macalaurë are setting out loaves of bread at either end of the table-when I hear a male and a female voice outside the door. I recognize Vorondil's immediately: He is talking about a project he is contemplating to do with green marble, speaking with his swaggering northern Noldorin accent; I can visualize his obnoxious gesturing that takes too much room out of the air like he is swatting at bugs constantly circling his head. Annawendë is much quieter. Whenever I see her, her face is stern, like she tastes something unpleasant. She is far too large for a woman, taller than Macalaurë and broad in the shoulders and hips, with the shape of one who deserves a sledgehammer welded permanently in each hand. Her hair is dark and unremarkable, usually tied back from her face with a strip of cord. She is from the south of Aman, and her skin is dark and her accent strange; her face-compared to the porcelain-pale beauty of Nelyo-reminds me of a sky occluded by clouds. I watch Macalaurë send Nelyo an eager glance, but Nelyo is straightening the cutting board at his end of the table, aligning it with unnecessary precision, and he won't meet Macalaurë's hungry glance.

Atar's apprentices enter and stop to wash their hands at the basin Nelyo had set by the door. Over and over their hands turn in the cool water, as though they fear that bringing a bit of dust from the forge will poison us all. Vorondil has stopped talking at least. Atar comes up behind them, and they scatter in opposite directions, their damp hands tucked behind their backs. Atar dips each hand in the water and flicks it at Carnistir, who stands by the door, waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting apprentice's leg and sink in his teeth. He laughs now and bats the water from his face, then races over to Atar and buries his face in his thigh. "Mm-mm! Mm-mm!" he says, and I know Carnistir well enough to know that he says, "Atar! Atar!"

"Ah, Carnistir, my little dark one, so that is where my cloak has gone." Atar stoops and lifts Carnistir over his head. "I shall have to wear you with it then!" He settles Carnistir on his shoulders, and Carnistir shrieks with delight and grabs handfuls of Atar's hair like reins. The cloak-dusty from being dragged around on the floor for half the day-swirls around Atar's shoulders.

Atar comes to us one by one in greeting: Nelyo first, always, given a kiss on the cheek and a squeeze on the shoulder. Macalaurë, next, receives the same. I am last, and Atar stoops to kiss first my forehead, then the tip of my nose in quick succession, and I laugh and hug him around his neck. He lifts me easily, despite Carnistir still atop his shoulders and now whacking him joyfully in the side of the head, and I perch on his arm and push my face into his neck, breathing in the smell of the forge and his Atar-smell that is like scorched air before conflagration.

"What needs to be done?" he asks Nelyo, his voice booming close to my ear. Nelyo is making a point of looking intently at Atar; behind him stands Annawendë, making a point of looking intently at Vorondil, who is back to talking about the properties of green marble that make it ideal for this project he is contemplating that-

"We just need to serve," Nelyo replies.

"We shall wait for your mother then." He sets me down and gives me a swat on the backside that sends me running for Nelyo. I wrap my arms around his leg and lean against his hip, facing backwards, and his fingers twine lazily in my hair. Annawendë's eyes meet mine, and I give her the wickedest stare I can conjure and tighten my grip on Nelyo as though to say, You can't have him. He's mine. Mine and Carnistir's. We need him more than you ever will.

Atar is walking around the dining room, pretending to look for Carnistir, who is still astride his shoulders. "I know I missed greeting one of my sons, but who? Which one is missing? I saw Nelyo, yes, and Macalaurë. And I saw Tyelkormo. What's that other one's name? The little one?" Carnistir laughs and holds handfuls of Atar's hair straight out from his head like wings. "Ah, yes, Carnistir! My little dark one! Where did he get to?" He stoops to peer beneath the table, and Carnistir shrieks and has to grab beneath Atar's chin to keep from toppling off his shoulders. "Carnistir! Carnistir!" he calls, and Carnistir calls back, "Atar! Atar!"

Our mother arrives then. Her long red hair is tied back with a ribbon and she wears a clean blue dress over the tunic and trousers that she wears to work, but the dress is still floured with stone dust, as Amil's clothes always seemed to be. Her two apprentices follow her like loyal ducklings.

She washes her hands and makes the same round of greetings that Atar made a few minutes earlier. Her kiss lands on my lips and her hands pull me into a light embrace. "Tyelkormo," she says, "were you good today?"

"Yes, Amil," I whisper, for in her arms, I always feel like the baby again.

Her hands rub my back. "Good. Did you have fun on your free day?"

"Nelyo read to Carnistir and me, Amil. But I fell asleep."

"Ah, it is wearying to be so young." Her arms slide from my body, and loneliness seizes me. I follow her to Carnistir-just deposited on the floor by Atar-and stand behind her as she cuddles him and whispers in his ear, near enough to feel the heat from her body warming mine. Then, he too, is abandoned, and she rises to greet Atar.

"Fëanáro," she says, and he replies, "Nerdanel," and their arms slip around the other's waist, and she lays her head on his shoulder. His hand steals up her back and tugs the ribbon from her hair, and she draws back abruptly, as though to chastise him, but he speaks first: "You are beautiful, Nerdanel, with your hair free. How I missed you today."

And they kiss. My parents always kiss each other with the same joy as a thirsty man who has just plunged his face into a cold, bubbling stream: clinging, immersed, eyes damp with gratitude, drowning in that which saves them.

But they do not drown this time. They pull apart after a moment, secret smiles on their lips, and I know that I, my brothers, and their apprentices are gone from their minds, that the universe contains only two spirits, merged into one in the middle.

"I missed you today, as well, my love," my mother whispers, her lips still near Atar's, and he kisses her again, quickly, sneakily, and she laughs and holds his face beside hers in an embrace. "I love you I love you I love you-a thousand times I love you!"

I feel Nelyo reach for my hand-in his arms sits Carnistir, chewing on the edge of Atar's cloak again-and we are taken around to greet the apprentices. I hate these formalities: Was it not ten days ago that I had an interminable lesson with Vorondil about steel alloys, yet I must be presented to him as a stranger? But Nelyo believes in such gestures; they keep the world orderly, he says, and if my brother loves anything, it is for things to be orderly.

Nelyo goes to Annawendë last. I was introduced to her, naturally, at her arrival a month ago, and I thought then as I think now: She is not so lovely; she is ordinary, really, with dark brown hair and sharp gray eyes and a mouth that never completely smiles. She certainly isn't worthy of my tall, beautiful brother. "Annawendë," he says, and his voice is stiff, formal, "I present my little brothers, Tyelkormo and Carnistir."

"I am pleased to renew your acquaintance," I say, as he taught me, and I take her hand and squeeze it as hard as I can. I must have overestimated my strength, however, or underestimated hers, for she does not even give me the pleasure of a flinch.

Carnistir purses his lips and blows out a spray of spit, accompanied by a rude noise. "Carnistir!" Nelyo scolds, but Annawendë laughs and says, "It is fine, Maitimo. He is adorable. They both are." I feel a nudge of guilt at her sincerity. She puts her hand on his arm then, lightly, barely touching him, but his stiffness falls away.

"Well, he takes after our father, as you can see," Nelyo says, smiling a funny half-smile and giving Carnistir an extra heft. Carnistir tucks the edge of Atar's cloak into his mouth again. I turn to find Atar, and see that he is greeting Amil's apprentices. Amil holds his arm and beams; soon, she will be presented to his apprentices, including this unlovely girl who'd touched Nelyo. Nelyo, too, has turned, and seeing that time escapes him, begins to back out of the conversation. "Annawendë, I hope that you will be comfortable here and that you will enjoy the supper." And then I am being dragged back to Macalaurë, looking back over my shoulder at the girl who smiles after my brother.

Even in a family with four children, the dining room is too big for our family. Usually, we eat outside, in my mother's favorite courtyard, at a round, glass-topped table that our father made. On evenings when rain forces our meal indoors, we crowd at one end of the long dining room table, an awkward little family in a room that is too grand in size and decoration for our humble suppers.

But when we have company-even just the apprentices-we eat in the dining room at the long oval mahogany table. The room is big and beautiful in the ornate, glittering ways of the Noldor, but I never feel like it belongs in our house. It would fit in my uncle's house, maybe, or even my grandfather's. Perhaps Manwë had called upon his Eagles to lift it over the city walls and drop it into the middle of our home? All that keeps me from doubting that it was my parents' deliberate decision to build such an oddity is the presence of their work everywhere: The crystals in the chandelier were made by my father, the carvings on the table were my mother's patient work; even the dishes-frighteningly heavy compared to the light ceramic settings we usually used-were gilded at the edges and with an eight-point star at the center in my father's meticulous hand and glazed by my mother so that they gleam as though coated with ice.

We usually observe little decorum during mealtimes; sometimes meals feel like an inconvenience for all the harried faces and windswept hair and eager hands reaching and grabbing. Usually, at least one of us-often me-is barefoot; dirty work clothes are not discarded beforehand (sometimes our father even wears his smith's apron, if he has been interrupted in the forge); hair is not combed and fingernails are not scrubbed. Nelyo usually has ink on his lips, and Macalaurë sometimes brings his sheet music to the table, if he has an exam to send to his Telerin tutor, and runs his fingers over imaginary harp strings with one hand while forking food into his mouth with the other. Amil carves the meat, even though it is thought wrong for a woman still able to bear children to handle meat, as it might drain her ability to provide nurturance to her unborn children. (Superstition, our father scoffs, claiming that Amil often hunted with him in their youth, reddening her hands with the blood of prey, and she'd had no trouble bearing four children already, still shy of her hundredth year, still with the strength to add more.) My brothers and I fall into whichever chair is closest; the glass-topped table is a round table, and no seniority is denoted by placement at mealtimes. The only absolute is that Carnistir has to sit beside Atar or Amil, and they alternate days for who will have this chore, because he is sloppy and mischievous in his eating habits.

But mealtimes in the dining room, with guests, are choreographed affairs. Atar sits at one end of the long table and Amil at the other. They sit first and then we-their guests and their sons-carefully take our places in the middle. Nelyo sits at Atar's right hand, the place of honor for the eldest son, and Macalaurë is placed at Amil's right, the place of honor for the eldest daughter or second son. It is Atar's turn to feed Carnistir, so I sit to the left of our mother and across from Macalaurë. In the middle of the table, the apprentices are seated: Atar's apprentices at his end of the table (Annawendë is next to Nelyo, and they are being careful not to look at each other for too long) and Amil's at hers. Because we have guests, then Atar follows the rules of decorum and carves the meat-a large, roasted pheasant that one of the apprentices killed the day before-and passes the first piece to Nelyo, who defers to the guests, who defer to each other and then to me, and I, in turn, defer to our mother, who accepts with awkward gratitude. I think it an arduous process, when all Atar has to do is slide the plate down the table to Amil, as he would do on the glass table outside.

The guests are served next, then my brothers, in order of age. (Though Nelyo always defers until the very last, saying that he will not eat until his brothers are fed. That concept never impresses Macalaurë, who always eagerly seizes his piece when it comes to him.) That means that I have to wait until nearly last, tempted by the mingling aromas of the various dishes, through much carving and deferring. Not like it matters, for no one eats until everyone is served and Atar leads us through Eruhantalë.

I have eaten at other tables-my uncles', my grandfathers'-and ours is the only one where Eruhantalë is given at every meal. Most families give thanks to the Valar for bringing our people to this blessed land, but Atar skips the Valar and goes straight to Eru. At some festivals, Eruhantalë is tradition, but even our haphazard suppers around the round glass table in the courtyard pause for it. It is only later in my life, when I am invited to the Halls of Oromë, to join his table, that I realize that the tradition is more than a family oddity: It is a custom observed by the Valar.

"We would like to thank Eru for that which we have received from Arda this day," Atar says, "and we shall return to her in excess of what we have taken. I give thanks for the iron for my steel, for the branches I have cut to fuel my forge."

Amil speaks next: "I give thanks for the stone I have taken from the earth."

We go around like so: The apprentices also give thanks for iron and wood and stone; Nelyo is thankful for his parchment and ink; Macalaurë, for his various wooden and silver instruments, and the parchment for his sheet music as well, he adds quickly at the end. I don't know what to say, so I am also thankful for parchment, for Nelyo read to me from books, and for the leather that covered them. Carnistir looks puzzled, sticks the edge of Atar's cloak into his mouth, and says, "Aaahh!"

"And we are all thankful for the life of the pheasant we have taken and for the fruits of Arda that grace our table," Atar says at last. "In excess shall we replant the trees we have cut and nurture the fruits we have taken from their branches; so shall we protect the lives of those creatures whose kin have given their lives for our sustenance." We all mutter our assent, and the thanksgiving is over.

As the dishes are passed, isolated conversations spring up around the table. Nelyo is engaged in careful conversation with Atar-Nelyo is doing most of the talking because Atar is trying to coax the cloak out of Carnistir's mouth and a forkful of pheasant in-with his head turned at too extreme an angle, intentionally turned from Annawendë beside him. She, too, is deliberately turned from him. Amil is politely asking her small questions: What is her parents' trade? Where did she take her training before coming to Tirion? What ever inspired her to pursue Fëanáro's scorching, painful line of work? The last is said in jest because Amil, too, is excellent at the forge-everyone knows this-and Annawendë's tension is broken a bit. Amil's apprentices, who know Macalaurë and Nelyo well from their excursions to late-night feasts in Tirion, are discussing another such diversion that is happening in a week's time. "We are all going," says the older of the two, whom I can tell from his younger colleague only by the elaborate braids in his hair, "and so should you and Maitimo, if you can," and Macalaurë commences giving our mother careful sidelong peeks to see if she has noticed the conversation or if he will be forced to make a formal request later.

I look back to the opposite end of the table, where Atar is mashing peas into a small bowl for Carnistir, and Nelyo is talking at him between mouthfuls of pheasant about prisms and colored light and how white light is actually all colors of light and therefore perfect. (Atar's own meal is practically untouched, I notice, and certainly growing cold.) Carnistir is intentionally missing his gaped mouth to rub a piece of sweet potato up and down his face, leaving lumpy orange streaks across his nose and cheeks. At times like these, Carnistir is an embarrassment. He is four years old; surely he knows how to feed himself by now? Surely he doesn't need Atar to mash his peas for him before he can eat them? (This habit was adopted after our parents learned that Carnistir likes to stick peas in his nose and ears, and one particular unfortunate instance when one got stuck so far up his nose that Nelyo had to hold him, bound and wriggling in a towel, screaming as though put to torment, while Atar attempted to avoid his gnashing teeth and remove the offending pea with a tiny pair of pliers and Amil paced outside the door, wringing her hands, and weeping almost as hard as Carnistir was.)

Amil stands to pour fresh glasses of wine for Macalaurë and the apprentices. Carnistir and I are each given a half-glass at the start of each meal and told to sip it slowly to make it last, for after it is gone, we have to drink water. (I always gulp mine, usually before I even start eating; Carnistir's mostly ends up-with the rest of his meal-down the front of his tunic.) "Amil, please." I hold my glass out to her in both hands. "It's a special day. Please?"

"Ask your father," she replies.

"Atar!" I yell, and Atar, who is trying to wrap a spoon into Carnistir's hand and get him to eat the mashed peas (Carnistir looks peeved; whole peas are much more fun) and listen to Nelyo's nervous chatter at the same time, glances at me and says, "Have a sip of Macalaurë's," to which Macalaurë begins to protest (Atar shoots him a glance that silences him before he's even spoken a full word, however), and I reach across the table for Macalaurë's glass, and my elbow knocks into my water glass, and water rolls down the table and into Amil's apprentices' laps.

"Tyelkormo!" Amil scolds, and leans across the table and tries to catch the glass before it rolls off the edge of the table and shatters. Too late. It rolls off the edge of the table and shatters.

Carnistir takes a big spoonful of mashed peas and catapults them into the side of Atar's face, where they stick in his hair and make him flinch in surprise.

"... and so if you reverse the magnets, then-" Nelyo is saying when he is hit by flecks of mashed peas that had missed hitting Atar and flown past to hit him. He turns to our baby brother-who wears a manic grin and still holds the offending spoon-with a look of such appalled shock that I have to put my napkin over my face to hide the fact that I am laughing. "Carnistir!"

Macalaurë calmly chews his sweet potatoes, reaches for his glass in front of my plate, and takes a long swig of wine.

The apprentices sit in awkward silence for a beat that is filled only with the sound of Carnistir's laughter and Macalaurë gulping his wine. Atar turns to Carnistir: I know that look; it wasn't so long ago that I was the baby and subjected to looks like that, and I know the consequences. "Carnistir!" Atar's voice when he is angry is terrible, like the rumbling of the earth. "For shame! For shame!" His flint-gray eyes snap with sparks. Carnistir's face crumples into tears, and he pulls Atar's cloak over his face and slides down in his chair until we hear the dull thump of his body hitting the floor beneath the table. Then comes the wailing-muffled some because Atar's cloak is still over his face-and Atar's temper flees like a tempest upon the wind, dissipating as quickly as it came.

He ducks under the table, peas still stuck to the side of his face, and Carnistir's wails escalate into screams. We can hear Atar consoling him, "My little one, do not cry. I was only angry, but the anger is gone now. I know that you meant no harm, but such behavior is wrong, little one, and you know that. But I forgive you, my love, I forgive you." Carnistir's voice rises, then becomes muffled, and I know that his face is buried in Atar's shoulder.

The apprentices are exchanging uneasy glances. Is our master really sitting under the table? I sense them asking in their eyes. Is this really the table of the premier craftsman of all the Noldor, and the high prince of all the Noldor at that?

A towel is thrust into my hands, and I look up into my mother's stormy face. "Here," she says. "Clean the mess you have made."

So I blot the spilled water from the table as best I can, and she offers towels to her apprentices. "I am so sorry. Here we invite you to supper and-" "No, my lady, it is fine. Do not worry about it. What is a little water?" and so on. Macalaurë is staring at the tabletop and chewing a crust of bread; Nelyo looks vaguely upset at the other end of the table and very lonely without Atar for company. Carnistir's wails from beneath the table are subsiding, and after a moment, Atar emerges with him in his arms, the cloak wrapped about Carnistir's head and his face pushed into Atar's chest. Atar takes his seat at the head of the table, perches Carnistir in his lap, and begins the delicate process of unwrapping Carnistir without spurring another fit of hysterics, using his other hand to wipe the clotted peas from his face with a napkin.

"So who's ready for dessert?" Amil asks cheerfully.

~oOo~

Macalaurë always plays music after supper, and the apprentices stay long enough to be polite-for three songs-then plead exhaustion and excuse themselves. My perfect and polite Nelyo only gives them the briefest of farewells, but when the door has closed behind them, the longing in his eyes makes me certain that he wished for the courage to say more. To one of them anyway.

Now we can abandon propriety for comfort. When Atar and Amil return from bidding their apprentices a good evening, Atar sprawls out, half-lying on the couch and holds his arms out to Amil, who trots to him with her face shining like an eager adolescent and settles between his legs with her head lying back on his chest. His arms circle her, and she tilts her face to his for a kiss that lasts long enough for me to jump up from my seat on the floor and fling myself onto her lap.

"Tyelkormo!" Amil says, laughing, while Atar moans and says, "There go the rest of our children."

"Fëanáro!" she scolds, nudging him playfully with her elbow. I curl onto her lap, and her arms clasp me as Atar clasps her. Amil feels different than Atar and Nelyo, like sinking into bed after a tiresome day, softer now than I remember her being before Carnistir was born. She is strong, I know, for I've seen her swing hammers in the forge beside my father, but her strength is wrapped in something softer, like each baby she gave to Atar has blurred her edges a bit.

She strokes my hair, smoothing it back from my face and letting it trickle through her fingers like water. "Where did you ever get such pretty hair and such beautiful blue eyes, Tyelkormo?" she asks me.

"Atar was staring at the blue, blue sky when he begot me," I tell her proudly, and she nudges Atar again and says, "See, I told you not to tell him that! They remember everything that you want them to forget!"

"I don't want him to forget it," he whispers in her ear, so softly that I almost can't hear him, and rests his lips on her temple. She closes her eyes and pulls me closer, as though his love for her makes her love me more.

Across the room, Carnistir rises suddenly from the floor, still trailing Atar's cloak, and runs to Nelyo, who sits in the rocker. He settles into Nelyo's arms as I lay in Amil's and Amil lays in Atar's. Macalaurë is playing a delicate song on his harp, a wordless song that rises to the velvet sky above us, above even Telperion's silver light, to wrap around the stars. I sometimes envy Macalaurë's talent, his ability to command a room with his voice or with the play of his fingers across harp strings, but lying here now, I pity him, for he is the only one of us who is alone, not holding or being held by someone, so it is no surprise to me that when he at last gives word to his song, though it is a song of joy, his voice is raw and trembling as though in lament.

~oOo~

Telperion reigns, and Atar plunks Carnistir and me into the bathtub, our last ordeal before we are sent to bed.

Giving us our baths-like feeding Carnistir-is rotated among the family members. Nelyo is my favorite because he kneels next to the tub, even after washing us, and plays, pushing around miniature wooden Telerin ships that he and Macalaurë made when they found out that our parents had conceived me, splashing us and making us giggle. Amil is fussy, scrubbing every bit of dirt from our hair and bodies and becoming irate if we splash too much. Macalaurë is hasty, washing us quickly and lifting us from the water without a chance to play, as though he has an engagement to which he must rush, leaving us damp between our toes and behind our ears.

Atar is none of these things. He washes us thoroughly and with surprising gentleness, then allows us to play until the water grows tepid and we begin to shiver. He always brings parchments with him-sometimes written in Nelyo's hand and sometimes not-and sits in a chair beside the bathtub and reads, looking intent, but I can see his eyes shift in our direction with every few words, as though fearing that we might drown in water that doesn't even reach our ribs.

Tonight, he reads a bound volume that Nelyo has been working on for the last few weeks. Carnistir pushes our little Telerin ships around the tub, every now and then capsizing one and impersonating the Telerin cries for help (in Noldorin, of course). I only half-heartedly join the game, for Carnistir has a disturbing tendency to pee in the bathtub while I am in it with him, and he always gets a distinct little smile while he is doing it. Amil and Nelyo know this smile well enough by now that they lift him from the water before it is too late (although poor Nelyo was right on time once and had his tunic ruined)-and Macalaurë never lets us stay in long enough for me to have to worry-but I never trust that Atar's inconstant vigilance will catch Carnistir in time, so I remain watchful myself.

"Ai! Ai!" Carnistir cries, thrashing his hands about in the water around two overturned Telerin ships. I see Atar glance up at us and back to his parchment in a space of time less than a second. "Ai! Merciful Ulmo! Oh, Uinen Lady of Seas, restraineth thy spouse and deliver us unto mercy!" I wonder sometimes where Carnistir, who cannot feed himself in a civilized manner and still cannot discern between toilet water and bath water, learns such silliness. Atar's eyes flicker back to us, and I see him smile.

"Atar?" I ask, for he will speak to us if we desire, laying aside his parchments and answering our questions with a frankness that we can't get from our mother or Nelyo. Carnistir, however, isn't interested in conversation, and his splashing and crying intensifies. A third ship joins her unfortunate sisters. "Ai! Ai!"

"What is it, Tyelkormo?" He closes the book, but his finger keeps his place.

"What are you reading?" I feel a little silly, like I am interrupting something important with my petty need to alleviate my loneliness, but my voice trumps my brain and keeps speaking in a small voice that makes me feel younger than I really am. Atar has that power over me. Always, I feel small whenever I think of him, as though he is perpetually sitting over me, clothed where I am naked. "Did Nelyo write it?"

Atar smiles, but it is one of his smiles that turns the corners of his mouth and doesn't reach his eyes. "Yes, he did. Your brother is very learned, you know."

"I know. Do you think I could be as learned as Nelyo some day?"

"If you work very hard, as Nelyo has done, then you could be as learned as Manwë, if you desire."

"Is Macalaurë learned too?"

Atar thinks for a moment before answering. "Yes, he is, in his own way. One day, his songs shall be renowned of all the Eldar, I believe." He looks at the floor and smiles that vague smile again. He almost looks sad.

"Atar?"

"Yes, Tyelkormo?" He looks up at me, the fire burning deep in his eyes, and I know I was wrong. Someone like Atar was incapable of sadness. Anger, rage, crippling joy, but never sadness.

"Can I come work with you at the forge soon?"

I don't even know that I am going to ask that until the words are already hanging in the air between us. Carnistir is hooting happily still and splashing, and I feel terrified. He will tell me no. He will tell me that he already has apprentices. I feel my face heat up with shame at my impetuous words.

"Soon, little one, you shall join me. But first we must perfect some of our other work, yes?" I can't keep the disappointment from my face, so I stare down at the water. Telperion winks on the crest of each ripple, and the candlelight makes flickers of flame in the deep. I feel Atar cup the back of my head in his hand and turn my face to him. He doesn't kneel beside the tub as Nelyo does, but he leans forward and I can see every fleck in his brilliant gray eyes. "You have the desire to be a great craftsman, little one, but greatness requires patience, and though I yearn for your presence by my side, as do you," he strokes my hair, my cheek; his fingers are warm and make my flesh that he doesn't touch ache with the clammy cold of the bathwater, "I wish only to do right by you, to be a worthy teacher, and to rush forward now would not be for the best. Do you understand?"

"Yes." I swallow, make my voice brave. "I do." I meet his eyes and know that I will never exceed him. I will try-oh, I will try-but never will I exceed him.

He says no more, and his hand lingers on my face for a moment, then lifts, leaving my skin chilled. I shiver, not because the water is cold, but because I am bereft. He does not notice; he is gazing at the floor again.

"Atar?" He raises his eyes to me and doesn't speak, but I know that I am invited to go on. "Will Nelyo leave us when he gets married?"

Where are these questions coming from? I want to stick my head beneath the water, where at least my voice will be lost in incomprehensible bubbles. Atar cocks an eyebrow in puzzled curiosity and asks, "What makes you think that Nelyo will be marrying soon?"

"Didn't you marry Amil when you were his age?"

"I was younger than Nelyo when I wed your mother, too young, some say, although I do not agree."

"But does Nelyo not fancy your apprentice?" His eyebrows raise a bit higher. "Annawendë?" I make myself say.

"Nelyo has courted many maidens in his time. He was nearly engaged to a young lady a few years ago, although it ended unfortunately. His desire for Annawendë may amount to nothing more." He pauses for a moment and considers my original question. "But, yes, Tyelkormo, he will leave when he marries. He will leave and beget his own children and start his own household."

I barely hear the last part: It is like a bruise delivered to flesh that is already rent and bleeding. Almost engaged? I had not known that. I had not even known that Nelyo had courted any maidens; although girls have been occasionally brought to the house for supper, I've seen no reason to believe that they shared anything more with Nelyo than friendship, like the boys who come to go hunting with him and Macalaurë. I feel a hurt puzzlement at the revelation of Nelyo's secret life. His other life, where he became nearly engaged without a word, where Carnistir and I-and maybe even Macalaurë-did not exist, were not substantial enough to influence his plans. Why should we? Was he not preparing for sons of his own, the sons of whom Macalaurë had spoken earlier and Atar spoke of now, the sons he was meant to have? Meant to leave us for? I decide that I will hate his sons, when they come, hate them with sickening bitterness, even though I will be their uncle and share their blood, even though they will only be innocent babies, I will hate them-hate them-for taking Nelyo from me.

When I was younger, I used to catch butterflies in my hands, and once I caught a bee, and the wounded surprise that I felt when it stung my innocent palm, already swelling, pulsing aching poison into my blood, was like what I feel now. My only consolation came from Atar's assurance that the bee had suffered more for its folly than I: The penalty for the poisonous stinger torn from its body would be death. I sink into the water, becoming cold, and desire conversation no more.

Carnistir's lips tremble, and he shivers.

Atar dips his fingers into the water. "Ilúvatar in Eä, it has become cold fast! Why did you not speak up, Tyelkormo?" He rises and, lifting Carnistir first, then me, wraps us in fluffy towels. I do not answer him and stand with the towel clasped around my shoulders, shivering at the shock of the air on my damp skin, and watch him carefully dry Carnistir, rubbing the water from his hair first and drying inside his ears and between his fingers and toes with more meticulous gentleness than even Amil does. I am dried next, and I relish the warmth of his hands on my body as he soaks the chilly water from my skin with the towel.

He dresses each of us in clean nightclothes and combs the snarls from our damp hair, sitting in his chair while we stand between his knees. Carnistir sways on his feet, his eyes only half-open, his thumb poked into his mouth, and would fall if Atar didn't clasp his legs around him. Carnistir leans on his thigh and whines.

"I need to put him to bed," Atar tells me, smoothing my hair and setting aside the comb. "Go to your room and I shall be in shortly to kiss you goodnight."

He lifts Carnistir, who might have rags for flesh, as limp as he's become. His eyelids are nearly closed; only a smoky glimmer from beneath his heavy lashes tells me that he is awake. "G'night, Turko," he mumbles. "Love you." Atar doesn't correct his sloppy speech.

"Good night, Carnistir," I say. "I love you too," and Carnistir wiggles in Atar's arms and turns his face against his neck.

I watch them go down the hall to Carnistir's room, right next to our parents' bedroom, before I turn and walk to my own room, wincing at the cold kiss of the stone floor against my bare feet. My sheets are tucked snugly against my mattress; Nelyo helps me to make my bed every morning, and he tucks the sheets so that I can barely pry them free at night. I manage to pull away a corner and wiggle beneath it, shivering where the icy silk slides against my bare skin. Nelyo's bedroom is across from mine, and shards of conversation drift across the hall and a glissando of musical laughter-Macalaurë-and I know that my elder brothers are in one of their private counsels. I wonder if they will be going to their picnic next week. Summer is imminent; we will be leaving for Formenos soon.

Atar drifts into my bedroom without a sound and draws my drapes until only a sliver of Telperion's light can stretch its silver fingers into my room. In the near-darkness, he melts almost perfectly with the shadows; only the hot sparks of his eyes remain. The darkness smothers me, and I close my eyes and feel the mattress beneath my body slowly disappearing. Atar sits on the edge of my bed, and the weight of his body shifts the bed and tugs me awake.

"Atar," I whisper-or think I whisper-and there is a warm flush in the center of my forehead, a kiss like rose petals. Across the hall, Nelyo banters, laughing, with Macalaurë, and I stretch my eyes open to slits.

"Sleep, little one," he breathes in my ear, and I seize him around the neck and hold him beside me.

"Don't leave, don't leave," I whimper, and he gently unlocks my arms from around his neck, folds my hands on my chest, and holds them clasped in his. I feel the mattress sink further, and I know that he is half-lying beside me, waiting for sleep to take me so that he can go to Amil.

Why are you so afraid to be alone? I think I hear him ask-or maybe it is the wind through my window-before oblivion takes me.

Carnistir

When I see the shape enter our gate, my brother Turko and I are swatting at each other with wooden swords that Atar made. The shape looks like an Elf. It has dark hair and is tall, broader in the shoulders than most of our people, and it wears a nice, clean set of white robes. That, right there, tells me that the shape does not belong to our house. I let my wooden sword fall to my side and ignore Turko when he pushes his roughly to my throat, claiming victory, to stare at the shape as it walks up the path towards us. It leads a horse, which it ties loosely to a tree near the gate to graze. It looks like Grandfather Finwë, but before I launch myself down the path and into the arms of a potential stranger, I want verification.

Turko, is that Grandfather Finwë?

I look at him, but he is only staring at me with mixed triumph and annoyance, his wooden sword still poking in my throat. I smack at it and scowl at him, until I realize that I haven't spoken aloud. I tend to forget that thoughts have to slip from your mind and into your mouth, and then they had to be regurgitated into great lumps of words before others can understand you.

"Turko!" I shout. He hates when I call him that, but the name Tyelkormo is like a wriggling snake in my mouth. "Is that Grandfather Finwë?"

"Where?" Turko's voice is smooth and rich, like honey, even at the callow age of fourteen.

"By the gate!" I screech at him in frustration, and he turns.

I feel his thought slam into me like a warm gust of wind. It is! We look at each other and set off running.

He hears our racing footsteps and turns right as we slam into his legs, each of us wrapping our arms around a thigh like a tree trunk. Our dual impact doesn't even make him tremor but with laughter, and his hands ruffle our hair into mayhem. Grandfather Finwë is the biggest Elf I know. Atar is tall, but he is a twist of steel where Grandfather Finwë is a boulder.

Turko is shouting greetings at him, and I bite into his leg. I am kissed all the time, a hundred times a day, by Amil and Atar and Nelyo and sometimes Macalaurë-more rarely by Turko-but I think it more sincere to move past just the lips and add a good gnash of the teeth when you really want to show that you love someone.

And I really, really love Grandfather Finwë, so I stretch my mouth as wide as it will go, imagining that I am like the snake that Turko caught one time, the snake that Nelyo had said could unhinge its jaw to eat, and let the powdery taste of Grandfather Finwë's robes fill me.

"My, you bite hard for such a little one." I feel my feet leave the ground, and I am perched on his hip, over Turko, who is still on the ground, twisting a strand of his gold-colored hair and staring at me with a hard jaw and blue eyes brimming with contempt.

A lint ball is rolling around on my tongue, and I grimace until Grandfather Finwë reaches past my lips, plucks it off, and flicks it away.

"That's what you get for biting," he chides and reaches down for Turko's hand. Turko is too big to carry around anymore, unless you are Macalaurë, who still falls for his feigned helplessness and lifts him up, even though he is bent backwards by Turko's weight.

Together, we walk up to the house.

"How fare you, my little fair and dark ones?" Grandfather Finwë asks.

"I killed Carnistir a minute ago," Turko boasts.

"Did you now?"

"Yep. Ran him right through with my sword. Cut his throat. There was blood everywhere."

"Is that so?"

"Yep."

"Well I suppose that your Atar will expect you to clean that up."

Turko shrugs. "Maybe. Probably he'll get Carnistir to do it. He was the one who was dumb enough to drop his sword and die."

Grandfather Finwë is Atar's Atar. They look a lot alike but not entirely. They both have dark hair, though Atar's is darker, like the sky between the stars. They are both tall, but Atar is slender and lithe where Grandfather Finwë is stoic and powerful. They both have gray eyes, but Atar's are brighter, like the center of a flame. Grandfather Finwë lives in Tirion, inside the walls, and we live outside. Grandfather Finwë is the King of the Noldor and Atar is the High Prince (though Amil always says that he rarely acts like it).

Grandfather Finwë comes to our house every month or so-although riders appear more often, and sometimes Atar is summoned to counsel in Tirion-and his arrival is never announced. Atar deserts whatever is in his hands when Grandfather Finwë arrives. I saw him leave a sword he was making for Manwë once, a beautiful gold thing with rubies in the hilt, with the last inch of the blade unfinished, twisted and ugly and ruined. The feeling that rolls off Atar when his Atar arrives is different than anything I have ever felt before. Once, I got angry with Macalaurë and stormed off into the woods when he had his back turned; Laurelin waned and I got turned to where I didn't know my way home, and I sat trembling with my head between my knees; the raw, cold joy, on the edge of tears, that I felt when Nelyo crunched through the bushes and rescued me is like that which pours off Atar whenever Grandfather Finwë comes.

Grandfather Finwë asks us now: "Is your Atar in his forge?"

Turko nods. "He is working with Macalaurë today."

I hate the forge when Macalaurë is working there. The hot, dry air, already uncomfortable, is saturated with his discontentment. Nelyo tolerates his day there-he likes to experiment with materials almost as much as Atar does-but poor Macalaurë suffers. He is not good at the work, and Atar is hard on him. He makes silly mistakes and hurts himself. I squirm to be free of Grandfather Finwë before he makes me go in there, but he clutches me tighter, and I am like one of the flies that Turko pins between his thumbnail and the tabletop, wriggling and desperate and trapped.

The heat makes ripples that make the air shimmer like water, but it is dry and makes my skin feel like paper. Breathing in, my lungs feel like they fill with hot dust. I put both hands over my face and cover my eyes, fearing that my tears will be sucked right out of them if I don't, and Grandfather Finwë jiggles me and says, "Don't be afraid, little one."

Grandfather Finwë does not work in the forge. He is competent enough, Atar says, but his job is to be a King. But what does he do? I asked once. Atar is a smith and Amil is a sculptor and Nelyo is a loremaster, and I know what they do, but what does a King do? I didn't know any other Kings, whereas I knew lots of smiths and sculptors and loremasters. Atar told me that a King makes the world work so that the smiths and sculptors and loremasters can do what they do. I still didn't understand. Atar said that was fine. It was a boring job, he said, being a King.

Atar has his back to the door. Macalaurë faces him; his face is rumpled with displeasure, but he is intent and nodding, and Atar's voice cuts through the heavy air like a stream of molten steel, "You can see, Macalaurë, where you didn't hammer it thin enough, and that made it-" and Macalaurë's eyebrows wrinkle in until they almost seem to be touching. Nelyo took me hunting once, and he slew a deer, and as the animal died, it wore a look on its face identical to that which Macalaurë wears now: wounded resignation, a prayer for escape, even if to death. Macalaurë's misery wraps around me, and I cover my face again and try to hide, but it weasels into my throat and burns there, and I choke and sob.

That is what makes Atar turn and see Grandfather Finwë standing there, and he drops his criticism of Macalaurë in mid-sentence and comes to him. I am dumped into Macalaurë's arms so that they can embrace, and at first, it makes me cry harder, for I fear that I may be smothered by his suffering, but my tears are cooled by the his obvious relief. If he holds his baby brother in his arms, I realize, then he will not be expected to wield hammers and tongs and stand in dangerous places.

Turko is looking around eagerly, for it is his heart's desire to work beside Atar in this very forge, and Macalaurë rests his chin atop my head and we slip outside, under the pretense of quieting my tears. The hot summer day is cold now, after the dry heat of the forge, and Macalaurë sits on the cool, green grass and rests me in his lap. He does not fold me into his being like Atar and Nelyo do; I do not lose track of where my body ends and where his begins, but it is comfortable enough. "Hush, baby," he says, and he wipes away the tears that pool beneath my eyes with his thumbs. "I know. I hate it too."

There is a whoosh of hot air, and Atar and Grandfather Finwë emerge from the forge with Turko squirming to dart between them. Atar has rolled his tunic to his shoulders, and his arms are bare and swept with soot. The same streaks his face. He has restrained his hair off his face and neck with a long swatch of dark blue cloth, and his hair pokes out of the cloth at strange angles, like a porcupine. He still wears his leather smith's apron, though it has long been blackened by ash and dirt. Standing next to Grandfather Finwë, regal and impeccable in his long white robes, it is hard to believe that Atar is his son.

Grandfather Finwë is presenting a sheaf of letters wrapped in a leather package. Atar looks at them with uneasy disdain, scratching his neck where a fly has landed. "This would all be so much easier if you would live in Tirion, with your people, Fëanáro," Grandfather Finwë told him. "You could deal with these things one day at a time."

"I have not time to deal with letters and messages every day." Atar waves his hand as if contemptuous of such foolish wastes of time. "And they are your people, not mine."

"You command much admiration, Fëanáro, and loyalty quickly follows such. Your skills, your wisdom, your beautiful family ... such are the gifts bestowed upon a high prince, and people know that."

Atar grabs the leather package from him, opens it, and begins to riffle through the letters. I see many colored seals flicker through his fingers, seals that I have seen before in Tirion. My uncles, Atar's half-brothers.

"Some of the messages bear only good tidings. Your brothers' wives each conceived, only a few weeks apart. Nolofinwë's second son should be here before the winter. Arafinwë's should arrive with the Winter Festival, but that seems fitting for your brother's first child, don't you think?"

Atar makes a humming sound through his lips and ponders the letters that bear my uncles' seals but does not open them. "They are sons, then?" he says after a long moment.

"Pardon?"

"My half-sisters-in-law shall bear sons?"

"Yes, they both carry sons."

"Then your house shall be twice blessed."

I wiggle in Macalaurë's arms, for I suddenly have the urge to run to Atar and have him lift me so that no one can see his face twist the way it does, and he could press into my chest as I do his when I have fallen and hurt myself, and I would soak up his tears like a pillow.

~oOo~

They retreat to the garden.

Turko and I are left in Macalaurë's care, and he is halfway jovial today, since Grandfather Finwë saved him from the forge. I tug at his hand, looking back at the garden, but he ignores it and drags me along, singing some inane song that amuses Turko. We stop on the path, so that Turko can name the butterflies that dance in the meadow. Monarch. Swallowtail. Viceroy.

"How do you know these things?" Macalaurë asks, and I tug his hand, straining in the direction of the garden, but he jerks me back to his side without even a glance.

Turko reaches out his hand, and a yellow and black butterfly, skips along his fingertips. He laughs and races into the meadow. Macalaurë sighs (though not as audibly as usual), and we follow.

I wait for Turko to dive into a mud puddle (I know he's going to do it the moment I see his eyes alight on it; I wonder why Macalaurë doesn't stop him) and for Macalaurë to become distracted by fishing him out. Then I escape, slipping into the tall grass and, letting its movement across my body match the whisper of the wind, and whisper back to the garden.

I become the shadows. I am the shadow; I am the darkness. My mind breathes these words. I do not know from where they came-they come to me at night sometimes, from the darkness beyond the stars, slipping into my brain unbidden-but they are a powerful incantation, and I creep unseen into the garden.

A few years ago, Nelyo became obsessed with growing rosebushes that would grow everycolor roses. He would hunker over books in the library, at the table at mealtimes, even in bed at night, and if asked to look away from his books for a moment, he would mutter, "I almost have it. I'm almost there," in a frantic, throaty voice. His early trials were very unsuccessful, but Atar wouldn't let him destroy the infant aberrations, claiming that death was a decision best left to the ways of Arda, so Nelyo planted them in the garden farthest from the house, where no one ever went. But Atar and Grandfather Finwë sit there now, on a stone bench across from one of Nelyo's splotchy orange gaffes, and I crouch beneath the bush, in the shadows, able to see them but knowing that they cannot see me.

I am the shadow.
I am the darkness.

Atar has removed the blue strip of cloth, and his hair pools unrestrained on his shoulders, except for a few uneven, tattered braids that keep the sides off his face. Amil's work, I know; her fingers pick over all of us constantly. The cloth is twisted in his hands; his hands are rarely still. If he is not making some craft or another, then he is scribbling in a ledger or flipping pages in one of Nelyo's books. He must have stopped at a fountain because most of the soot is gone from his face and hands, and his smith's apron is discarded over a rosebush with soupy green blossoms. The letters lay on the bench beside him. He's opened two, torn through the colorful seals that belonged to my uncles.

"So you shall be leaving for Formenos soon?" Grandfather Finwë asks.

"In a week's time."

I feel my insides give a delighted squeeze. Formenos!

"So soon? Summer has not even arrived yet."

"Nerdanel and I have four apprentices that we must settle."

The delighted squeeze loosens into baggy disappointment: the apprentices, who insist on coming to supper and make Nelyo act frantic and scrub Turko's and my hands and faces until they hurt. I had forgotten them.

"Shall you aid your brother in his request?"

The cloth jerks tight between Atar's hands. "I know not." The silence between them is louder than shouting. Grandfather Finwë stares at Atar, and I sense that he wants to say something more, but he does not. Atar looks down at the cloth and twists it around his fingers.

"It would aid him greatly," Grandfather Finwë says at last, his words tiptoeing across the space between them.

But the words, however delicate, must have bumped something in Atar, because his voice becomes loud and righteous. "I do not think well on those who cannot care for their own children. Nerdanel and I have four of our own-Nolofinwë has only one, for I do not count the son unborn-and never have they been in want of love or anything they required."

"Fëanáro," says Grandfather Finwë in a voice soaked with patience (he sounds so like Nelyo that I nearly fall from the bush in surprise), "his request has nothing to do with his inability to care for his son but rather his recognition that he cannot give to him the kind of instruction that you can easily provide. Findekáno is the same age as Tyelkormo, nearly; would you wish any less an education for Tyelkormo? Nolofinwë is expert in matters of court, little more, and he desires that Findekáno become learned in all matters of art and lore. Your knowledge and skill exceeds that of the best tutors in Tirion; he comes to you, not to unload his burdens upon your hands, but in praise of that which he does not possess."

Like an elixir, Grandfather Finwë's words soothe the poisonous contempt that oozes from Atar. "I have two apprentices and four sons whom I teach," he protests still, but his voice is softer now. "Even that is too much. Were Nerdanel and I to conceive again, already we have decided that one of the apprentices would have to go to her father. I will not deny my sons for another. Any other."

"Then give Findekáno to Maitimo. Maitimo is exceptional in matters of science and lore and gracious enough to be a lord of my court. Indeed, I wish he desired that pursuit, for the Noldor would thrive from his contributions. Though I have a feeling he will be too busy teaching his children and those of his brothers to pay much attention to politics."

A wan smile flits across Atar's lips, but still he twists the cloth in his hands.

"So he might as well learn now, wouldn't you say?" Grandfather Finwë continues.

Atar hesitates. "I shall speak to Nerdanel," he says at last.

"With haste, I hope, for Nolofinwë will need time to prepare, should you decide to take Findekáno into your charge, and time to arrange another tutor, should you not."

Atar stiffens. "I shall send a messenger to Nolofinwë tomorrow."

Atar is angry. I can feel it. Only a few weeks old, I'd first learned to feel love, then anger. Love drew me in; it bathed me in gold; it soothed all ills. But anger grew spikes like untempered steel, and it repelled me or, if I got too close, it shot through me like cold stilettos. It hurt. The spikes that come from Atar now are small, and there is an aura of something else beneath them. Something I'd never sensed on anyone before. I lean forward without a sound to study him closer. He sits primly; the only clue to his tension is the strip of cloth that he winds around his hand as though bandaging an injury. But I can feel it, a throbbing emotion beneath the protective bristles of anger.

I lean back into the bushes and close my eyes. Inside my head is another set of eyes, and I open them, only instead of opening from the top, like my outside eyelids, these I slide open from the bottom. I draw them from my inside eyes like pulling a sheet off a body and feel my mind go black. There is a bird twittering somewhere and a thorn nipping the back of my leg, but I ignore them and drink deeply of Atar with my inside eyes like one might smell a rose. I encounter the stipples of his anger-black and silver-and they sting me, but I push between them and delve for that which lies beneath, and I am filled with red light like fresh blood. Nauseous red. Red like the flesh that is revealed when trauma scrapes away the skin.

Grandfather Finwë's yellow light tickles the edge of Atar's, and I turn my attention to it next. Hopeful yellow, the color of the butterfly that danced in Turko's hand; it is trying to soothe Atar, to dilute the wounded red color, to turn it the color of Nelyo's rejected roses at least. Images flicker across the red: a white-clad woman in a garden, a gold marriage ring, a brown-haired little boy who leans on someone's knee, angry footsteps on the stairs. I turn to Grandfather Finwë-

You should not be here, Carnistir! You do not belong in the private corners of one's mind!

The admonishment comes from the center of Grandfather Finwë's yellow light, and it tears the sheet over my inside eyes and knocks my outside eyes open so that the rich colors disappear and there is only Atar and Grandfather Finwë, sitting on the bench among Nelyo's roses. The breath is gone from my chest; I feel like I've imploded. Never has another's voice come into me with such purpose, such perception! I peer through the leaves, terrified, and see Grandfather Finwë's glance skip across the rosebushes. His mouth has hardened. Atar tightens his arms against his body as if cold.

Did he see me? Had I been knocked from the shadow I wove around myself?

I am the shadow; I am the-I can't finish the incantation, for Grandfather Finwë's eyes are resting on the orange rosebush, and I know he sees me, but his face has softened, and I feel hopeful doubt that it wasn't his voice from the light at all.

Carnistir, come forward.

Did he speak to me? The words are as clear as if spoken, but Atar doesn't not move, does not look in my direction, so the words must have been in my head. Or were they in Grandfather Finwë's head? I hear myself mew like an animal wounded, and Atar's head swivels in my direction.

"Carnistir?" Inquisitive but edged with worry. I ease from the bushes. "Carnistir!"

Hands gather me, strong hands, warm hands, Atar's hands. I squeeze my eyes shut and weep. I feel his thumbs press against the bare skin of my ankles and my arms, and when I look at them through squinted eyes, they are spotted with blood.

"Where is Macalaurë?" Atar asks me. He sits me on his lap, on the bench; he is dabbing at my wounds with a white cloth Grandfather Finwë hands him, red roses on white. I open my eyes a sliver and see Grandfather Finwë watching me and know he is not fooled into believing that my tears are caused by nips from the rosebush in which I'd been hiding. His face is grave, stern, and I can see why outsiders find him a bit fearful. "Atar, I swear," my Atar is saying to him (it always sounds a bit weird to hear Atar call Grandfather Finwë Atar, like he is talking to himself), "for all the responsibility that our eldest has, Macalaurë would lose his body if his spirit was not bound to it."

"Now Fëanáro," Grandfather Finwë says, turning to Atar and sparing me from his reproachful gaze, "Macalaurë is still more than a decade shy of his majority, where Maitimo is only three years away. Looking after two young children is quite a responsibility for one so young."

As though he knows we are speaking of him, Macalaurë hammers onto the garden path, his hair streaming behind him, his gate lurching a bit because Turko is perched triumphantly on his hip. Turko is slathered with mud, though Macalaurë has wiped most from his face and hands-even his hair is brown with it-and Macalaurë's clothes are streaked with brown. "There you are!" he shouts to me, and I don't need to open my inner eye to feel his hysteria. He dumps Turko onto the ground-Turko immediately darts off to explore a trail of ants marching underneath the rosebushes-and kneels before me. "Atar, I'm sorry. You know how he is. He disappears like he was never even there. I turned for three seconds-three seconds!-and he was gone." He sees the bloody cloth in Atar's hand. "Oh, no. Did he hurt himself?" I can feel that he wants to touch me, to prod my wounds as Atar had done, but he cannot because of his muddy hands. I settle smugly against Atar's chest and smile at him.

"Why do you do this to me, Carnistir?" he asks me.

I can't tell you why Turko and I delight in tormenting Macalaurë so, but we do. Oh, do we. He is docile and kind-malleable-with the least flammable temper of anyone in our house-Amil included-and he probably never would be in a bit of trouble if not for Turko's and my antics. His color is gray, flat and even. I suppose I like the splatters of brilliance when we distress him; I like the way his boyish features wrinkle comically, the way he gives us the satisfaction of hearing his voice hitch when he is upset.

"He is barely scratched," Grandfather Finwë reassures Macalaurë before Atar has a chance to speak.

"I am so sorry, Atar. Grandfather Finwë. So sorry. I'll take him back now and leave you to your counsel." He wipes his hands on his trousers, smearing more mud on himself and reaches for me.

I yowl. I don't want to leave the warm security of Atar's arms-where I can listen to his private counsels with Grandfather Finwë-for Macalaurë's muddy uneasiness.

"No, no," Atar says quickly, "he can stay with us."

Macalaurë settles back on his heels in nervous relief.

"Take Tyelkormo," Atar instructs, in a voice that sounds measured, gentle, but really crackles with irritation just below the surface. Macalaurë, even with his trained musician's ears, does not hear it though, and I watch his shoulders sag with relief. "Take him and put him in the bath. He's filthy."

"Yes. He dove into a mud puddle," Macalaurë explains, and his forehead pinches and wrinkles.

"And clean yourself up too," Atar goes on. "Your grandfather and I will keep Carnistir if you think you can handle Tyelkormo."

"Well, Nelyo-" Macalaurë begins hopefully, but Atar cuts him off: "Nelyo is busy today. He cannot have his work interrupted every day to watch his brothers. Your brothers. You have been given unexpected leave. I do not think it unreasonable to ask you to watch Tyelkormo."

"Yes, Atar." Macalaurë's voice is meek; his nod contrite. "I apologize again and bid you farewell." He nods again, and his eyes will not meet Atar's.

"That is well, Macalaurë," Grandfather Finwë says quickly. "Farewell."

Macalaurë stands and gathers Turko into his arms and shuffles from the garden.

"You are hard on him," Grandfather Finwë says once Macalaurë had left.

"I am hard on all of my sons," says Atar, "as you were hard on me. Yet my love for them exceeds what can be expressed in words. I would leap from Taniquetil for any one of them. As you would for me."

Grandfather Finwë ponders that and nods slowly. "Yes. I suppose I was hard on you, Fëanáro. It just looks harsher when you stand on the outside." A wry grin twists his lips. "And Macalaurë does not fight the way you did."

"Nor does Nelyo, usually. Tyelkormo has a temper that dies as quickly as it rises. But this one-" he squeezes me into a smothering embrace and plants a loud kiss on my forehead- "this one is going to be my fighter."

I laugh and bite his thumb to prove his point. I taste my own blood and lick it in recoiling fascination.

Atar's voice softens as he cradles me, and I feel a sting as he dabs again at the scratches on my legs with the white cloth. "Do you think we should take him to the house? Tend his wounds?"

"Fëanáro, really," Grandfather Finwë teases, "have you four sons? And you still worry over scratches? They shall be healed before you leave for Formenos, and he shall have acquired twenty more by then."

"I will have a dozen sons before I cease to worry over scratches," Atar says into my hair. "Maybe not even then."

Grandfather Finwë laughs. I close my eyes and it runs over me like water. I can hear Macalaurë in his voice. Nelyo too. "A dozen sons, Fëanáro? Does Nerdanel have any idea that you are so ambitious?"

"Nerdanel does not protest trying for a fifth. In fact, there are times when she begins the attempt."

Grandfather Finwë laughs again, and Atar joins him this time. I twine a strand of Atar's hair, bored. I don't understand what is so extraordinary about my parents having four sons before reaching their hundredth birthdays. "So soon, Fëanáro?" Grandfather Finwë asks. "If you were to beget a child tonight, little Carnistir would only be five years old when he-or she-was born."

"And Tyelkormo would be but fifteen without even Nelyo at his majority-five underage children, I know-but Nerdanel and I go not for those austere traditions: separate bedrooms and the like; only cold, chaste affection. We do not expect to conceive again until Carnistir is around ten-that seems to be the pattern-but would I beget another child tonight, we would call for celebration."

I pop the strand of Atar's hair into my mouth to taste it. It tastes like hair, a bit acrid from the forge, but I imagine it tastes like the black licorice that we get when we visit Tirion.

"You sound like your mother, Fëanáro," Grandfather Finwë says, and his tone is light, but I sense a careful hesitation in his words, like he is stepping onto a frozen pond. From Atar, I feel red emitting again, a sore reopened, and he tightens his arms around me until my shoulder explodes into a dull ache and I whimper.

Atar often does not know his own strength.

He loosens his hold on me and kisses my face-my forehead, my nose, my cheeks-as though to quiet my fussing, but I know that it is so he does not have to look at Grandfather Finwë.

"Well, of course," Atar says. Hairline, temple, ear-my tears are stemmed, but his kisses do not cease. His voice is loud in my ear, like he is standing inside my head instead of sitting me in his lap. "She loves you."

I am only four; I have only had a few lore lessons so far with Atar, but even I do not miss his deliberate misspeak, for one does not accidentally speak of the foreverdead in present tense.

There is dead. And there is foreverdead.

When I was littler, my family tree confused me. Amil explained to me when I was very young that every Elf had a mother and a father, except the Unbegotten, like Grandfather Finwë. Amil had a mother and a father: my Grandfather Mahtan and my golden-beautiful Grandmother Istarnië. But Atar had only his Atar, my Grandfather Finwë. A branch was missing, broken, unspoken of.

"Is Atar Unbegotten?" I asked Nelyo. The Unbegotten were magical, the leaders of our people, revered. Atar was all of these things, and it explained the missing, unspoken of branch that would have been his mother. But Nelyo looked at me with pinched puzzlement and answered, "No, of course he is not. He is too young to be one of the Unbegotten."

I discovered death beneath my feet, when I would tread on butterflies in the meadows and they would lie, crumpled and broken, only beautiful and lifeless wings. I felt something pass over me like warm smoke when my foot fell, and I sat in the grass and cried, "Where did it go?" until Turko stooped beside me, covered in butterflies as he often was, and looked at the crushed tissue-wings in the grass. "It's dead, stupid," he said. "You crushed it."

And on the way to Formenos, the first summer of my memory, when we topped a hill and a deer stood at the bottom, a buck, with antlers like tree branches. I rode in front of Amil on her horse, and she stopped suddenly, and Atar took the bow that Nelyo handed him, strung an arrow from the quiver that hung alongside of his horse, and with a twang and a whistle, the deer stumbled and fell thrashing to the ground.

And the warm smoke passed over my eyes, and I shrieked, for I knew then that it was the feeling of dead.

I feared the feeling of dead, for I had seen it fall with such hasty grace upon so many creatures, and I imagined that it might smother me too.

It was Nelyo who discerned my fears, who explained to me that the Eldar were given life as long as that of Arda. "Our bodies may die," he said, "but our spirits live forever, and when we are healed, we are given new bodies and live again."

It was Macalaurë who told me when I asked, "Where is Atar's Amil?" that she was dead.

So I took to looking for her at festivals and feasts, for Nelyo had told me that a dead person's loved ones often spotted him for the first time at such places. I looked for a woman who had those features that belonged to Atar but not Grandfather Finwë: his slender grace, his quick hands, his bright eyes. I craned my neck to search for her, abandoning my meals and forgoing recreation to search, until Nelyo asked, "For whom do you search, little one? We are all here beside you," and I said, "Grandmother is not. I search for her, for Atar's Amil."

"Oh, little one." Suddenly, I found myself in his embrace, kneeling in the middle of a dance floor, watching skirts and feet swirling around us, as he rocked me in his arms. It was like I'd been hurt somehow, but I had not, had I? "Little one," he said again. "Atar's mother would not be here. Never shall we see her in life. She is forever dead, my love."

Foreverdead.

Like the butterflies, like the buck with the tree-branch antlers. She would not join those swirling skirts; I would not suddenly hear a woman's voice erupt into the same mirth that Atar's could when he was joyful, a joy that our proper rock of a Grandfather Finwë could not mimic.

I curled up like I wanted to disappear into Nelyo's arms and, in the middle of the dance floor with feet stomping and bright music playing, I wept.

Foreverdead.

The word came to haunt me, like the voice from beyond the stars, coming into my dreams and waking me with a cold start, the voice in my head so real that it could have been someone in the room beside me. Foreverdead, it whispered, edged in threat. I pushed Nelyo, Amil, and Macalaurë to tell me why Atar's mother-an Elf like the rest of us-was alone foreverdead, but they would not answer. Atar was the only one who spoke so frankly, and him I could not ask.

I made a mistake once, after a year of the thought of foreverdead circling in my mind. Laurelin was blooming; the light through my windows was golden, and Nelyo was getting me dressed for the day. I can dress myself if I need to, but I like the attention, the gentle hands guiding my body, the chances for soft words and kisses. Turko was dressed already, and he was in the corner of my room, dancing in a patch of golden light that had sneaked past my drapes. I fussed; I wanted to play with him, and Nelyo could not get my arm through my sleeve. "Come on, Carnistir," he grumbled, and his frustration addled me like a handful of pebbles. His soft blue patience was frayed in places that day. I whimpered and struggled, caught in my clothes, and his patient blue tore, and speckled black anger bulged forth. "Ilúvatar in Eä, Carnistir, hold still!" and the wholly irrational though came upon me that he might strike me, and I wriggled from his arms and tumbled to the floor, bruising myself and really sobbing now. My right arm was still trapped in my tunic; my left was free, and he grabbed it and wrenched me to my feet. That hurt. I kicked him, shrieking, and he lifted me at arm's length like a detested bag of garbage and tossed me onto my bed. "I hate you, Nelyo! I hate you! I hate you!" I heard myself screaming. He pinned me down, and his black anger smothered me, it squirmed into my nose like a stench and ran like slime down my throat. I gagged and spit on him; his head snapped back like it was a projectile much more substantial than a bead of saliva. His hands were clenched on my shoulders; they hurt me. "I hate you!" I shouted again. "I wish you were foreverdead!"

And the word that slithered through my dreams was out, shimmering in the air between us, and I watched him breathe it in, it went inside him like a cloud of dust, only he did not sneeze to expel it, and his hands left me lying there, on my bed, only half-dressed, as he scooped up Turko and slammed my door behind him.

I howled. I had never cried so hard for anyone in my short life, even when I was a hungry infant left with Macalaurë for an hour while Atar and Amil worked. "Nelyo!" I screamed. "Nelyo!" The door was closed, so final, separating me from any knowledge of him, and I feared that I'd sent him stepping into foreverdead with Turko in his arms. "Come back!" I wept, and my chest burned from lack of air and tears and snot ran down my face. My existence became one long scream-was it really me screaming, or was it in my head?-and even Laurelin's blooming light became dark, and I heard the door swing open so hard that it hit the wall behind it and knocked a picture down.

"Carnistir!" It was Macalaurë, and worry rippled the flat grayness of him. He was only half-dressed too, in his undershorts with a tunic pulled on backwards in his haste, his hair still tucked in the collar. He gathered me into his arms and rocked me. "Carnistir! What happened?"

"Foreverdead! I made Nelyo foreverdead!" My voice was hoarse and bubbled with tears; I knew he didn't understand me, but he rocked me and shushed me and eased my right arm through my sleeve, and I clung to him and his calm gray color.

"Shh, baby, you're safe. I've got you. You're safe." And he sang to me, a trembling lullaby that he sang at night sometimes, and like an apparition, Nelyo appeared in the door behind him, his silver-gray eyes reddened around the edges and his patient blue already mending.

~oOo~

Atar and Grandfather Finwë walk in the garden, talking of family and politics in Tirion-often the line between them blurred-and I sit astride Atar's hip, chewing on his hair. I like being carried by Atar; he can carry me forever like it's nothing. Probably, for him, it is.

After a while, we hear footsteps beating down the path behind us. "Nelyo, Nelyo!" I cry, and a moment later, Nelyo emerges around the bend behind us, running in a manner that does not fit his usual composure.

"Grandfather Finwë!" he shouts, and Grandfather Finwë catches my big, nearly-grown brother in an embrace that makes him suddenly seem small and little, like me.

"Maitimo!" Grandfather Finwë sets him back, an arm's length away, and appraises him. "My! Are you still growing? You sprout another inch every time I see you! How many years is it now? Three, until your majority?"

Nelyo nods eagerly and bites his lower lip to keep from grinning too widely. I notice spots of ink on his lips-he has been licking his quill again-and more spots on his tunic and his boots are untied.

"You will be taller than Fëanáro by the time you finish growing." In truth, Nelyo is only an inch or two shorter than Atar already, and he looks Grandfather Finwë straight in his eye. Nelyo smiles, and Grandfather Finwë licks his thumb and tries to polish the ink from the side of his mouth. "You have something ..."

"It's from licking his quills all of the time. I tell him not to do that," Atar grumbles, and Grandfather Finwë doesn't even glance at him before saying, "Ah, Fëanáro, you did the same when you were his age."

Grandfather Finwë is the only person who can make me believe that Atar was ever as young as I am.

So we walk, the four of us, and Grandfather Finwë quizzes Nelyo about his work. If there is one thing that will make Nelyo chatter nonstop, it is the research he does with our father. He reads to Turko and me from his big volumes to keep us quiet; Turko listens, but always I fall asleep. It sounds like he is speaking another language, and languages other than my native Noldorin never make much sense to me. I fall asleep then, on Atar's shoulder, with a strand of his hair poking out of my mouth and hunks of his tunic balled in my fists.

I am aware of being passed from person to person. I do not see their faces; their voices are a buzz and their scents lost in the summer breeze, but I feel their colors. I open my eyes, and the light has changed. Telperion is polishing his sister's golden radiance with silver. I have been asleep for some time. Atar's brilliant white radiance leaves me, and I am wrapped in blue. I drift back to sleep in Nelyo's arms.

When I awaken, it is radiance that again swallows me, but it is milder and tinged with violet: Amil.

Atar and Nelyo have gone to prepare supper; we are in one of the sitting rooms, though none of our sitting rooms equal those of Grandfather Finwë and our uncles in Tirion. Ours always seem to be filled with cast-off shoes and the beginnings of crafts and Nelyo's scribbled-upon parchments and bits of clothing draped across the backs of furniture. Amil is laughing at something Grandfather Finwë has said; the violet edges to her brilliance deepen and wrap around me like silk. I hear myself sigh, and I settle in her arms. Through slits of eyes, I see Turko on Grandfather Finwë's lap opposite us. His shoulders sag; his eyelids droop, snap open, and droop again. Turko shuns sleep, though I do not know why; sleep is like a warm blanket on a cold night. The sound of a harp tickles my ears. Macalaurë sits on the floor, plays idle melodies, and stares into nothingness. I feel his gray and know that-with Nelyo gone with Atar-he feels alone, as he often does.

Grandfather Finwë tells Amil many of the same things that he told Atar in the garden. The difference is that Amil asks him for such information: She inquires about our family in Tirion, especially her half-sisters-in-law, who are both expecting. She asks after our cousin Findekáno, who is only a year younger than Turko. I have supposedly met my cousin at my first begetting day, but I do not remember much about him, just his chocolate-brown hair and hesitant gray eyes. He was too young to be invited to hold me. I remember my uncles, though: Nolofinwë, tall, stern, and secure, and quick little Arafinwë, who wrapped me in a light like Laurelin at her zenith, and Atar's bright eyes on them as they crooned over me, his hands held slightly in front of him like he feared they might drop me.

Grandfather Finwë says nothing about the letter from Nolofinwë begging tutelage from Atar. But I know Amil and she will say yes.

~oOo~

Nelyo and Atar prepare the supper for the night. Cooking duties rotate between them and Macalaurë, with Atar being the best, though a bit haphazard, tossing in odd spices and scraps that don't seem to belong but always seem to work. Nelyo is very measured, and all of his recipes taste a bit bland. Macalaurë, as Turko informs him regularly, still has a lot to learn.

Atar has made some kind of soup. Atar always makes soup, and Amil teases him and says that it is only so that he can get rid of the bits of vegetable and meat that no one would eat otherwise. Atar does not deny it. He does not like to waste the gifts Arda has given us, he says.

I personally find soup a bit silly, like it should be served in a glass and drunk like juice. It is Atar's turn again to feed me. We eat in the courtyard, at the round glass table, so there is no need for precise, assigned seating. I end up in a chair to Atar's left, beneath a little pear tree, with Macalaurë on my other side. I amuse myself by eating the pear blossoms until Nelyo catches me and makes me stop. (And spit out the sodden blossoms from my mouth into his hand.)

Atar picks me up from my seat. He has a plan, he says, to minimize the damage I do to my clothes during meals. (It is not my fault that he and Amil forget that I am little and give me more food than I can eat, leaving me no choice but to play with the rest or be forced to sit for hours until I can finish it all.) He strips me down to my underwear-even taking off my shoes-and puts on an old, stained shirt of Macalaurë's that comes down to my ankles. The sleeves come down to my knees. I whimper. There is no way I can possibly eat.

"Atar!" I whine, and he says, "Patience, Carnistir," and rolls the sleeves until my hands are free, though there are big, heavy rings of cloth like weights around my wrists now.

He sits me back in my chair beside him.

"I don't want soup," I complain. It is a murky red-brown color with flecks of meat floating on the surface.

"You'll sit here until you eat it," he threatens.

After Eruhantalë, Grandfather Finwë pours the wine. I don't really like wine, though Nelyo assures me it is a taste you acquire as you get older. I get a half-glass every night with supper. Atar says that wine is good for the spirit; indeed, he does seem to laugh more after he has had a few glasses. I have learned that if I pinch my lips shut and pour it really fast against them, most of it will run down my chin and onto my shirt, saving me from having to drink it. Good for the spirit or not, it is rotten grapes and tastes like rotten grapes.

Turko is gulping his half-glass, holding the goblet with both hands. "That's all you're getting, Tyelkormo," I hear Amil warn him, and he sets down the glass with reluctance and drinks water instead.

I drop my spoon into my soup. It makes a funny-sounding plop and little balls of soup fly into the air. Atar does not notice; he is talking to Grandfather Finwë, and Amil is carving the meat. (Venison tonight, tough and dirty-tasting.) I drop the spoon again and again. Plop plop PLOP. The last is a big one, and soup splashes onto my nose and lips. When I lick it, it does not taste too bad, but I keep dropping my spoon anyway, and soon, half the bowl is gone onto my face and shirt.

Nelyo has made some kind of sweet corn. This I will eat, although Atar keeps a sharp eye on me while I eat it, and I don't have a chance to make Turko laugh by putting bits of it in my nose and sneezing it out onto Macalaurë. I have to take my corn apart before I eat it, though: I do not like the little sleeves that hold each kernel, so I separate them from the meat of the corn with my fork. They taste like little shreds of skin.

Amil puts a stringy chunk of venison onto my plate. I frown; it is way too big. I will never be able to eat that much, so I wait until Atar drops a knife under the table and scoop half of it onto Macalaurë's plate while he is reaching to pour himself more wine. (He piles his plate so high with food that he will never notice the addition. Atar swears that Macalaurë and Nelyo eat their weights in supper.) I cut the last half in half again and hide it in my soup, where it looms like a big lumpy shadow beneath the surface.

Atar comes up from underneath the table, having found the knife. "Can I have gravy?" I ask him.

Three voices at once-Atar, Amil, and Nelyo: "May I-"

"May I have gravy?"

Gravy is the best part of supper. Indeed, it is the only thing that makes certain parts of supper-like venison-bearable. It is like soup but without the weird bits of things floating in it. (Unless Macalaurë makes it, in which case it always has lumps.) Once, I got angry with Atar for making me eat my soup first (thus eliminating any chance I had of getting rid of it without actually having to eat it) and waited until he stood to open a new bottle of wine and stuck my entire slice of cheese-and-broccoli casserole onto his chair. He yelled pretty loud when he sat down. Turko was sitting on his other side and could have borne the brunt of it, but I gave myself away by laughing. I got punished by having to do without gravy for one whole week.

I am allowed one ladleful of gravy on each part of my meal. Except vegetables. Amil says that only savages put gravy on their vegetables. Atar doesn't even have to ask; he obediently doles a ladleful onto my meat, my slice of bread, and my mushroom pie. The venison still tastes like dirty yarn, but at least the gravy lets it slide down my throat without having to be chewed. I eat the tough crusts of the bread (bread tastes like paper) and mash the soft insides into pulp in the gravy and smear it around my plate until you can't even tell it was a whole piece of bread. The mushroom pie I eat, except for the crust (also paper, but tougher), which I pulverize into crumbs and mix into the gravy/bread mixture that is hardening into paste.

"I'm finished," I announce. My plate is one big glistening smear of gravy paste.

"Finish your soup," Atar says.

"But I'm not hungry!" I protest and earn a sharp look.

"Then you shall sit here until you are hungry enough to finish your soup." To Grandfather Finwë, he says, "I have never seen a child with such an aversion to eating. It is a surprise that he even grows at all."

"It is not unheard of at his age," Grandfather Finwë says. "Arafinwë wouldn't touch meat for five years."

I would finish my soup but for the big piece of venison I stuck in the middle of it. I hadn't thought of that when I'd chosen such a hiding place.

I lift the venison out and sit it on my plate. Then I sit my soup bowl on top of the venison. It rocks and rattles, but the soup is somewhat edible again. I sip at each spoonful and let the rest drop down the front of my shirt with the wine.

"Finished," I say, letting the spoon clatter into the empty bowl. Atar lifts the bowl and stares at the hidden piece of venison. "Gravy?" I say hopefully.

"You're close to getting your gravy privilege revoked again," he tells me as he dumps a ladleful onto the venison, "if you don't stop all this fooling around with your supper."

"Yes, Atar," I say obediently and pick forkfuls of venison small enough to slide down my throat without chewing.

Atar pours a fourth glass of wine for himself and Nelyo and Grandfather Finwë. Nelyo is laughing-head tossed back and his voice very loud-at a story that Grandfather Finwë is telling about our Uncle Arafinwë and his puzzlement at Telerin marriage traditions. (My Aunt Eärwen is a Teler and has silvery hair and a funny accent.) Nelyo hardly ever laughs like that, without restraint, unless he is working on his fourth glass of wine, like he is now. Atar has heard the story already-after all, he stood at my uncle's wedding-but he is chuckling too.

"Imagine poor Arafinwë's confusion when Olwë, first, takes him to Eärwen's bedroom, then pushes him in and locks the door behind him!" Grandfather Finwë says. "And Eärwen takes off her dress and says, 'My people bond the night before the wedding, in case our spirits reject each other, then we don't have to take each other in Ilúvatar's name.' Poor Arafinwë knew he was fortunate to be marrying into Telerin royalty but had no idea he'd be that lucky!"

"He was lucky that the bonding worked," Nelyo laughs, "or he would have felt really awkward."

Grandfather Finwë dismisses the Teleri and their strange traditions with a wave of his hand. "Eh. It always works. That a spirit can reject another is just a silly superstition."

"Some Noldor practice that tradition too," Atar says, smiling coyly at Amil. She has had a few glasses herself, so she smiles back. "Though not out of fear of rejecting each other's spirits."

I know that the wine is doing well for Grandfather Finwë's spirits because, usually, when Atar talks about his wedding, Grandfather Finwë gets really quiet and scowls. Nelyo gets uncomfortable, but he is still grinning, so his spirits must be doing well from the wine too.

Maybe I should try to grow up and acquire a taste for wine. Maybe then I'd know why the story about Uncle Arafinwë marrying Aunt Eärwen is so funny. Unfortunately, most of my wine is still on the front of Macalaurë's old tunic, so I lift it to my face and give it a hearty lick. It tastes nasty, like congealed soup mixed with rotten grapes, and I gag and spit a little.

Atar turns to me, and I have to hastily suck my spit back into my mouth before I get accused of drooling like an orc. "Are you finished?" he asks, and I nod. He inspects my plate and doesn't even seem to notice the pile of gravy paste. At tomorrow's Eruhantalë, I shall be grateful for grapes and wine. He drags me from his chair and into his lap, laughing at Grandfather Finwë's impersonation of poor Uncle Arafinwë trying to explain why he spent the traditional Noldorin Last Night Home away from home, and his laughter rumbles in his chest like a bag of rocks sent leaping down a hill. Maybe a bit of the good spirits from the wine rubs off on me because suddenly I love him like I've never known possible. I love him so much that I lunge my arms around his neck and bite him on the throat, making him laugh again, his voice tingling against my teeth as he says, "Still hungry, little one?"

~oOo~

Grandfather Finwë leaves after supper and music. Usually, we lounge in the sitting room until Turko and I get sleepy, but tonight, Amil asks Macalaurë to take us immediately for our baths and to amuse us, please, in his bedroom until she and Atar are done with their counsel.

Atar and Amil do not often hold formal, private counsels. They did when the Telerin music teacher wanted to take Macalaurë as a student last year; they did when Nelyo got into some kind of trouble with a maiden in Tirion a few months ago. Other than that, their counsels are held at the supper table, over food and glasses of wine, with Turko knocking things over and me trying to find innovative ways to avoid eating the nasty stuff that they insist on putting on my plate and Nelyo and Macalaurë yapping about their studies and eating their weights in supper.

Tonight, though, they will hold formal counsel in their bedroom with the door locked. Macalaurë looks puzzled, but he sets aside his harp and gathers Turko and me and takes us for our bath. He doesn't know what it is about and neither does Nelyo, whose brow also furrows with worried wonderment. I know what it's about, though. It's about the letter from Uncle Nolofinwë. About Cousin Findekáno. But I don't say that.

Macalaurë does as he is told and takes us to his bedroom after we are dried and dressed. He and Nelyo lie across his bed-Nelyo reading his usual parchments and Macalaurë doing some last-minute assignments to be taken to his Telerin tutor before we leave for Formenos-and Turko and I are told to play quietly on the floor. If Nelyo wasn't there, we would play as loudly as we could and watch Macalaurë scramble around and try to make us behave. But Nelyo wears a serious look, and we know better than to test his patience. I sense some fraying in his blue, like I did the day I almost accidentally sent him to foreverdead. We work on the puzzle he gave us without a word, even though we know before even beginning it that it cannot be solved.

Macalaurë asks, "Nelyo?"

"Hmm?"

"What do you think they're talking about?"

Macalaurë lies with his head back against his pillows; Nelyo faces the opposite direction, with his bare feet pressed against Macalaurë's headboard. Atar says that my two eldest brothers are best friends-Macalaurë is only eight years younger than Nelyo-and that's why they will spend hours like this, while Turko and I play on the floor beneath their awareness. I wonder if someday Turko and I will be friends like that.

"I know not, little brother," Nelyo says softly. It sounds strange to hear Macalaurë called "little brother"; that name is reserved for Turko and me, who are actually little, not Macalaurë, who is thirty-nine years old and tall as a tree next to us. "Why are you so concerned? You haven't been caught naked with any maidens, have you?"

"Most certainly not!" A moment's pause, then, "I wish I had."

They both glance at Turko and me, playing on the floor. I give them a grin to show that nothing is amiss.

Nelyo looks back at his parchment, but he speaks still to Macalaurë. "You shouldn't wish for that. I had to clean the forge every night for a month."

His eyes meet Macalaurë's and they both smile.

"You know it was worth it," Macalaurë says, and Nelyo hesitates for moment, as though pondering something grave, then agrees. "It was worth it."

They laugh and go back to their studies. I have never seen two people who can study as much as they do. Even Atar stops reading and writing long enough to go to the forge every day and make swords and jewelry and stuff. And I don't think he reads in bed either, like Nelyo, or does any writing. I asked Nelyo once, and he told me that if Amil and Atar were content to read in bed, then I never would have been born.

Nelyo has a strange way of connecting things sometimes.

~oOo~

Did I fall asleep?

I must have because the world, when I open my eyes, is hazy like it is covered in spiderwebs. It is also sideways, and I realize that I am lying on my side, on the soft blue rug beside Macalaurë's bed. Turko-tipped sideways-is still idly pushing pieces of the puzzle around, but he looks no closer to solving it than he was when I was helping him, and he is sucking his lower lip into his mouth like he is trying not to cry.

There is shouting.

The air in Macalaurë's bedroom simmers with anger. I can only imagine what it must be like to walk down the hall and open my parents' bedroom door; it would knock me over; it would be like the heat that festers inside an oven and blasts forth when you open the door.

"I cannot do it!" Atar's voice rises until I can hear his words and not just his anger. "I am tired of everyone expecting that I should sit my life's work aside so that I can teach their sniveling brats to hold a hammer! I am not a damned teacher, Nerdanel, I am a craftsmen, and I was not meant for this kind of life!"

His last words erupt in a scream, but Amil is not afraid, and she starts before he has even finished: "You are selfish, Fëanáro, and that is it! Selfish! Selfish!" She wields that word as though it was a sword and she wants to cut him with it. "You are so selfish that I am ashamed sometimes of you! Always have you been selfish, but now you make me bleeding sick!"

I sit up carefully, trying not to disturb the air, imagining that if they were aware of my tiny movement, then they would turn their anger on me.

Nelyo is sitting back against Macalaurë's headboard now, and Macalaurë leans back against him with Nelyo's chin in his hair and his face turned into Nelyo's chest. There is a book open on the bed, and Nelyo's fingers are splayed across its middle, holding his place, but he is not reading it because his eyes are closed. Macalaurë looks both littler and older at the same time: as little as me, helpless and scared, and as old as Grandfather Finwë, who has seen his wife foreverdead and lived in the dark, in another time and place. With his other hand, Nelyo strokes Macalaurë's hair, and his fingers tremble.

"You will do it, Fëanáro! You will take your brother-son as a student, or I swear to Manwë himself that I will not go with you to Formenos. I will stay and teach the child myself, and I will not go to Formenos. And so shall our sons stay in Tirion, where they belong, and you can cry your delusions to your cold bed at night!"

"You are less a wife than you are a traitor and a fool!"

Turko's hands crumple what little progress he has made on the puzzle. He looks up at me; his blue eyes shimmer like polished glass. His face changes, becomes firmer as I have seen Nelyo's do when I come suddenly upon him in a moment when he thought he was alone-standing outside the laboratory, where he was holding counsel with Atar, and biting his knuckles-and I realize for the first time that hot tears course down my cheeks.

Turko crawls over and crouches next to me, and we embrace and rock each other like we are both the baby and the father at the same time. His breath is hot and quick in my ear, and his silky hair tickles my neck. His arms are stronger than I knew, stronger than the arms of a fourteen-year-old should be.

They are interrupting each other now, both in such a rage that their words are too fast and too mingled for me to understand. I cry silently against Turko's shoulder, and he lifts me up, puts me on the bed, and with his arms around my chest, drags me to Nelyo. The book snaps shut as Nelyo embraces us. I want to reach out and touch Macalaurë's cheek-so close now-to give him some comfort, but his face is rigid and intent, like he is counting Nelyo's heartbeats to keep from hearing our parents fight.

I snuggle into Nelyo instead, and I feel his thought trickle through my head. I wish I were not the oldest.

I bury my hoarse sobs in his tunic.

Amil uses profanity against Atar that Nelyo and Macalaurë would have been punished for saying aloud. Atar calls her names lower than those given to creatures that squirm in the mud. Obstinate bitch! he says. I feel Nelyo wince, like he's been burned.

A door slams open; I hear it hit the wall; I hear the wood crack. "Go then!" she screams "Go!" and footsteps thunder past us in the hall and roar down the stairs. Macalaurë's eyes squeeze shut like he's waiting for a sting he knows is coming. The front door slams.

~oOo~

Nelyo tucks Turko and me into my bed.

Usually, I do not like sleeping with someone else, especially Turko, who snores and kicks, but tonight, I am grateful that Nelyo insists upon it and relieved when Turko does not protest.

"Who will tuck you in, Nelyo?" Turko asks in a high, childish voice.

Nelyo smiles-or rather, his corners of his lips turn up and his eyes crinkle, but there is no real joy in his face. "I have been putting myself to bed for many years now, little one," he says. He leans over to kiss our foreheads. "But I shall stay with Macalaurë all the same, just for tonight."

He draws my drapes and closes the door without a sound. Turko rolls over and kicks me in the shin, but I am so grateful for his presence that I forgo my pillow to press my face into his back.

The house is silent. There is no sound from Atar and Amil's bedroom next door to mine, just through the wall behind my head. If Nelyo and Macalaurë stay up talking into the night, as they sometimes do, then they do so in voices so low that I cannot hear them. The only sounds come from outside: a hammer ringing, puncturing the stillness of the night. It is too loud and sharp to be swung in an act of love, of creation. It is wielded to smash and destroy.

~oOo~

Fëanáro!

I awaken.

My room is perfectly dark; not even a sliver of light sneaks past the drapes. Turko has rolled away from me in the night and lies facedown on the far edge of my bed with his arm and hair hanging over the side, breathing heavily, deeply asleep. He has pulled most of the covers from me, and I am cold.

Outside, there is no sound. No wind, no insects. No hammer.

"Fëanáro!" So it was a voice and not something that crept unbidden into my head while I slept. It is my mother's voice. "Ah! Fëanáro!" she cries again, shouting like before, but differently now. There is hysteria in her voice, like a star swollen to the trembling brink of supernova.

I wonder where Atar is; I sense him near. I sense the mingling of their colors, like the mingling of the Trees in the early morning and early evening: my mother's beautiful violet-tinged brilliance always consumed by my father's white light. Then I hear his voice too, next to hers, his words coming fast and feverish, stumbling over each other until they make little sense. "I love you, Nerdanel, I love I love you more than I love you more than, ah, Nerdanel!" and he cries out wordlessly, like he's been wounded in some way, but I feel his color flash whiter until I forget that it is in my head and close my eyes against it, fearing that if I look too hard upon it, I will lose my sight. I wrest the blankets from Turko and cringe beneath them, afraid, wondering if that flare was the supernova, signaling the death of the star.

Death is supposed to be unknown to my people, but I find that, sometimes at night, it still enters my thoughts.

I do not feel either of their spirits recede, though the hot white light of my father's dims to its normal luminance. If they had died, would I know it? Death is just the loss of the body; the spirit remains. What if they join Grandmother in foreverdead?

I wait for a few minutes, then slip from my bed.

The stone floor is like ice against my feet. I shiver and walk soundlessly down the hall to their bedroom door. It is a hard oak door, ornately carved by Amil, but when Atar threw it open against the wall before, he cracked the corner. The crack fractures Varda's face like a sideways smile. I ease the door open and slip into their bedroom; their drapes are thrown open, and silver light pours in. Telperion is at her fullest.

I creep beside their bed. They sleep in the middle, naked, in a tangle of sheets. Atar lies half atop Amil with his head on her breasts and his legs tangled in hers. Her arms grip him like she fears he might be torn away from her if she lets go. His hair is tangled, and it falls over his face and mixes with hers, black and red mingling like Laurelin and Telperion in the morning. The silver light casts a strange sheen over their bodies. It reminds me of the glaze that Amil puts on pottery that always makes it look wet.

I touch Atar's calf. His skin is warm-burning, actually, as though with fever-and damp. Amil is cooler but flushed. Are they alive? I have trouble discerning their breathing, and for a moment, I think to try to wake them, but Atar murmurs something unintelligible in his sleep and Amil shushes him-her hand rising from his back to knot itself in his tangled hair-as though they share the same dreams.

I am afraid ...

Shh ... do not be ...

I would myself die to bring her back ...

Then you would bring the grief unto our House fivefold, for your sons and I would not survive your loss.

The words on their lips are unintelligible, but I realize that I can hear them in my head, as I can at times hear powerful thoughts as they come suddenly upon others. I remember the broad yellow color of Grandfather Finwë earlier, I remember the march of images across red, I remember the admonishment that slammed into my head: You should not be here, Carnistir! You do not belong in the private corners of one's mind! Can they sense me now, as Grandfather Finwë sensed me before?

I love you more than I love my own life ...

More than I love all the Valar ...

More than I love Ilúvatar.

I turn and run from the room before they awaken.

~oOo~

The fast knocking of hoofbeats awakens me early the next morning. A rider travels fast from the stable, away from the house. Telperion is dimming; Laurelin gilds his withering edges in gold.

Turko has opened my drapes and sits on the windowsill, hugging his knees to his chest. I sit up and rustle the sheets, and he looks at me. His hair is very gold in Laurelin's light.

"Atar just sent a fast rider with a message. To Tirion."

He turns back to the window. His blue eyes are lit up, as if from within.

"Our cousin shall go with us to Formenos."

Maitimo

We leave for Formenos in three days.

Three days? Already? It is perplexing: It seems like we are still preparing to leave for Formenos last year, like this year went by too fast to really have happened.

But, of course, that is how time moves in Valinor. There are no seasons-at least not in the sense of changing leaves and weather-it is hot year-round; the winds are mild; snow is nonexistent except at the tops of mountains that line our horizon. Every day here is the same: Telperion wanes and Laurelin brings the heat to the morning; she waxes at midday, and as Telperion brightens into evening, we get an hour of light rain, enough to keep the trees green and the gardens fruitful, as though anything is ever in want in Valinor. But I wake up in the morning and am never entirely sure: Did yesterday even exist? Or is yesterday, in fact, today, for every morning is the same, swept clean of identifying features, and I wonder if time is row after row of identical days or just the same day repeated into infinity.

In Formenos, it is different: The leaves change color as summer diminishes; the nights are cold; the days are warm but mild-in the summer anyway-but some are warmer than others and one can never predict when he might need a light cloak to keep the chill off his arms. Every day is erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes, Laurelin blazes against a cloudless sky. On other days, violent storms tear the sky. Sometimes, rain does not come for weeks. But time seems real there, marked by events like droughts and downpours, more real than it does in Valinor anyway, where time is beautifully and sickeningly bland.

The days before we leave are full of frantic activity. Even Atar does not go to his forge except to toss out the accumulated clutter-and Atar is quite good at accumulating clutter-and to scrub every inch until it shines like it was never used. The house is cleaned and sealed. Those horses that we will not take with us are given to the families whose properties border ours for keeping until we return, and the stables are cleaned and aired. Trunks are packed; supplies are gathered; tents and heavy blankets that we will need on the journey are tossed from the attic and tied to the carts.

Macalaurë and I work in the garden. Our garden is on a plot of land behind the house, surrounded by a low fence and filled with row after row of plants with many-shaped and -colored leaves swaying in the breeze. We have a big family-in addition to Atar and Amil's apprentices and assistants-and normally, all of the vegetables we grow are used. Today, Macalaurë and I will pick all that is ripe: most will be taken with us on the journey; the rest will go with the horses to those who share our property borders, for Atar despises that we should be given anything that is wasted. While we are gone, the assistants who stay behind will use the forge, under the conditions that they tend the garden every day and see that the vegetables are given to families who can use them.

Macalaurë is full of complaints today. He hates to work outside in the hottest hours, and he wears a white cotton cloak over his head and shoulders to protect his skin. He inherited Atar's fair complexion but not his tolerance to heat, and Laurelin at her fullest makes his skin red and sore. Also, his hair is dark-the color of bitter chocolate-and heavy like satin. Would I place my hand against his hair in such light, his hair would burn my hand like dark glass freshly forged. He is hard to look upon, though, in his white cloak in such bright light, like staring directly at white-hot steel just removed from the furnace.

"This is atrocious, Nelyo," he grumbles. We have made it past the tomatoes and are into the peppers now, red and green and yellow, the fruits of a fractured rainbow. Macalaurë likes to use big words when he is angry, as though they make less obvious the sheer childish satisfaction of pointless complaining. "Why do we have to do this, year after year, when Tyelkormo is more than capable? Manwë's britches, Carnistir is more than capable of this brainless nonsense."

If Macalaurë sizzles in the midday heat, I cringe to think of poor dark little Carnistir, with his porcelain skin so quick to flush and his black hair that he got from our father.

The real reason Macalaurë complains is not that the task is actually difficult for him or in some way insulting but because tonight we will go to a feast in the forest, an hour-long ride from home, and he wants the afternoon to riffle through his clothes and soak in his bathtub and braid his hair in hopes of finally procuring a maiden to court.

"Macalaurë, you know what Atar said. We are excused for the rest of the day if we do this. And do you forget that it should be your turn to cook supper and my turn to clean up? Which would make us an hour late, at least?"

He sighs. He knows I am right; he is thirty-nine years old, edging out of childhood, but every now and then, he is tempted to turn back and bask in its liberties. Like being senselessly contradictory. "Yes, but now I shall have to go smelling like dirt!"

"You sound like Tyelkormo," I tell him. Our third brother, Tyelkormo, always has things pressed to his nose, while Carnistir is always putting things in his mouth. "And you shall not smell like dirt, for you shall bathe when we are done."

"Dirt and rotten vegetables," he mutters, even though we have yet to encounter a vegetable that has rotted. Atar gets up early every day to care for the garden, and his diligence is obvious: The dirt is soft and dark, neatly turned; there is not a weed or yellowed leaf to be seen. Just like Atar. Meticulous. Perfect.

"Will you braid my hair?" he asks me suddenly, his foul mood suddenly blown away, storm clouds on a summer's breeze. "In that way that always makes you look good?"

"Just because I look good as such," I tell him, "does not mean that you shall. I have red hair and yours is brown."

He rolls his eyes. "It will look better if you do it then if I attempt to do it. My fingers can't handle such meticulous tasks."

"Just pretend you're playing your harp," I tell him, "it's all you'll get to play tonight anyway," and he straightens and drops his basket to lunge across the rows of peppers at me. Macalaurë is smaller than I was at his age-much smaller than I am now-both short and slight of frame, and his body colliding with mine is inconsequential. But I stumble backwards anyway, to give him satisfaction, and make the appropriate grunts of surprise. "Ilúvatar in Eä, if you are not Varda's tweezers!" he yells at me.

"Well, you are Mandos' muffin tin!" I shout back, and he punches me in the arm, remarkably hard for someone so small. "Ai!"

"To Irmo with you," he grumbles, shaking his hand, and I realize that my arm has hurt his fist as much as his fist has hurt my arm and laugh. He tries to look stormy, but his lips are twitching, and when I reach over and pinch him underneath the ribs, he shrieks with laughter.

"Shh!" I tell him, and we both watch the house where, sure enough, Amil's head pokes from her workshop windows. "Boys? Are you well?"

"We are fine, Amil," I shout to her in my most sincere voice, "just picking peppers," even holding one aloft to prove my point. Satisfied, she ducks back inside the window. Macalaurë and I both collapse into silent laughter.

Cursing has long been a private game of ours. When we were little, we used to help Atar keep the forge clean, sweeping and polishing while he worked, and sometimes he would burn himself on a piece of hot metal or a spark would jump onto his skin, and he would jump and curse in his loud, authoritative voice. "Ilúvatar in Eä! Varda's stars!" or, if it was really bad, "To the Void with you!" Macalaurë and I took to whispering these curses to each other when no one else was around. In our babyish voices, whispered in the other's ear, they sounded funny. Even funnier were the ones we made up ourselves: Nienna's beard, salt of Ulmo, Manwë in Varda. These we would hiss at each other when no one else was around, not our little brothers and certainly not Amil. (Macalaurë served a weeklong sentence washing dishes when he was little for swearing by Nienna's tears after he dropped a piece of stone on his foot.) Only once were we caught at our game, when we were both older and working in the forge with Atar, and we thought he'd left to get some fresh water from the house, and we started: Macalaurë, with fruit of Yavanna; me, with Aulë's hammer; Macalaurë back with tickled Tulkas; and back to me with Nahar's manure, which made Macalaurë laugh so hard that he couldn't counter, and we turned to reach for clean rags to polish the gemstones we were setting, and saw Atar standing behind us.

I don't know what I looked like then, but I know that every drop of color drained from Macalaurë's already fair face, and Atar walked past us, grabbed the bottle that he'd left behind, and said, "I forgot this," and walked back out the door. I must have looked at least as petrified as poor Macalaurë; after all, I am the eldest and always expected to know better. "Do you think he's angry?" Macalaurë whispered in a trembling voice. I didn't trust my voice, and so I only shrugged and let my quivering legs drop me onto the bench. I knew Amil's punishments well, and Atar's were always worse.

Atar came back a minute later and offered the bottle to us first before drinking of it himself; I was so nervous that the water only sat in my mouth; I couldn't swallow it and might have eventually drowned on it, if Atar hadn't said, "Those swears were pretty good, Macalaurë and Nelyo, but I know the two of you can do better." He pushed the bottle back into my hands and went back to hammering on a carving knife that he was making for our mother.

Still, the game remains a private one, conducted in the rare moments when we are free of parents and brothers alike.

We bend again to the peppers. Laurelin's zenith has passed, and the day is settling into afternoon. Soon, Laurelin will dim and Telperion will brighten, and the Mingling of the Lights and evening will come. I feel a nervous quiver of excitement and try to swallow it before it erupts into impatience like Macalaurë's. The peppers are waxy in my hands; the smell of earth engulfs me. Macalaurë is humming a tune under his breath, something light that one might dance to. Something that he will probably play tonight.

I try to decipher my emotions, to cut them apart and understand them. Will she be there tonight? a persistent little voice wonders. She said she would. But our departure for Formenos is only three days away, and Atar has kept his apprentices as busy as his sons. Next thought: What is your fascination with her? and when I reply that she is pretty, my mind automatically takes apart her features one by one until I see that she is ordinary, really, if not a little coarse, but when I see her composite, my heart beats faster and abashed warmth spreads through my face and my groin at the same time.

Annawendë ...

I think it is only the wind through the trees until I feel Macalaurë's breath in my ear and realize that it is him, and that I have been standing, half-stooped over, with a yellow pepper in each hand, smiling at the ground. I turn and punch him in the stomach-not hard, because I really don't want to hurt him-but he feigns having the wind knocked from him, doubles over, and groans, "Tulkas' armpit ..." which makes me choke with laughter.

"That was a good one!"

"You don't know your own strength, Nelyo," he moans, and I realize that I may have hurt him a little bit. Unintentionally, of course. I grab his arm and drag him upright. "Stop griping. Tyelkormo takes punches better than you," and he surprises me with a quick, grinding jab to the ribs before darting off to take shelter in the row of green beans. I think about pursuing him, but the thought of Annawendë makes me hasten to my task, for the faster I finish here, the faster I can begin preparing for tonight.

At last, we reach the end of the rows and look back at the baskets scattered behind us. "Finally," Macalaurë says, lowering the hood on his cloak now that Laurelin has faded, and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The Trees will mingle within the next hour; we must hasten or else go-as Macalaurë suggested-smelling like dirt.

We carry the baskets to the back of the house, where Amil and Atar will choose what will be taken on our journey. Tomorrow, those who share our borders will come and each take a horse and what they think their family can eat of the vegetables. The rest will go to Tirion, where there is always plenty of use for fresh vegetables grown outside the city walls.

Macalaurë and I run up the stairs. Macalaurë is undressing as he runs, pulling his tunic over his head and unlacing his trousers. "Keep your clothes on, for love of Varda!" I tell him, and he says, "Ah, but Nelyo, that bathwater is calling my name. I feel like a pig."

He turns into his bedroom. "You are what you feel!" I shout after him and catch a sweaty tunic to the face in retribution.

I know how he feels, though. Amil has drawn a hot bath for each of us each, as she'd promised she would. I strip off my clothes and kick my boots under my bed. I pull off my jewelry-just a necklace and a ring-and drop them into my jewelry box. My skin is slick with sweat and grime, and it itches. I remember how Grandfather Finwë told us it had been for the two-hundred-year journey across Middle-earth, when they would sometimes travel for weeks before they could bathe, and then it was only in cold river water, and I wonder how they slept at night for the tight, itchiness of dirty skin. I have been on journeys, of course-to Formenos every summer and all across Aman with Atar-but the rivers in Valinor are generally warm, and I know that my soft bed and a hot bath await my arrival home.

I scratch even as I walk into my bathroom; I scratch as I add the salts and oils that will take the scent of the earth from me; I scratch as I dip in a toe to see if it's too hot. It's hot still, but I itch so badly that I jump in anyway and sink to my neck beneath the water.

The hot water prickles my skin like a thousand tiny needles. It is painful, I realize, when I think about it, but I feel something within me cry out and welcome the heat. That part of me, I know, comes from Atar. When he plunges into the depths of frantic concentration, a place where my brothers and I cannot reach him, even as we stand in the doorway and tentatively call him to supper, he will lift red hot metal with his bare hands, never flinching. I turned his hands over once, studied the palms, and they were just as smooth as mine, unscarred, strong, and beautiful.

The water cools to a comfortable temperature, and I realize that it is quiet, so rare in our house that the silence becomes louder than shouting. I breathe deeply and let my head slip beneath the water, squeezing my eyes shut so that they are not stung by the salts I have poured liberally into the water. Under the water, I can hear the dull roar of blood in my veins and the faint ripple of my body moving and nothing else. And I am alone. Being alone tugs at me after only a short while, for it is rarer even than quiet, but for now, it is bliss. Even in sleep, I am rarely alone. Macalaurë spends more nights in my bed than he does in his own, coming over to talk and laugh, swearing to me that he won't stay, but when I turn to look at him, he has dropped into dreams and I have not the heart to wake him. Tyelkormo comes to me at least twice a week with nightmares or sleeplessness, and never can I resist his big blue eyes. Carnistir hates sleeping with anyone else, but sometimes, I will wake up and he will be curled at the bottom of my bed, at my feet, like a dog. I am never alone, but that is, I suppose, both the price and reward of being the eldest.

My chest burns, and I realize that I have been submerged for several minutes. I erupt through the surface of the water, gasping, my lungs cooled and relieved by the air that rushes to fill them. I wipe the water from my eyes and open them. Carnistir is leaning on the side of the bathtub, staring at me.

"I thought you were dead," he says.

So much for being alone.

"No, of course I'm not dead," I tell him. "I am an Elf, and Elves live a life as long as the life of Arda. You know that."

"Some have died," he says in a matter-of-fact voice that is amusing and chilling at the same time. "I would have looked for you in Tirion, though, at the Spring Festival next year. And I would pray to Námo every day for your return."

"Well ..." I'm not quite sure what to say, so I smile and settle for, "Thanks."

"Your hair is dark. You look like Atar," he tells me next. I have to remind myself at times that he is only four years old and prone to the bizarre behavior of young children.

I push my wet hair out of my face. I suppose that he is partially right; my hair darkens when wet, although it is still far from being as black as our father's. "Things change color when they are wet," I explain to him, "and my hair is wet. See?" I wrap his soft little hand around a lock of my hair.

He puts it in his mouth. "You haven't changed colors," he says, his words lisped because of the hair in his mouth. "Your hair still tastes like you, Nelyo. Can I get in and play with my boats?"

"No, little one. The water is getting cold, and I have to get dressed. Will you hand me that towel over there?"

He toddles over and grabs the towel I've indicated, leaving my hair in his mouth until it will reach no farther and slips out and sticks to my cheek. He hands the towel to me obediently; at least he doesn't dunk it in the water like he had done last time-the only towel left, too-leaving me no choice but to run across the hall, dripping, naked, and quite embarrassed, to borrow a towel from Macalaurë.

I quickly dry myself, and Carnistir sits on the floor and watches me with his wide dark eyes, biting his fingers at the knuckle. A little runner of drool is forming off of his chin. I wrap the towel around my waist and stoop to lift him, wiping his face with my thumb. He falls immediately against me and sinks his teeth into the bone of my shoulder.

I draw a sharp breath, trying not to cry out; he doesn't realize how painfully sharp his little teeth are. "Carnistir," I say, and I juggle him to free an arm and dislodge his teeth from my shoulder, "why can't you give normal kisses?" As if to demonstrate, I kiss his nose and his lips in quick succession. He doesn't respond and buries his face in my neck, and I wince, waiting, but the nip I expect never comes.

I sigh and carry him out to my bedroom. Light fills the room; it is the Mingling of the Lights, and I feel my breath catch in my chest, as it still does every day at this time. I have tried, in my more poetic moments, to do it justice in words but cannot. It is the purest light imaginable, colorless because every color of light possible is poured into it in equal measure and sings in perfect harmony. It takes all tinges from the world; it reveals everything as it truly is, in perfection. All is made more beautiful in such light.

But the moment passes and something slams against my legs. Tyelkormo. So much for being alone, I think again.

"Nelyo!" He wraps his arms around my thighs and pushes his face into my belly. He is huge for a child of his age and might possible eclipse Atar and I one day in height. "You smell funny," he says, his voice slightly muffled.

I dislodge his arms from me and set Carnistir down beside him. They stare up at me with the wide-eyed love of little children, fair and dark, foils of each other. "By 'funny' I hope you don't mean 'bad,' " I say.

"No. You smell better than usual. But not like Nelyo. Just funny."

I put on a serious face. "Tyelkormo. Carnistir," I say gravely, and they stare up at me. Carnistir has shoved his knuckles back into his mouth; Tyelkormo twirls a honey-colored strand of hair. "Macalaurë and I have a very important place to go tonight, and I have to get ready, and I don't have a lot of time left. Can I expect you to behave?" They nod. "Good. Now, why don't you sit on my bed and wait for Atar to call you to supper?"

A tiny hand in each of mine, I guide them past the temptation of blank parchment and inkwells left on my desk, a pair of cast-off boots with laces begging to be tangled, past a shelf of books teeming with words and drawings-ideas-still new to their young minds. "Aren't you having supper with us, Nelyo?" asks Tyelkormo in a small voice as we walk, jerking on my hand.

"Not tonight, little one. Macalaurë and I have an hour-long ride, so if we stay for supper, then we will not be on time."

"Won't you be hungry, Nelyo?" Carnistir asks me.

"We'll eat something when we get there. Do not worry, my loves, Macalaurë and I will be fine." I steer them to my bed and lift Carnistir; Tyelkormo scrambles up without my help.

I go to my closet, but before I can even open the door, Macalaurë bursts into the room. "You said you'd braid my hair, Nelyo!" He is dressed already in a gray tunic and black trousers. (Macalaurë wears entirely too much gray, but I would never tell him that.) "Does this color make me look washed out?" he asks.

Fingers rise to massage the space between my eyes that is beginning to ache. I feel my patience like a vast white slop beginning to slip away. I stand perfectly still, hoping to forestall the avalanche that has begun in slow trickles. The fingers pressing my forehead-have they begun to tremble? My shoulders ache. Sometimes, my patience lets go, and that smooth, white expanse tumbles and roars and knocks away those hands that-naively-are raised in defenseless innocence, hoping to be spared.

This, I get from Atar.

Now, a tinge of sarcasm laces my voice. I can hear it, and I hate it, but it weasels itself in there and is nearly impossible to ferret out. I am grabbing at the trickles of snow with futile fists. "Not at all. You look just like the handsome prince that you are."

My sarcasm might have escaped his notice, slipped past as genuine sincerity, but for the word "prince." It is easy to forget our status as Noldorin elite: Princes do not get on their knees to scrub the floor of their father's forge; they do not cook and sweep away the garbage that others drop; they do not wipe the snot from their baby brothers' faces. We do all of these things, yet there is a velvet box on my dressing table, and in it lays a copper circlet made for my fortieth begetting day by my grandfather Mahtan. On the circlet is the star of the House of Fëanáro, high prince of the Noldor, the heir to the kingship, were grandfather Finwë to abdicate. Sometimes I'll put it on when I am alone in my bedroom and look at my reflection: the simple clothes, often darkened by soot or dust; the dirt underneath my fingernails; my hair tied behind my head in a bedraggled knot; and the symbol of my legacy atop it. It shines with a pride I do not myself possess, for how can one be proud of that which passes mostly unacknowledged? My father's heir, a prince of the Noldor.

The smile on Macalaurë's face has crumbled a bit, and his acidic reply is "Perhaps I shall wear my circlet then, and you shall wear yours, and we shall woo maidens as do the lords in Tirion, with promises of power and political influence. And they shall not care if we are ugly and our thoughts are vapid. Now will you braid my hair or not?"

"Would you allow me at least to first put on my underwear, please?" I say with exasperation. From my bed, I hear Carnistir whimper, gifted-or cursed, perhaps-with an extraordinary perception of the moods of others. Macalaurë sits heavily at my dressing table, trying not to pout and playing with my jewelry while I choose my clothes with exaggerated care, pondering every shade of cloth and every stitch of embroidery before I select the black tunic and tan trousers that I'd had in mind since early afternoon. Macalaurë has put every one of my rings on his right hand and studies them in the light. Most of them are too big for his slender fingers.

"Would you mind if I wore one of these?" he asks in a gentle tone that tells me that my earlier rancor is already forgiven. The snow is still; the avalanche will sleep, for a time. We speak with each other through the mirror-a strange, disembodied manner-as though I am outside my body and watching myself tug a tunic over my head as I watch him hold my rings in the light. "I favor your jewelry much more than mine."

"Take what you'd like," I tell him. The ring of which he speaks-rubies and onyx set around a silver band-I had hoped to wear myself, but now I feel bad for my earlier slip of temper.

"What about this?" He holds aloft a silver chain with a white stone that catches the light and returns it in exponential brilliance.

My hand goes automatically to my throat. I had forgotten that I'd removed my jewelry prior to bathing; suddenly, I feel naked in a way that even clothes could not cover. I answer him carefully. "If you desire it, then you shall wear it." I mean it.

The chain slithers through his fingers and falls back to the jewelry box. "No. Nelyo." His voice is very soft. "I was teasing. I could never wear it."

I was born beside a river. My mother lay not in the softness of a birthing bed when she pushed me into the world but on the hard ground, in a tent, tended not by healers and midwives, as she was when my brothers were born, but by my father, who was younger than I am now and understandably terrified. It was the middle of the night, and Laurelin slept, and through an opening in the tent flaps, the first light I saw was Telperion on the water, and this was the light that was put into my eyes.

On my first begetting day, Atar rose in the middle of the night and left my mother and me asleep to ride to that river with nothing but two stones in his pocket. Even without a wife heavy with child this time, crossing the river was difficult and dangerous. It was springtime, and the water surged and devoured the banks of the river in great chunks of red earth, but he crossed and knelt at the very place where I was born, waiting until Telperion swelled to silvery brilliance, as she had when my eyes opened for the first time, before removing the stones from his pocket to capture forever the same light that touched my eyes with silver.

One stone was my first begetting day gift. The other, Atar wears around his neck with the same loyalty as he wears his gold wedding band. His Nelyo-stone, he calls it. It will go with him, he says, to the end of Arda. Normally, mine hangs at my sternum, out of sight, under my clothes, on a shabby silver chain darkened by a patina of grime, but tonight, I will wear it at my throat on a shorter silver chain of perfect brilliance. As I dress, Macalaurë finds the shorter chain without my asking and-removing the stone from the longer, grimy one, which he pools gently in my jewelry box-he slips the stone onto it. I fix the laces on my tunic last, and when I finish, he rises and clasps the chain around my neck without a word.

"Thank you," I say, and he says, "You're dressed. Now braid my hair."

His hair is like satin, not as silky as Tyelkormo's and mine, but heavy and slippery. Whenever he tries to braid it on his own, it inevitably slides askance by midday. Amil is always complaining that she wishes he would wear his hair off of his face, to show of his fine, fair features, but he has learned not to bother, so his high cheekbones go unappreciated. (When Macalaurë was born, I was often scornful and jealous of the extra attention he received and said that I thought he looked like a girl. He has since grown out of that fragile, feminine look, but I still don't dare tell him these first thoughts of mine lest he take after me with his small but bruising fists.) To keep his hair in place, I must tug it extra-tight. "Ai!" he shouts once, and would have pulled away and ruined all that I had accomplished if I didn't seize his head in time. "You're pulling it so tight that you're making my eyes go funny!"

"They are not. You look fine. It has to be tight or the braids will fall out. Now, hold still and stop whining."

He sighs. "Why can't I have hair like Carnistir?" Our littlest brother has the coarsest hair of the four of us, and it is always embroiling itself in bristling snarls that hurt to comb out.

"Ask Atar," I answer, tugging his hair and making him wince.

"Why Atar?"

"Because he begot you. Ask him why he gave you his hair instead of Amil's, like Carnistir."

"Atar's will stay braided, at least," Macalaurë grumbles. "I don't know where this aberration on my head came from." I give his hair enough sharp yank to tighten the braid. "Ai!"

"Sorry," I say, without really meaning it, and Macalaurë glares at me in the mirror. "I'm almost done." I use a silver clip to secure his braids behind his head. "There. Now don't you look handsome? Maybe you'll finally find a maiden to court."

He laughs. "Perhaps...." He is trying on my necklaces now, one by one, and one by one, discarding them. Atar makes our jewelry. He makes mine to accentuate my red hair and gray eyes; Macalaurë's is always more demure, to flatter his finer features. Still, he insists on wearing mine.

Tyelkormo appears beside me, and he hugs my thighs and leans against my hip. "May I go with you?" he asks in a tiny voice that does not sound like it belongs to him, the most boisterous of my brothers.

I stroke his hair. "Little one, you are too young still."

He looks up at me with pleading blue eyes. "May I go with you when I am older, then?"

Before I can tell him that, of course, when he is older, he is welcome to come along, Macalaurë opens his mouth and says, "That will be another twenty years at least, Tyelkormo, and by then, Nelyo shall be wed and you shall be an uncle." As soon as I realize where his thoughts are going, I start nudging him in the back, but he finishes speaking before looking up at me and saying, with a wide and blameless stare, "What?"

Tyelkormo starts weeping, and I have to stoop and lift him, at which point he presses into my neck and really starts wailing. Macalaurë tosses the necklace he has been trying back into my jewelry box. "I don't know what I say sometimes," he says.

"Macalaurë, do us all a favor," I say. I am slipping, slipping, I feel the patience slipping away in a tumultuous roar. "Do wait a while yet before you go making anyone an uncle." I see his face in my mirror, and his brows tighten in a quick, barely perceptible wince, and now his feelings have been hurt too. And Carnistir is lying on my bed, whimpering and warming up to a full-blown tantrum.

Macalaurë doesn't mean to do it, but he is painfully oblivious about our little brothers. He does not know that Tyelkormo is needy, that one should never mention leaving-and especially not marrying and begetting children-when he can hear. And Carnistir takes every tremble in emotion as a personal affront. I have learned to never show my impatience around him, to handle him delicately and with light hands-the coarsest of our brothers-like he's made of glass. But Macalaurë does not know such things.

Carnistir erupts into sobs, and now I have to sit on my bed with a brother on each leg, my black tunic to which I'd given so much thought becoming tacky with tears and snot, my hair still uncombed and my feet still bare. And Macalaurë is still sitting at my dressing table, but his shoulders are rigid in a way that I know he would run out of the room if he thought he could do it decorously.

There is a loud knock on my door. "Yes?" I call, my voice tight, and Carnistir turns up the volume yet again.

Atar enters. "Should not you two have left by now?"

"Yes," I say, "but-" I look at Tyelkormo and Carnistir, each burrowing into a shoulder.

"Give them here," he says, and he comes and takes them from me. Tyelkormo latches his arms around Atar's neck and sobs, though his wails lack their earlier intensity. Carnistir stops crying almost immediately, appraises him, and pops one of Atar's bedraggled braids into his mouth.

I glance down at my tunic. On for less than a half-hour and already filthy.

Atar looks at me, then at Macalaurë, who is still putting on my necklaces, tearing them off, and throwing them back into the jewelry box. "Nelyo, Macalaurë, come with me." He is out the door before we can even stand up.

Macalaurë and I follow Atar to our parents' bedroom and to his armoire. "Give me your tunic," he says to me, and I pull it over my head and hand it to him, trying to keep my face expressionless, trying not to look confused. He tosses it into the hamper with his dirty laundry, sooty, smoke-smelling clothes. He rummages through his own tunics in his armoire; I see several black ones just like the one he discarded slip past his fingers, until at last he stops and pulls one from its hanger.

"Here." He thrusts it at me. "This should fit you."

I take the tunic and hold it up. It is black, made of a fine, silky material that feels like water in my fingers. There is a bit of embroidery along the neckline, gold thread mixed in places with just a touch of red to give it the color of flame, done in stitches so fine that it looks as though the seamstress imbedded the cloth with actual fire. Behind me, Macalaurë stifles a gasp, and I feel his hand on my elbow. Only one Elf was capable of embroidery so beautiful. "Atar, no," I say and try to hand the tunic back to him, but his hands hang at his sides, and his bright eyes turn on me, and he says, "Why not?"

"Grandmother Míriel made this for you."

"Actually, she did not. She made it for my father, and he gave it to me, and I, in turn, am giving it to you, Nelyafinwë."

The use of my full father-name name startles me. I am so often called just Nelyo that I forget that it stands for something, it means something more than just a childish nickname I gave myself. I realize that the cloth I hold in my hands is more than just a tunic, it is part of the legacy that Atar is passing onto me, along with my name, my title, the copper circlet in the velvet box in my bedroom. I have his face-his nose, his lips, his way of crinkling his eyebrows when he concentrates-and his long, strong limbs, and his blood runs through my body, even as I sleep, and it will run through my body until the ending of Arda. I will have a son one day, I realize-the thought whips the breath from my lungs-and I will look upon his face and see Atar's nose and lips, and I will watch him at counsel, and he will ponder something, and his eyebrows will crinkle with concentration. But, this I will not pass onto him, I think. This tunic will be mine always, though it will not last until the ending of Arda.

"Put it on," Atar tells me, in a voice that is too gentle to be commanding. I am grateful to tug the tunic over my head and hide my surprise at the uncharacteristically soft tone of his voice. Maybe the same thoughts came to him that came to me.

It fits me perfectly, but it would, for Atar and I are nearly the same height now. The silk is a cool draft against my skin, like wearing nothing. The hair that falls over my shoulders is the same color as the embroidery: red touched with gold, the color of flames. Atar tightens the laces for me, as though I am a small child again, takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheek. "She made it for you, Maitimo," he says in my ear, and I believe it.

His hands leave me, and the air that takes their place is cold. He shoves the armoire door shut and goes to his jewelry box. "Come, Macalaurë," he calls over his shoulder, and Macalaurë scuttles after him. I follow more lazily, stroking the embroidery at the neckline of my tunic. Atar is the only person I know who keeps pliers and a small hammer in his jewelry box. Indeed, the table around it is scattered with partially disassembled jewelry, like he was dressing for an occasion and realized that the chain at his throat was somehow inferior, tore it off, and started to take it apart. I can hear our mother's voice prodding him: "Fëanáro, come on, we are late; we don't have time for that," and see him drop the mutilated necklace and pliers and dash from the room after her. Or maybe he saw something more inferior and dropped the original to twist that one apart instead. Atar is restless and easily distracted; many of these will gather dust until Amil sweeps them away; the others will be given to my baby brothers as part of lessons with instructions on how to finish them.

Atar has piles of jewelry, much of which I have never seen him wear, but his hands go right to the piece that he has in mind for Macalaurë, hanging apart from the rest, in a place of honor, alongside the Kuldamírë that looks ordinary here, in the box, but in Laurelin's light captures her golden light and breaks it, every facet a different shade of gold. The pendant for Macalaurë hangs on a slender, silver chain: the star of the House of Fëanáro, also silver, with a fire opal at its center. It is a beautiful piece, and when he puts it around Macalaurë's neck, I realize that it is inspired as well, for enlivens him (despite the bland gray tunic that I wish he'd throw into Atar's rag bucket) without overwhelming his soft features.

"Thank you," he says. Macalaurë has a way of sounding surprised whenever someone does something unexpectedly nice for him, as though he isn't the second son of a high prince who gets a thousand kind words and a hundred kisses a day.

Atar sweeps Tyelkormo and Carnistir up from the bed, where they have successfully managed to push half of the covers onto the floor. He stands back, with our baby brothers in his arms, and appraises us. "You look well," he says at last. "Eru has given me no daughters, but you two shall. Now go, or you shall be late."

Macalaurë is in a lighter mood as we dash out to the stable to ready our horses for the hour-long ride. He keeps touching the necklace as if he is afraid that it has disappeared-or maybe that it was never there. He has his harp slung onto his back for, Macalaurë's invitations always come with the expectation that he will provide part of the music. "It is going to be wonderful," he calls to me, as we saddle our horses. "I can feel it."

"So you shall bring Atar his first daughter then?" I tease.

He gives me a stern look. "If I was seven feet tall and had red hair and gray eyes with the light of Telperion in them, then I might. Yet I hold onto hope that one day, I will give Atar a daughter. Probably even little Tyelkormo will wed before me, but one day maybe I will too. For tonight, though, I would be happy just finding a maiden to court for a spell. She need not desire me ever again beyond tonight. One evening would make me happy."

I have had many evenings of such happiness, many long courtships and one near engagement. Macalaurë has never even had a kiss. "You say now that one evening shall suffice, but tomorrow morning, you shall wish for another, then another, until you are wishing for betrothal and marriage and four sons, all before your hundredth begetting day, just like Atar."

He laughs. "I think I shall start with just one night for now. I am only thirty-nine. However admirable Atar's marriage at age forty-two and begetting you at age forty-four may be, I am not nearly so precocious."

We lead our horses from the stable-the sleek gray stallion that was Atar's gift for my fortieth begetting day and Macalaurë's somewhat dumpy palomino mare-and we mount. My gray snorts and prances beneath me; Macalaurë's palomino grabs a few mouthfuls of grass and Macalaurë jerks the reins. "Stop that, you lump," he scolds. Turning to me, an eager gleam in his eye, he says, "Let's ride fast, shall we?"

~oOo~

We do ride fast, and we arrive at the edge of the forest sooner than if we had kept a more modest pace. Entering the forest, we slow to a trot, for though there is a path, it is old and overgrown and at times meanders into obscurity.

We know our way well by now, though, for many late night feasts are held here. Deep within the forest, out of earshot of any of the neighboring farms, is a clearing planted with soft grass and flowers of every color. Here we meet, as young Elves have met since our people came to Valinor. I wonder sometimes if Atar and Amil had come here in their youth, then decide that they would have likely found this kind of gathering frivolous: the silly dances with their complicated rules for who could partner whom and at what point partners were exchanged, the petty conversation about political and family relationships, the shy kisses captured a few feet outside the clearing in the brush. No, they would have lain together in the forest, beneath trees and beside rivers, discussing craft and lore and exchanging affections that exceeded what was thought proper for Elves of their age, especially when one of them is a high prince. Had they participated in a dance where partners were exchanged, they would have ignored the rules, as is their wont, and stayed in each other's arms while others spun and shuffled around them, for I have seen the desirous gazes fixed upon Atar by women in Tirion not my mother and have seen his mouth twist when he meets their eyes as though repulsed.

We bear off the path by the rock. By all appearances, it is a big gray bolder brushed with moss, but to the young Elves of Valinor, it has long been a sign of the possibilities of an evening that still lies in the dark uncertainty of the future. Will I meet my future spouse tonight? we wonder. Will the one whom I have been watching be here? Will she dance with me?

This latter thought is the question that comes to my mind as our horses step past the boulder, veering from the rugged path and into the undergrowth of the forest.

There have always been rumors of young Elves who imbibe too much wine at these gatherings and wake up wed the next morning, lying naked in the brush beside a spouse they barely know. There are even tales of children conceived at such events by their previously unwed parents who are still children themselves. Of course, no one ever knows anyone who married in such a manner, and certainly no one knows anyone who was begotten as such. The youngest parents of whom I have heard are my own, and inebriation and dance had nothing to do with their wedding or my conception.

Still, there are always young girls here for the first time who watch the sons of the lords with shifting, wary eyes, as though we come here only to take an unfamiliar, innocent girl to wife, and you know that they have been told tales of a young maiden much like them, always one relative or friend removed beyond what they can themselves confirm, who was in fact corrupted in such a manner at this very place.

We are not far off the path when we hear the first delicate strains of music stirring through the leaves. There is a ripple of laughter, a girl's voice, like windchimes in the morning. We urge our horses faster and into the clearing. The clearing is bordered by some of the oldest trees in the forest, set in a nearly perfect circle, as though Yavanna made this forest with the specific intention of having the young Elves meet and drink and dance here, and their branches arch high over the ground, forming a verdant ceiling through which slivers of Telperion's light crisscross in silver rafters. Among the lower branches, someone long ago draped iron lamps; I had placed the stones in them that Atar made, stones that glowed brighter than the candle flames we would never again need. In the center of the clearing, someone has already built a bonfire, and the older, confident boys-many of them the sons of my grandfather's lords-have already begun cooking bits of meat and bragging about the hunt that yielded it. A boy with a lute and a dark-haired girl with a harp have begun a spirited song-though only a handful of couples are dancing-and another boy beats weakly on a drum. Macalaurë and I tie our horses to one side of the clearing with the others, and I make a fuss out of untying the wine that Atar has given us while really searching the swirling skirts for Annawendë.

My heart thuds harder when I spot her, and my fingers fumble the knot, and I nearly drop the wine. She stands on the opposite side of the clearing, talking to Vorondil, whom I usually like but suddenly resent for his easy command of her attention, although I am pleased to note that she twines her hair around her finger, as she has a habit of doing when she is bored. "Do you see her?" Macalaurë hisses in my ear, and I jump in alarm, and he laughs, for he knows that I do.

"Hush," I tell him in a low voice, and he rolls his eyes and says, "You are amazingly daft at times, Maitimo, as though she would reject the affections of someone like you."

I push three bottles of wine into his arms. "Take this and stop berating me. I do not see you making any romantic overtures."

"I shall, as soon as everyone tires of hearing me pluck the harp."

"Then you shall be unwed forever," I tease, and he scowls.

"Lucky for you, Nelyo, no one likes hearing about the classifications of Atar's alloys or the inheritance patterns in roses or any number of your other boring pursuits."

We start toward the bonfire, our arms laden with bottles of wine, jostling each other with our elbows until we draw abreast of the lords' sons. Their tight little circle opens briefly to admit Macalaurë and me. Although we rarely see these boys, they are shrewd enough to understand the value of forming friendships with the sons of the High Prince. "We brought wine!" Macalaurë sings, and someone calls, "All hail the Fëanárians!" and the circle closes around us.

Macalaurë is afforded easy escape by the harp on his back, and he joins the trio of musicians across the clearing. I watch him sit beside the dark-haired girl; she sets aside her harp and picks up a flute, and they smile at each other and begin a new song without a word, communicating in the easy wordless way of skilled musicians. The song is something sprightly that makes couples in the clearing seize each other's hands and begin dancing. I am trapped now with the lords' sons, trying to think of a way to politely duck away to find Annawendë or at least have a dance with another girl, but I am being enticed into swaggering conversations about hunting. "I got a buck the other day that must have been at least thirty points," says Lónango of the House of Iron.

"How many points?" says someone.

"At least thirty. I did not exactly count," brags Lónango.

"One would think," I hear myself say-and my voice is so different from theirs! so languid and meandering, where each of their words ring like stones tossed into a fountain-"That for so impressive a kill, you might exactly count." Laughter runs around the perimeter of the circle like fire, but Lónango does not laugh, only scowls. I feel a blush of shameful triumph. So like my father I sound! Atar becomes critical when he is brought to court, scornful and superior. As his heir, I am taken with him to counsel in Tirion, and I see the acidic glances tossed at his turned back by the lords of the court. He has no patience for their sly politics, the way they sidle up beside him, all smiles and grasping hands, probing him like mosquitoes for yielding flesh and fresh blood. "They feed you honey-coated chocolate," he told me once, "and only once your stomach curdles do you realize that it was in fact shit dipped in honey." Lords stand in circles, says Atar, as do carrion birds.

I slip inside the circle to pour myself some wine and never insert myself again fully into its perimeter, although I am aware that-no longer a vulture-now I am the prey.

"Maitimo," says Haralyo of the House of the Quarry, "we hear that young Findekáno shall accompany your family to Formenos this summer. And that you shall be his primary tutor."

"You hear correctly then," I tell him but say no more, sipping my wine and watching puzzled glances make their way around the circle.

"I knew not that you shared Prince Fëanáro's skill at the forge?"

"I do not, but with him I study the lore of letters and history and science, and in this shall I instruct young Findekáno. With my father he shall study craft, and with Macalaurë, music."

Eyebrows twitch and tight smiles are shot across the circle. Watching the sons of the lords is like learning another language, one that is conducted wordlessly. I have to constrain my laughter at the thought of my father deciphering their careful facial expressions in the same manner as he has deciphered the language of the Valar and surprising all at our next counsel by speaking back to them in their language of silent spasms.

I swallow my laughter and bow neatly. "As much as I enjoy your company, my lords, I shall take my leave, for I must confess that it is the company of maidens that have drawn me here this evening."

"Ah, Maitimo desires to marry and produce a successor, then," Lónango says sweetly, and I sense some convoluted method of revenge being initiated.

I laugh. "I am not so ambitious. My only desire this evening is a goodnight kiss from someone fairer than my brother." Laughter follows me as I slip cleanly through the circle and nod at them. "Farewell, my friends, and may such fortune find you as well."

The air is easier to breathe outside of their circle, and the music trickles into my ears with a lightness that it did not possess earlier. The musicians are playing brighter and brighter songs, encouraging the crowd to dance. The clearing is full of colorful raiment and whispering gowns. Laughter rises to the heavens and tangles in the tree branches.

I see Lossirë, whom I courted once, and before her I knelt in the dirt, a silver ring-forged by Atar after many hours of long, giddy counsel-sandwiched between palms raised as in prayer, begging her to marry me, but she wept and pled love for another, the husband on her arm now, a blond half-Vanya like my uncle Arafinwë. Her gown is looser than is the fashion for the Noldor, and I see why, for her belly swells beneath it, and I turn away.

A maiden catches my hand as I turn and spins me into a dance. "Maitimo!" she cries, and I make myself smile, though the muscles in my face seem to creak with the effort. She too, I courted, and we parted ways when I went to Formenos three summers ago and never rekindled the courtship. She presses closer to me than she should, with a hand on the small of my back, and I am grateful when she whirls me into the arms of her blushing friend, whose steps are awkward and whose hands tickle my arms with her hesitancy. The music stops and Macalaurë calls something, and judging from the nervous way the girls align themselves at the edge of the clearing, I guess that it is gentleman's choice. I turn to look for Annawendë and find her across the clearing still. She too is turning in my direction, but Vorondil asks her for a dance, and I look away before our eyes meet.

Instead, I offer my hand to the shy maiden, and she looks at my hand extended before me, and I see her eyes dart off to her left and right as though checking to make sure that I am not offering myself to another before she shames herself by mustering enthusiasm. At last, she says, "Are you sure?" and I say, "I would ask you properly, but I know not your name."

She steps into my arms. It is a slower song, and I hold her close but not so close that I feel her muscles go rigid and defensive, not so close that our hips touch. "I am Nimerionë," she says at last, and I say, "I am Maitimo."

"Yes, I know," she says quickly, and her cheeks flush a bit. "Everyone knows you."

I wonder as to the meaning of her words: Does she know me as the eldest son of Fëanáro, a prince of our people, or as the tall, red-haired philanderer who has courted half the women in the clearing? I like to think that it is not the latter, for I never intended to be thought of as such (though I know such accusations circle Tirion, especially in the homes bitter towards my father). I hold that I am unlucky in love, for I have been in love a hundred times if once, but my affections always seem to wane or-in the case of Lossirë-those of my intended do. My father and mother courted none but each other and fell into passionate, obsessive love immediately; my grandfather Finwë brought my grandmother overseas with the intention of being the first to be married before the Valar; even my two uncles married young, finding their heart's other half with envious ease. I alone seem to have a slippery hold on love.

When Lossirë rejected my proposal, I spent many dark days in bed with the drapes shut and my head buried beneath the blankets until Atar forced his way into my room, climbing up the wall and through the window because I'd barred the door with my dresser to keep Macalaurë out. For many hours, he sat beside me, stroking my hair and saying nothing. I was grateful for his silence, for Atar is rarely silent long, and grateful for the touch of his hands-always so warm!-on my skin gone cold. At last, he spoke to me: "I believe that love will be hard won for you, Nelyo, but when you find it, you will have the greatest of us all, for it shall not waver as love usually does, and nothing shall break it." He kissed my forehead then and climbed back through the window and down the side of the house.

I realize that the song is nearly over, and I have said nothing to Nimerionë, although she seems content in the silence. Our hands rest lightly on the other's waist, and she stares at my chest with great fascination, until I realize that she looks at the stone around my throat, and the song ends, and I let my hands fall from her. "Thank you," she says quickly and slips away.

"You're welcome," I whisper after her, watching as she is engulfed by a throng of female friends, prodding her and sending quick little smiles in my direction. I smile back and raise my hand slightly in greeting. There is a spate of nervous giggles as hair is tossed in my direction and the circle closes around her.

Macalaurë starts a fast, bright song, one in which partners are exchanged every few seconds, and I am being passed around from girl to girl, managing to find mirth in the quick shuffle of feet. Macalaurë calls three ladies' choices after that and plays quick numbers, and I am never left unclaimed, and my earlier melancholia dissipates upon the pulse of the night like smoke.

A few times, I see Annawendë near me, being swung in the arms of another, but the music is so fast that her back is turned to me before I can meet her glance. Other times, she stands to the side with Vorondil, sipping wine and nodding at whatever he is saying to her. Whatever it is, it is accompanied by sweeping gestures and a very intense look on his face. I wish she would smile more and then-reconsidering-am glad that she does not. Not at Vorondil anyway.

The crowd has grown thinner, and sometimes I pause from dancing long enough to stare into the forest beside the clearing and imagine I can see the brush rustling and swaying in time to the music.

Macalaurë calls another partner exchange, faster than any he has done before, and I am no sooner reeling, dizzy, in the arms of one maiden before I am being shoved into the arms of another. (Things get so confusing that I spend a few embarrassing bars dancing with Vorondil and find that he is remarkably light on his feet.) I spin from his grasp and find myself bumped by someone's belly and look down into Lossirë's face.

"Maitimo!" she screeches, but her fingers clench my arms hard, begging me not to push her away, and I bump again into her swollen belly, against the child given to her by someone she loved more than me. Luckily, I am in front of the musicians now, and I whirl her around so that I can look over her shoulder and meet Macalaurë's eyes, and he cries, "Change!" before two bars have even been played.

I tear from her grasp and spring to whoever is next, even if it is Vorondil again or one of the lords' sons or a ravenous wolf from the deep forest, I care not, and I embrace the body that falls into my arms to my chest. I hear a gasp, and strong hands seize my waist, and we push back from each other in mutual surprise, and she shouts, "Maitimo!" as I cry, "Annawendë!"

Macalaurë stops the song in mid-swing, and the other musicians play on for a few confused seconds before they slowly putter to a stop too. "Gentleman's choice!" Macalaurë calls, giving me flickering smiles that I dutifully ignore.

"Would you-" I begin, and simultaneously, she says, "Yes," and we hold each other close so that we cannot see the blush that rises into the other's cheeks.

~oOo~

For hours, we dance.

We dance to slow songs; we dance to fast songs. When Macalaurë calls for partner changes, we obey, but we always find our way back to each other's arms in time for the next song. Vorondil loiters in the periphery of our vision, trying to capture her attention, politely and silently asking me to relinquish, but we both ignore decorum and pay him no mind, and eventually, he ends up in the arms of the shy maiden whom I had held early in the evening. I see his jaw flapping up and down and see her staring up at his chin; Annawendë leans into me and says, "Likely, he lectures her on the proper method for folding iron," and I laugh.

The musicians take a break for food and drink, and Annawendë and I-suddenly ravenous-sit in the grass at the edge of the clearing with a cloth full of breads and meats and cheeses between us, sharing a goblet of wine. I have filched one of the bottles that I brought from home-a good wine, older than my father-so that I do not have to keep leaping up to refill the goblet. Any residual awkwardness between us has been melted away by wine and dance. We are flirtatious now, nearly intimate in our casual touches.

Annawendë keeps pressing little bits of bread on me. "Why are you doing this?" I tease, taking the bread from her fingers with my teeth. "I am forty-seven years old! I can feed myself by now!"

"Look at you!" Her hand ripples along my ribs. "I could climb these! You are far too skinny to be healthy!"

"Really, I am," I assure her. "I take after my father. He is thin too."

"That is because he barely stops long enough to breathe, and he often forgets to break for the midday meal," she tells me, and such intimate information about my father startles me, coming from someone outside the family. "Look at Macalaurë," she says, and I follow her gaze to where my little brother stands, chomping crudely on a piece of meat and laughing with the dark-haired flutist. I had expected him to plop down on the grass beside us, but he seems preoccupied, although if he keeps chewing with his mouth open like he is, his efforts will earn him nothing. "He stands only to your shoulder, yet I'd bet that you are the same weight."

"That's because Macalaurë takes after my mother," I argue, and she puts a piece of bread into my mouth to silence me.

"Do not speak ill of your mother! It was her body that gave you life!"

I speak around the bread. "But my father begot me, and he was just as skinny then as he is now."

Somehow, in our drunkenness, frail connections are made that make us blush: her rounder figure and my slender one become matched to my mother and father and their extraordinary fertility, and I fear that I had been implying all along that I might like to make her one of the unfortunate maidens of legend who is wed in the weeds beside the clearing, or like my mother, a mother herself before the age of fifty. We fall into silence; she sips from the goblet, and I look after Macalaurë. He is gone, as is the pretty flutist at his side. The boy with the lute has begun playing a delicate tune, but Macalaurë's harp still leans against the tree. I look back to Annawendë, and she is picking at the cheese. I am suddenly desperate for conversation. "Do you like working with my father?" I ask, and she glances up sharply.

"Of course! It is an honor to work with him. Never have I known anyone who can achieve such clarity of language. He makes anything seem so simple, even when I know that it is not. Even when my failures prove that it is not! He makes me think that anything is possible."

"So he says," I mumble in reply, but I am still looking about for Macalaurë. I see him nowhere in the clearing.

"You have nerve, Maitimo, to ask me questions and not listen to the replies!" she scolds, prodding me in the shoulder.

"I cannot find Macalaurë," I reply, still scanning the clearing.

"He is making love in the forest with that pretty flutist of his," she says, and I whirl around in surprise, and she laughs. "I knew that would get your attention!"

"He'd better not be," I grumble. "He has never even been kissed before tonight."

"He had a lot of wine. That may change."

I lie on the ground and look up at her. She smiles lopsidedly at me and feeds me another piece of bread, this time letting her fingers brush my lips. I find myself taking her features apart again: Her eyes are too dark and flat; her hair is too coarse; her chin is too wide; and her nose is too sharp. But when I lie back and look beyond individual features-imperfections, some would say-and consider her in her entirety, I am washed with a desire so strong that it makes my heart pound. I am lying on the edge of the sea, and the water tumbles over my feet, my legs, my hips and belly and chest, and at last, covers my face and drags me under, and it is warm-not like drowning at all-and I know that I have fallen in love.

~oOo~

Telperion dims toward morning, and we speak casually, like friends, but I cannot take my eyes from her face. Bravely, she meets my gaze. The clearing is nearly empty; the bonfire doused. Macalaurë's harp still rests, untouched, against the tree, and the lute player stands and prepares to leave.

"I should find my brother," I mutter and rise from the ground. Annawendë's remains lying with her arm extended along the ground over her head and her face nestled against her own shoulder. She mumbles something and turns onto her back, her dark hair spread in the grass behind her like a fan.

I speak to the lute player, and he points to a clump of bushes across the clearing. I know such places along the edge of the clearing well, places where the brush is thick but soft, where one cannot be seen but need not wander far enough to be lost either. I push through the branches and find my little brother where I knew he would be, lying on his side on a bare patch of earth, his eyes closed, kissing the flutist. Their bodies touch only at harmless points: Their knees press together, and their forearms cross, and he cups her shoulder with such tenderness that she might be made of porcelain. He is kissing her quite intently, open-mouthed and hungry, and there is a line of bruises along his throat that he will have to explain to Amil tomorrow morning.

I dart behind a tree before they see me. "Macalaurë!" I hiss, and I hear him spring to his feet and whisper something to the flutist before he stumbles around the tree, his eyes wide and innocent, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"What?" he asks.

"It's late. We need to be going soon."

He casts a regretful look over his shoulder, where the flutist waits on the bare patch of ground behind the tree. "May I have a moment to say farewell?"

"Of course. And make sure that she has a safe way home."

"I will, Nelyo."

He darts back around the tree, and I ease back into the clearing, where Annawendë is standing and clearing our empty bottle and goblet.

"I walked here with Vorondil," she says, "but I seem to have irked him, and he has left me." Her eyebrow lifts a little, and she smirks.

"Nonsense. You shall not walk. You shall ride Macalaurë's horse, and he will ride with me."

"Maitimo, that is not necessary. I am strong and able to-"

"I know you are. But it is late, and no one should walk alone in Telperion's waning."

I watch Macalaurë emerge from the forest, holding hands with the flutist. She gives him a chaste kiss on the lips and goes to where her brothers wait for her. Her hair is dark-Noldorin-but I see now that it is touched with silver, and when I see her brothers, I realize who she is: Vingarië, half-Telerin, of the House of the Albatross in Alqualondë. Her father is a cousin to my aunt Eärwen. I am warmed with joy for my little brother, who has done well for himself.

Macalaurë comes to us, his feet weaving and crossing, and I realize that he has had a bit too much wine tonight. He is grinning, inebriated with both love and spirits. When I give him a boost onto my horse, he would have slid over the other side and fallen to the ground if I had not caught a hold on his leg. I give Annawendë a leg up onto his palomino before mounting behind him.

Our people celebrate the Mingling of the Lights and rejoice next in the burning radiance of Laurelin. But maybe because I was born in the depths of Telperion, I love most of all the hours that leave the land glazed with enough silver to take the fear from the night without obscuring the stars. How beautiful the sky in these hours! A black backdrop punctured by tiny pebbles of light and draped with hazy silver gauze. My grandfather awakened beneath those stars; he walked hand in hand beneath them with my grandmother Míriel, seeking the light of Valinor.

It was in Telperion's hours, he said, that he found the gift of Valinor: a night that was never truly dark, that even storm clouds could not cover. A night where his sons-and later, his grandsons-could go without fear, as we go now, Macalaurë leaning back against me and dozing, and Annawendë and I falling into soft conversation. When we come to open fields, we canter, and the wind tears the words from our mouths, and we ride in silence. But we pass through the farms or the stands of trees at a walk or an easy trot, and I watch her as she speaks eagerly of her work and hopes for the summer, and her eyes light so that I am suddenly and regretfully aware that I have lain beside her much of the night and have not yet kissed her.

When we pass through the gates, the house is dark, slumbering. Macalaurë is awake now, the effects of the wine beginning to fade, and he helps Annawendë and me to remove the tack and dry the horses before turning them out to pasture for the night. "I'll be in shortly," I tell Macalaurë, and he drifts into the house without further question.

I walk Annawendë to the apprentices' cottages behind the house. She presses the tips of her fingers against mine as we walk, suddenly shy, and I let my fingers slide between hers and lace our hands together. We reach her cottage. She leans her back against the doorframe and slips her other hand into mine. The space between us is only an inch thick. "I could hold your hands forever," she whispers, smiling. "Thank you for tonight, Maitimo."

"You need not thank me." My voice is but a breath; someone standing just a few feet away would not have been able to hear my words. I wonder if she can hear my heart pounding; it sounds louder in my ears than my own voice.

Her hand goes to my backside and draws me against her, closing the inch between us. She turns her face to me, so close now, her eyes open and waiting, but still I do not kiss her. She presses against my hips, slowly, deliberately, knowing exactly what she does to me, and I gasp, closing my eyes so she can't see the pleasure she gives me.

"You torment me," I whisper. I open my eyes, and her eyes are turned to my face and very bright in the meager light. I keep my gaze on hers; I let my lips brush her mouth, a kiss softer than if a butterfly had brushed across her lips. She whispers my name, "Maitimo," and I shiver, but I will not close my eyes, or in the anonymous darkness, I know, I would lift her up, carry her into her cottage, and lie beside her on her bed and be unable to control my actions. I dot her mouth with little kisses from corner to corner, and when she isn't expecting it, I slip my tongue across her lower lip, her eyes close, and she moans softly. We draw each other into a crushing embrace. We kiss deeply now, at last, our mouths opening to each other. I move against her in a slow, blissful rhythm. Her hands are on my buttocks, now my thighs. She does not push me away but draws me into her. Harder! I move until her legs clasp me, and still, she doesn't stop me. My hands want to grasp her, to tear away her clothes, so I force them to clutch the doorframe instead, digging my fingernails into the wood until splinters assault the soft flesh of my fingertips and pain momentarily quells my desire for her. One of her hands slips inside my tunic, around my waist, and her fingers knead my bare back. I take my lips from hers long enough to gasp, "Annawendë, no!" digging my nails harder into the doorframe, and the touch of her warm hand on my flushed skin makes me jerk against her in a flare of agonizing pleasure. "Annawendë," I plead, "please don't. I won't be able to stop."

She rests her lips against my throat-is she considering what I have said? or is she repulsed by my honesty?-and I can feel my pulse throbbing against them. "I shall bid you good night then?" she says softly, and we kiss again, but the moment is lost, and I do not let my body touch hers, though I ache with longing and the air that zips between us now is like ice. My lips part and her tongue darts into my mouth. She has kissed like this before, I realize-a thrilling thought-maybe more?

She gives me a final quick kiss on the lips. "Good night, Maitimo." The space between us is widening. Why did I push her away? She opens her door; I imagine myself falling into the cottage with her, tangled in her embrace. "Good night, Annawendë," I say and close the door behind her.

~oOo~

Walking back to the house, I am suddenly exhausted. I begin unlacing my tunic as I walk up the steps and trudge into my bedroom. Macalaurë is lying on my bed, already in his nightclothes, wrapped in my quilt.

"Macalaurë," I say, "it is late. Nearly morning. Why are you here?"

"I wanted to talk to you, Nelyo."

I sigh and tug my tunic over my head. The silk drifts across my face. My scent mingles with Annawendë's. I hang the tunic carefully in my armoire and grab the first nightclothes I can find. There is still a hot tightness in the front of my trousers, and I have no desire to undress in front of, much less lie, with Macalaurë in this state, so I escape into my bathroom and close the door before he can question me.

I splash my face and chest with water. My skin is burning; it is like I'm being consumed from within. It is not an unfamiliar feeling anymore but it frightens me still, though less than it did in my youth, when I would awaken from the strange dreams that bathed me in sweat, my body pressed into the mattress to seek release from unbearable pleasure. I hear Macalaurë's quick, furtive footsteps moving across my floor and I slam myself into the bathroom door as he opens it, knocking him back into my room. The door slams shut with a bang. "Ai! Nelyo!" he cries. "Are you mad? What are you doing in there?"

"I am getting ready to go to bed. Alone."

"Why the secrecy?" He is right outside the door, probably with his cheek pressing against it. I can hear his voice buzzing through the wood.

"I am nearly grown, Macalaurë. Don't you think I occasionally deserve the right to undress in private, without you or Tyelkormo or Carnistir sitting there watching me?" My voice is irritated, like abraded skin.

"I have seen you naked before, Nelyo," Macalaurë says in a bland, matter-of-fact voice. "More times than I care to recollect."

"Well, you won't tonight, and if you can't figure out why, then you can get out of my bedroom because I have nothing else to discuss with you."

There is a long pause before he says, at last, "Oh," and I hear his footsteps move across my floor again, receding, followed by a creak as he climbs into my bed. I push my face into the water and hold it there until my burning lungs force me to rise again for air. My shoulders and chest pucker into goosebumps. I turn my hearing inwards and listen for my heartbeat: It is plodding, slow, normal. I breathe deeply and listen to the heartbeats rush faster for a moment, racing to drink the air from my lungs, then slowing. I am calm again, the fire of the night's desire extinguished. I shiver, put on my nightclothes, and emerge from the bathroom.

Macalaurë is lying in my bed, beneath the quilt, on the side that he always refers to as "his side." (Once, I had the audacity to climb in on "his side" of the bed and, when he became irked, had to politely remind him that both sides are technically mine.) I wait for some embarrassing comment from him as I climb onto my side, but all he says is "I won't stay long! Promise!" and even kicks the quilt away to show how serious he is.

"You say that now," I say, "but you'll fall asleep in five minutes, and I won't have the heart to wake you up."

"I might," he admits. He looks small and helpless with his pale blue nightclothes against his white skin, lying uncovered in my big bed with his hands defenseless at his sides.

"What are you going to do when I get married and you have to sleep alone every night?"

"Who says I have to sleep alone? We can get a really big bed, and you can lie in the middle, between me and your wife."

"I seriously hope that you are jesting."

"I can close my eyes and stop my ears when you need me to. That doesn't bother me. I learned to sleep through just about anything during those two years when Atar was certain that every night was the night he would beget Carnistir."

He speaks with such wide-eyed innocence that I can't help but laugh.

"I still can't believe that Amil fell for that cheap ploy for two whole years!" he continues.

"Well, maybe there was something to it. He did eventually beget Carnistir."

"Yes, but Manwë in Varda, that really isn't that impressive when you're making two and three attempts every night for two years!"

"I'm not sure that it wasn't just one really long attempt every night."

"One would think he would tire!"

"Once the process begins, I believe it to be a rather self-sustaining effort."

"Incredible," says Macalaurë, my baby brother who is growing up but not fast, who has only had kisses from a maiden this one night, who still has the barefaced, innocent beauty of a child. "You would think that Atar would take that unbounded energy and put it in stones like he does with light."

I cannot hold back my laughter.

"Why are you laughing at me?" Macalaurë asks, plainly and a bit hurt.

"You are suggesting that Atar capture an orgasm in stone? Why? He already captured four in you, me, Tyelkormo, and Carnistir."

"Oh, Nelyo." He blushes, and his hands scramble to pull the blankets over his head, as he always does when I embarrass him, forgetting that he shoved them away with his feet. "I didn't exactly say that."

"Macalaurë, that is why you are the musician and Atar is the craftsman and I am the loremaster."

"So did you see her tonight?" It amazes me how Macalaurë can change subjects in midair, like a horse changing leads as it gallops. "Isn't she beautiful?" He smiles wistfully, rolls onto his back, and sighs. "And you won't believe it, but she wishes to see me again too! I told her that we are going to Formenos for the summer, but I will send a letter to her whenever Atar sends a rider to Tirion. I think she's going to be the girl I marry."

I remember that feeling, the first girl I courted, in a time stretching so far behind me that the memory is small and blurry, as viewed from a distance. Suddenly, my body aches with weariness, stretched thin by the endless years of growth that curse the Elves, who do not consider one to be an adult until he has have seen fifty years and do not esteem him as a capable one until his hundredth. I wonder how many more new beginnings I will have to endure, living eternally in my father's house, caring for his sons instead of my own, riding an hour each way to the clearing to attend tiresome feasts that never bear fruit. Or dare I hope that Annawendë is the last one I will have to love? Dare I chance disappointment? "Love will be hard won for you, Nelyo." I hear Atar's voice, feel his fingers stroking my hair, and despair to imagine that I might be one of the unfortunate few for whom love cannot be found in Aman. Let it not be true! I silently wish, but to whom do I pray? I squeeze my eyes shut and see Annawendë's face.

"She is lovely," I say softly, turning back to Macalaurë, to encourage the hope in his heart that has been long absent in mine, but his eyelashes flutter against his cheekbones and his breath is purring deep in his throat. He has fallen asleep.

I draw the quilt over his body, lacking the heart to awaken him and send him to his own bedroom, as he knew I would when he crawled into my bed and again when he let his eyes fall closed. I watch him as he sleeps, a tiny smile on his lips-maybe he dreams of the loveliness of which he spoke last?-wishing to hold time, unchanged, forever in this moment: the day my little brother first fell in love, a day I never appreciated fully in my own life and to which I shall never return except through him, in this moment, that even now is slipping away.

I awaken to a hand on my shoulder.

It rests there, gently, too firm to be incidental and too warm to belong to anyone but Atar.

My eyelids feel as if they've been welded shut, but I squeeze the muscles of my forehead together and force my eyes to open. The silver light is dim but nonetheless makes my head ache. Macalaurë lies motionless beside me; his deep, even breathing tells me that he is still in the depths of dreams. I roll onto my back, away from him, away from the light. I hear a sound pass my lips that is a cross between a mumble and a groan, and Atar says, "I need you to come to Tirion with me, Nelyo. To get your cousin."

Today? I had forgotten that that is today.

I sit up carefully so as not to disturb Macalaurë, but he does not even twitch as I swing my feet over the edge of the bed, wincing as they touch the cold stone floor. "I'll meet you in the kitchen," Atar says. He is wearing his traveling clothes, I notice: light cotton, neutral colors that do not show dust, his green cloak. Amil would be pleased: His hair is braided away from his face. I nod, and his hand slides off from my shoulder, and he leaves the room.

I sit for a minute, my feet on the cold floor, anchoring me in wakefulness, tempted to topple backwards, curl up beside Macalaurë, and return to the comfortable, warm sleep from which I had so reluctantly emerged. Dried mucus clogs the corners of my eyes; my mouth feels as though it has been swabbed with cotton: the signs of having drunk too much wine, I realize, and then behaving regrettably afterward. I feel my eyes dropping shut again, so I press my feet against the floor and stand, swaying on uncertain legs, and walk to my armoire, where I select clothes that match Atar's: light material, for it will be hot today, in colors that will not show the dust from the road. The lords of Tirion already make smirking jokes about the King's eccentric son who lives outside the city gates; we certainly do not need to inspire them further by arriving in their court in muddy boots and dusty cloaks.

I creep downstairs with my boots in my hands, trying not to wake anyone; I can feel the expectant silence of a sleeping house heavy in my ears. Judging by the light in the windows, I could not have been asleep for more than two hours, but it is an hour's ride to Tirion and another hour to its center, where my uncles live in mansions beside Grandfather Finwë's palace, so I understand Atar's desire to leave early and arrive before the city fully awakens.

Atar is in the kitchen, wrapping a small loaf of bread in a clean, white cloth. I join him at the table and, without a word, begin wrapping salted meats and cheeses and an apple for each of us. "Are you hungry now?" he asks me, and I shake my head no; in the early morning, his eyes seem brighter than Telperion's light outside the windows.

"Nor am I. We shall stop, if you'd like, on the way there?"

"That would be fine, Atar." My voice is still hoarse and sleepy.

"I am sorry to have awakened you, Nelyo," he says, "but ..." He leaves the words unspoken, but I know what he means. He does not like to go to Tirion alone. He always takes Amil or Macalaurë or me. "It is fine," I assure him. "I should like to bid farewell to our kin before we leave for Formenos."

He smiles, a quick twitch, surprised: Such a thought did not enter his mind.

In truth, I enjoy taking journeys with Atar. At times, he grows so restless that even the broad pastures and dense forests of our home cannot satisfy him, and he takes those of us who will go, and we ride across the country, wherever our hearts lead us, sometimes to the edges of our world, where the sea batters the cliffs of our homeland as though begging to enter and share in our blessings. Other times, he takes us to the mines, where small, dark Noldor burrow beneath the earth and extract metals and gemstones that my father will twist and break into beauty. Once, we went to the mountains in the south and slept upon the highest peak, breathing air so clear that our heads spun with it, gazing giddily over lands never before seen by our people. Others tell of Atar on such days as intolerable, picking at all that lies before him until small blemishes become gaping wounds, and when circumstances keep him home during such times, he is. But when his body is allowed to move where it pleases, he falls into a languid good humor that exceeds even the distracted joy to which he is prone after a very productive day in the forge. We ride beside him then-my mother, my brothers, and I-racing and playing games; at times, nearly falling from our horses with laughter; discussing and debating with each other late into the night, over the swirling sparks of a dying campfire; and sleeping beneath stars that blaze brighter than they ever do in Valinor.

Today, though, is the prelude to the journey: the requisite trip to Tirion. Atar's face is grim.

Atar has readied our horses while I dressed, and we mount in the silver light of morning, the world softened by glistening drifts of mist that rise from the earth. The forests recede into layers of gray shadow-trees around us. The grass beneath our feet blazes as emeralds set against smoky velvet. Laurelin is brightening and the Lights are mingling, and I silently beg her to wait still, to let her brother reign for just a while longer, to let me bathe in the light that shone at the moment of my birth.

But the light is growing sharper, and Atar and I fall into easy conversation as we ride, discussing the progress I am making on my research and some of the ideas he has for the work I had done on colored light. "Everyone's tired of stones that give only a white-blue light," he says, and I quickly reply, "Oh, I don't think so!" and he laughs.

"Are you not the one, Nelyo, who celebrates equally each color on the prism? Imagine if I could make gemstones with light the color of your mother's favorite roses! Or Tyelkormo's eyes. Or your hair."

I laugh. "But, Atar, white light is the most beautiful of all, for in it is all of those colors, all of the colors of Arda."

He gives me a careful look. "You are ambitious, my son, for you wish to capture the mingled Light of the Trees. That is the only white light in pure form." But I know from his intentional, slow enunciation that this is not the first time he has considered it.

We ride until we leave the forest and can see the city walls in the distance, wavering on the horizon. We stop and sit beneath the trees at the edge of the forest to eat our breakfast. "I was working in the forge and noted that my dear Vorondil returned home quite early last night. Quite early ... and alone," Atar says.

I pretend not to know what he is saying. "I did not see him leave," I answer innocently, picking at a crust of bread.

"I always thought that he coveted the affections of the lovely Annawendë. I was surprised that she left by his side but returned not that I saw."

"Lovely? Annawendë? You jest."

"Once, when your mother was young, she was hurt by her sister's husband, who told her that she lacked the beauty that inspires men to make statues of women. Yet I have made a thousand statues of her, and still I have not tired of the pursuit."

I try one of Macalaurë's flying subject changes. "Macalaurë will be writing to a maiden this summer."

"Now you jest, Nelyo. Macalaurë set down his harp long enough to be introduced to a maiden?"

"Well, to be fair about it, she was the flutist and sitting beside him all night. I doubt he had much of a choice."

"But he fancies her?"

"He fancies himself in love with her."

"Would I know her?"

"She is Vingarië, of the House of the Albatross."

"Ah, a maiden of the Telerin court! I wondered which of you would dilute my blood first," he teases. "I suspected it would be Tyelkormo-after all, he is mistaken for a Vanya as it is, and his golden-haired children would be lovely to behold-but it makes sense that Macalaurë should fancy one of the singing Teleri. I shall have to badger him liberally about it."

"Do not let him know that it was I who told you!"

"You did no such thing, Nelyo. I heard it from the sons of the lords in my father's court." He winks at me. "What of you, Nelyo? Do you fancy Teleri or Vanyar? Or Noldor?"

A piece of bread catches in my throat, and I cough. "I have had my eye on a Noldo," I say quietly.

"I know you have. I have been hoping that you would just admit it to me and be done with it."

"Until last night, I knew not if she fancied me," I say carefully.

"So that is why poor Vorondil came home alone. And, you, I presume, Nelyo, fancy her deeply?"

"I would make a thousand statues of her," I say, "and never tire of the task."

~oOo~

When we reach Tirion, the day is bright and gilded with golden light.

Tirion climbs the Hill of Túna in ever-smaller circles, wide stone streets carved from the earth and spiraling higher and higher, reaching for the top of the hill.

When Macalaurë and I were young, Atar and Amil would take us to the sea, and there we would build a mountain of white sand-Atar told us it was glass, but it looked like diamond-packing it round and smooth, and we would take the molds that Atar had lent us from his forge and build a white city upon it: Tirion. At Laurelin's zenith, Tirion burns white, like an apparition, on the horizon, as though with the fire of stars. My grandfather and my half-uncles live in the narrowest circle, at the top of the hill. The king's palace crowns the apex, and Mindon Eldaliéva stretches against the sky.

There are gates to the city, but they are unguarded, for there is no danger to fear in the Blessed Realm. The gatekeepers are unarmed and are posted only to welcome visitors to the city and bid safe passage to those leaving. I see their eyes settle on us as we approach-two of them, at each side of the golden gates that have never been closed-and I imagine that they mutter to each other from the corners of their mouths, as is their manner.

"Prince Fëanáro?"

"And his eldest son Nelyafinwë?"

But when we get close enough to see their faces, they are rigid and silent.

Smiles carve their mouths at the same time.

"High Prince Fëanáro!"

"Prince Nelyafinwë!"

"We welcome you back to Tirion upon Túna!"

"Bring you any news from the lands beyond the gates?"

We stop before them. It is strange to be greeted in such a manner, so warmly, by strangers. Some of the gatekeepers I know, from accompanying Atar to Grandfather Finwë's counsels, but these I have never met. Atar's gaze drifts over them. He appraises people in the same manner as gemstones: surveying their brilliance, looking for flaws, turning over each feature in his mind before closing his hand to keep them or cast them aside. "No news has come to my home but from Tirion," he says in a careful voice that always startles me. Atar blazes like light on diamonds, but this voice is flat and brittle, conjured in the same manner as the illusions he does to amuse Tyelkormo and Carnistir. "My family fares well: We are busy with our work, and my sons grow faster than Nerdanel and I can alter clothing to fit them. I come to collect my brother-son Findekáno, for he is accompanying us to Formenos this year."

"So is the word. How fortunate he is to be left with so gifted a scholar."

Atar only nods. Such words are not praise to him but mere fact.

The gatekeepers move to the side, and we pass between them and into the streets of Tirion. With our backs to them, I have to stiffen my shoulders and stare at the road before me to keep from twisting around to see if they mutter at each other from the corners of their mouths. But I can imagine that I hear their voices.

"So gifted but so cold. The boy may freeze."

"And hair so red on an Elf? Such a color was not meant for our people."

"Expect you less for a Fëanárion?"

Fëanárion.

My shoulders are so stiff that they ache.

Tirion is a beautiful in the way of the Noldor: clean, practical, geometric. Any superfluous spills of beauty are constrained so that they do not hinder daily progress. Flowers are kept back from the paths; fountains tumble near the gates, where travelers can dip their hands or pause for a drink. When vines are allowed to climb the walls of the houses, they are carefully tended to keep them from drooping across windows and doorways. The city smells of daylight on stone, eclipsed in places by the sweet scent of flowers. The stones from which the city was built are a thick, powdery, and white, drawing the heat of day and not allowing the day's warmth to escape at night, and Tirion always seems to simmer in repelled heat.

People greet us in the streets, and even their clothes are practical. Dresses and cloaks do not trail the ground. Robes are rare on the men; most dress as Atar and I do, in tunic and trousers. Hair is kept braided off the face but the designs are not so complicated as to make one late for work in the mornings. People move with brisk purpose, deftly steering around each other to avoid collision, talking in the sparse, sensible speech of the Noldor.

When the streets become narrow, we dismount and lead our horses. I watch people's eyes as we pass. Some light too quickly upon seeing my father to be anything but genuine joy. Others, I notice, pause before chortling our praise in high, false voices, and their eyes shift quickly from mine when I answer. Atar speaks little, leaving me to take the hands of our people, to inquire after family members whose names he does not remember, and I am struck with vague surprise that he who is so quick to gather my mother and my brothers and me into embraces at home stiffens so when a young maiden places her hand on his arm, as though he would like to throw it off as he would a fly. "Prince Fëanáro? Would you like an orange?" she asks. Her shoulders are laden with bags of fruit, from which she gives freely to the people of the city.

"Thank you," he says. He nods cordially, and his hand plucks the orange from hers with fastidious care. "My son Tyelkormo will delight in this, for my orchards are lacking this season." He gives his horse's reins a quick jerk and moves past her. I pause and thank her again. We must have met before because her name tumbles from my mouth, though I cannot call it to conscious memory, even as I stand with her hand in mine. "May you fare well on your journey, Prince Nelyafinwë," she tells me, and I say warmly, "Please, call me Maitimo," and I know that-despite Atar's aloof behavior-she will remember us as gracious to her family that evening.

In short time, we are standing at the gates that mark entrance to the royal quarters atop the hill. I turn to see the city spilling down the hillside beneath me. Gatekeepers greet us again, and two of Grandfather Finwë's stablehands rush to take our horses. "Thank you, but I am competent enough to lead my own horse," Atar says in appalled surprise, and the stablehands fall back in alarm. "It is our way to take our own mounts to the stable," I assure them. "I apologize, for no offense is meant."

Their heads bob. "Of course, Prince Nelyafinwë. Of course."

The houses of the lords and my uncles-princes of the Noldor like Atar and me, more in manner if less in blood-are each caged behind neat gold fences that gleam in Laurelin's light. The streets bustle in an unnerving silence, servants mostly, wearing the crest of the house they serve. We too have a crest-the star of the House of Fëanáro-but show it today only on a platinum ring set with a fire opal that Atar wears on his left thumb, as though the ring had been made only as an experiment, an afterthought, without being fitted to a more appropriate finger, worn now only because it is pretty. The servants stop and bow and murmur in deference as we pass, and Atar stares at them, his face grim.

We take our horses to Grandfather Finwë's stables, remove their tack, and carefully dry them. I bring two sloshing buckets of water while Atar rations out handfuls of hay and oats. He is silent now, stiff, as is his wont in royal Tirion. Ironic how, from despise of the stiff, glacial lords, he falls so easily into their manner! I try to start conversation, but he hums his responses-high and lilting for yes, low and grumbly for no-and finally, I give up.

"Fëanáro!" The stable door bursts open and Grandfather Finwë runs down the aisle-making the horses snort and paw the floor-looking quite comical in his billowing white robes. He catches Atar so hard in an embrace that I hear my father gasp, his palms flat on Atar's back. Whenever he holds my father, it is as though he believes that Atar is not quite real.

"Atar!" says my father, in the joyful voice that I wanted to hear a moment before and could not find. "I sent two stablehands ..." Grandfather Finwë begins.

The initial joy of reunion subsided, Atar's brow furrows and his eyes flash hotly. "I know. And I refused them. When is it the way of the Elves to grovel before another? I ask not for your people to lie at my feet because I was born in your palace with your blood in my veins."

"Fëanáro. They are apprentices to my horse trainers. They will not serve me in this meager capacity forever." Grandfather Finwë's voice is patient and tired, a voice that is used to quieting querulous lords and unruly children.

"If they are apprentices to your horse trainers," says Atar, "then should they be training horses and not scurrying to tasks that could be done by Carnistir." He sneers, and I cringe, for my father is the most beautiful of our people, but his face can twist into ugliness when he is displeased. "I have more pride than to allow another to do for me a child's task."

"I meant no offense." Grandfather Finwë rubs his forehead as though warding off a headache, and Atar's eyes blaze. "In the course of my day, there is much that I must do for our people, and I cannot always find time for such tasks."

"I am your High Prince"-when Atar says it, "High Prince" sounds like something to be ground into the dust with the heel of his boot-"yet I manage to accomplish such trivialities and still maintain time for my craft. The only ones who aid me are my wife, my sons, and my apprentices, whom I serve with equal love and gratitude, and I ask none of them to do that which I have not done a thousand times myself."

"Next time, then, Fëanáro," says Grandfather Finwë in a patiently patronizing voice that would enrage Atar coming from any other, "I shall lead your horse myself and curry him until he gleams, just to prove to you that accepting such offers of assistance from those who choose to serve me is a respectable luxury." He looks past Atar, to me. "Now you have flustered me so that I have neglected to greet my eldest grandson." He opens his arms, and I step into his embrace. "Russandol, I am always glad to see you."

"As I am to see you, Grandfather Finwë," I reply.

We walk to the palace. Grandfather Finwë inquires about the rest of the family, although he saw them just last week, and I tell him how well Tyelkormo is progressing in his horsemanship lessons and that Macalaurë has written two new songs and praise Carnistir's letters, which he is beginning to write quite well. Atar is mostly silent and walks with his arms crossed over his chest. "You shall, I hope, Fëanáro, greet your brothers while you are here?" Grandfather Finwë asks Atar.

"Nerdanel has written letters to both of my half-sisters-in-law, wishing them well, as they are both with child, so I shall see that they are received. I should myself like to see Arafinwë. And Nolofinwë leaves me little choice, as he has somehow convinced me to drag his son behind us to Formenos this summer."

"Ah, young Findekáno is a delight. He shall be a good playmate for Tyelkormo."

I try to imagine big, roguish Tyelkormo playing with my delicate cousin Findekáno and cannot. I can see Carnistir whopping him over the head with a practice sword; I can see Tyelkormo luring him into quicksand. And I can see Macalaurë dragging a muddied, weeping, and possibly bleeding Findekáno behind him and claiming not to know how any of it happened. But I cannot see my poor cousin fitting into my big, loud family.

"I should like, actually, to call on Arafinwë, gather Findekáno and quickly return home," says Atar, "for there are still many preparations to be made before we leave for Formenos day-after-next."

"No, Fëanáro, you must come in for a short spell, at least," Grandfather Finwë protests. "Indis has been looking forward to your visit all week."

Indis is the reason that Atar does not like to go to his father's home, but he does not say that.

"You leave me no choice then but to accept," Atar says, his voice weary, as though he has been making such acceptances for far too long now. But his eyes burn with something that is not weariness, and I can imagine, had Carnistir come along, that he would be wailing by now.

The palace sits atop a long flight of marble stairs. We enter the court, a massive, high-ceilinged room, occupied by the lords of the neighboring houses. I see Atar's work among the statues and paintings that grace the walls, and I am always taken aback, for I cannot imagine him here, appraising this room, planning its decoration, setting aside his research and his gemstones to manufacture pleasures for the lords of the court. I can imagine less that he lived here for forty years, that he was once a child who ran and played across this wide floor, that he stumbled home, late and disheveled from love with my mother, trying not to make a sound. I cannot imagine my parents-still children themselves-crossing this room with me in their arms, clothes soiled from the road, taking me to meet my grandfather for the first time. A man who knew not that he even had a grandson. How did they cross so vast a space on knees that must have quavered? How did they bear the whispers of the lords, loitering in the corners? The child? Whose is it? furtively whispered as their faces took in with satisfaction the slim gold rings on my parents' hands and the red-haired baby in my mother's arms.

The lords stand there now, in their robes and circlets, in small clusters like feeding predators, discussing in bold voices the counsels they have held and attended pertaining to a wide array of issues affecting Noldorin life in Tirion, everything from the allotment of land to the new marriageable generation to the replacement of loose cobblestones on the lower streets. There is an awkward falter in speech when we enter, a moment's pause before the bold conversations continue as before, and I can imagine the question zipping through their heads: Fëanáro? In his father's court? Without being summoned first to counsel?

They come to greet us, arriving in carefully timed waves, making their salutations, and departing. They are like small missiles being bounced dutifully off a wall. Atar is distant and stiff; I am warmer. I take their hands to please my grandfather. I make the appropriate inquiries about their families and answer those made about mine, always the vague positives only: They do not need to know that Tyelkormo twisted his ankle three weeks ago or that Carnistir's nightmares have gotten worse. Nor do they need to know that Macalaurë and I are both in the first flushes of love. I dole out controlled smiles that are neither gushing nor insincere, that do not show too much tooth. I nod with appropriate deference, to show respect for the satiny, gilded versions of the men who crossed Middle-earth with my grandfather, filthy and stinking, centuries ago.

Laiquiwë of the House of the Silver Willow hesitates until nearly last and arrives bracketed by two other lords, and when I try to meet his eyes, his glance skips away to Atar's, and when Atar stares back at him, skips to the floor. I am especially deferential to him, as one who still owes a debt, and I know that he sees me eternally unclothed, caught in the clasp of his daughter on the couch in his study (who knew that my grandfather would call the counsel short that day?) and he sees Atar as the negligent, permissive father who gave me only a month of cleaning the forge as punishment. (Atar actually found the incident quite harmless; the punishment was more Amil's doing.) I have to bite the tip of my tongue to keep from laughing, biting hard until I taste a painful spurt of blood, and when Laiquiwë's glance leaves mine, Atar and I catch each other's eye in a sidelong glance-two lines that intersect at a tiny, insignificant point in space, fixing upon a single molecule, unnoticed by the others-and I have to clear my throat to hide the laughter that bubbles unbidden over my bloodied tongue.

(To be fair: It was his daughter that found the lascivious parchment in his study. It was his daughter who led me there and instructed me to stand while she removed my clothing piece by piece. It was his daughter who suggested that we attempt one of the more ambitious activities illustrated on the parchment. It was his daughter who took to whispering my name then speaking it then shouting it, leaving me no choice but to think that, when she screamed, it was in the throes of passion, until an unfamiliar male voice joined hers. Perhaps he was more embarrassed by the damning presence of the parchment in his study than the relatively passive role I played in corrupting his daughter?)

Laiquiwë's face is like marble, and I know with thrilling humiliation that he has seen that grain of air sizzle with mine and Atar's convergent glances. The laughter chokes in my throat. I bow very low and bid him-and his attendant lords-a most sincere farewell. Atar just nods and remains silent.

More lords march to greet us before we are free, passing into the private chambers of the palace.

"Indis has had prepared for you a midday meal," says Grandfather Finwë.

"That is not necessary," Atar replies. "Nelyo and I had bread and cheese just two hours ago."

I could eat again, to be polite, and I will. But I know that Atar will not; he will force himself to ignore the rich, delicious food; he will go hungry if he needs to. He will use our plain meal of bread and cheese as an excuse to reject the superior food that Indis offers, to reject Indis.

We arrive in a sitting room, a posh room, upholstered in an endless sea of blue velvet and a rich gold and maroon carpet. Indis is perched on the edge of the sofa like a woman about to be called to give unpleasant testimony. Her clothing matches the room: a deep blue gown with sweeping, voluminous sleeves and a train that brushes the ground behind her. The necklace at her throat is something that Atar made-a ruby and topaz thing that coordinates with the carpet, beautiful but too bright for a casual midday meeting with one's stepson and step-grandson-and her attempt at pleasing his vanity seems sadly flagrant, like too low a bow before a minor lord. She is a beautiful woman, her face caught eternally in youth, her golden hair swept into a hairstyle that must have taken hours to execute, but it is hard to imagine that she has a body beneath the pounds of velvet and stiff, lacquered hair; it is easier to believe that she is a dressmaker's dummy, with wire ribs and dowel-rod arms. As I come nearer to her, I am dismayed to realize that even her eyes match the room, a deep sapphire blue untroubled by winks of gray, as are the eyes of the Noldor.

She is Vanya, a woman of soft hands, whose skin has never been broken or hardened by labor. She is kind to us in an effortful, doting manner; she goes to lengths greater than should be necessary for one whom she longs to call family. She treats Atar as if he were the King, and as if her husband was but an ambitious, upstart lord.

She rises from the sofa and glides to us. "Fëanáro, Russandol," she says, and I wince at the use of my epessë, an effort-like the jeweled necklace around her throat-too dazzlingly obvious to please. She takes Atar's hands and kisses him, letting her lips brush across his; I see the tendons in his neck spring rigid, like it takes a great effort to keep from twisting away from her. She comes to me next. Her hands are warm and powdery; her lips on mine are very light and dry. I suddenly feel slobbery and dirty. My skin itches.

The idea of Indis and Grandfather Finwë making love always creeps unbidden into my mind whenever I see them together. I try to banish it in a manner of shooing away pesky birds, but it steals back as I watch them sit beside each other, his hand draped over hers. The impracticality of it is darkly fascinating: to think of this tiny, sighing woman and her dry kisses in the eager, viselike embrace of my bearish grandfather. It is hard to imagine him unwrapping her from her miles of velvet gown like one might unwrap a morsel to eat on a journey. I wonder how she lays on her hair without mashing the hours of effort it takes to make it look that way. It is hard to imagine, a squeamish thought, but they must have, twice at least, for I have two half-uncles in Tirion with Indis's blue eyes and Grandfather Finwë's strong shoulders. Perhaps Atar thinks of it too. Perhaps that is why he won't eat in her presence.

She has set out a small table with a spread of lavish food that we rarely get at home. (Partly, I must admit, because Macalaurë and I never want to go to the trouble of making such things when it is our turn to cook.) I dutifully take some-my stomach has managed, at the sight of food, to be hungry again-but Atar rigidly refuses. He refuses her wine as well: "I'll have a glass of water," he says, and she has to leave the room to get it for him, my grandfather having dismissed the servants who usually hover outside the door, perhaps fearing another of Atar's outbursts.

The food is really good, but then, Grandfather Finwë and Indis have in their employ some of the finest cooks in Tirion, cooks who are not always rushing to get back to the forge or the library or the music room like we do at home. Indis returns with Atar's water and I wait until he takes an awkward sip of it to grab another handful of crackers with a spicy cheese spread and little slices of smoked turkey, hiding them in my hands like they are an insult to him.

"This is very good, Lady Indis," I say. Like I winced before at her use of the name Russandol, she twitches almost imperceptibly at the name Lady Indis, the title used by the lords of the Noldorin court when they speak with her; the name used by her servants. It is a name suggesting obedience, deferment. It does not suggest the blood of kin, even if that kin is yours only through a dubious marriage.

Grandfather Finwë and I maintain the conversation. Indis makes the occasional polite inquiry, and Atar makes the occasional polite but tepid reply, but mostly it is Grandfather Finwë-laughing too heartily-and me-being too gracious-keeping the awkward silence at bay.

I am grateful when Atar stands and announces that we have other calls to make and must be moving on before the day grows late.

"Will you return for supper?" Grandfather Finwë asks.

"No, we shall return home. Macalaurë has generously offered to have a supper waiting in welcome of his cousin."

Secretly, I think that Macalaurë's spongy casseroles and stringy, overcooked meats are far from welcoming, but I keep my thoughts to myself.

Back outside, on the balcony overlooking the long flight of stairs that will carry us down to ground, Grandfather Finwë embraces Atar, and they hold each other for a long time. Grandfather Finwë whispers something into Atar's ear; he strokes Atar's hair, but Atar doesn't move or speak, and I can only faintly discern his shoulders moving as he breathes. When they let go, at last, Grandfather Finwë holds Atar's face in his hands and lavishes him with kisses-his eyes, his cheeks, his lips-like he would a small child who has injured himself, while Atar grips his wrists with both hands.

"I love you," he says, and if Atar replies, I do not hear it.

My uncle Arafinwë lives only a few houses away, and we walk there in the golden light of afternoon. Atar is quiet and I do not question him. Silence shimmers between us like heat waves, perceptible, odd, but not yet uncomfortable.

Arafinwë has one of the more modest homes on the street, a pinkish stone mansion fronted by ranks of lopsided topiaries that he proudly keeps himself. Someone-probably Arafinwë-has propped open the gate with a chunk of broken cobblestone. Arafinwë is only fourteen years older than me, near enough in years that I stood with him at his wedding only five summers ago. We have barely set foot on the path when the front door flies open and Arafinwë bounds down the walkway.

"Fëanáro!" he sings, and leaps onto Atar, squeezing his arms around his neck and spinning him in a circle. Arafinwë is small next to Atar-little and quick like a golden sparrow-and Atar likes him the most of his second family, probably because Arafinwë cheerfully ignores any of Atar's attempts at animosity. Atar embraces him in return-more warmly than I would have expected-though he is the first to let go and makes a point of widening the space between them. I am next, and my uncle who is already shorter than me catches me in a tight hug around the neck. "Russandol!" he says, and the epessë does not sound awkward when he says it, but warm and familiar, as Grandfather Mahtan intended when he gave it to me.

Arafinwë backs away and appraises me. He wears blue robes and a prince's silver circlet, but his quick smile makes him less imposing than my uncle Nolofinwë and Indis-even Grandfather Finwë. "My, you're tall," he says to me. His voice is musical, breathless. He speaks faster than is the wont of the Noldor. "How old are you? Ninety-eight, ninety-nine?"

The goofy childlike humor works. I grin. "No, just forty-seven."

"Forty-seven!" He makes a big show of looking behind me. "Shouldn't you have three or four children by now?" He pokes Atar as he says this. "Like your father? At least a beautiful wife?"

"He's working on the last part," Atar tells him.

I am appalled. "I am not-Atar! We've only been to one dance!"

"Well, I shall have my best robes pressed then," Arafinwë says, "in anticipation of the occasion." He winks at me. "And I shall have Atar order nine gross of handkerchiefs," he says to my father, "for the maidens in Tirion shall weep inconsolably on the day that one of their numbers takes the charming Russandol away from them."

"Arafinwë!" From the house behind us comes my aunt's voice, her Telerin accent lively in the still air of royal Tirion. "You would leave our guests at the gate like beggars? Where are your manners?"

Aunt Eärwen trots down the walkway, holding her pregnant belly just beginning to swell, the grin on her face betraying her feigned annoyance. She wears a light blue gown of a filmy, gossamer fabric; her jewelry is not gemstones set in gold, as is her husband's, but strings of pearls iridescent in the afternoon light and a pair of earrings that Atar made as a wedding present: scallop shells cast in silver and adorned with tiny flecks of multi-colored coral. Eärwen's hair is silvery, as though the sea itself resides in it; her eyes are gray like ours but they twinkle and dance like light playing on the water. She bounds into Atar's arms as Arafinwë had done only moments earlier. "Fëanáro! It has been too long!"

"It has only been a month since I was here last for Atar's counsel."

She laughs and catches him by surprise with a quick peck on the lips, but he does not recoil. "And Russandol!" she says, holding her arms out to me. "My brother-son, who never fails to grow taller and more handsome each time we meet. How fare you?"

She stands on tiptoe to kiss my lips.

Grandfather Finwë and Eärwen's father Olwë have long been the closest of friends. Eärwen is but a few years younger than Atar, and I have always suspected that the two had a close friendship in childhood, for Eärwen is the only woman besides my mother who ever touches Atar without him flinching. She takes our hands now-her hand is frail in mine, like the stems of flowers, easily crushed-and leads us into the house.

Arafinwë's house blends the stern beauty of the Noldor with the whimsical loveliness of the Teleri. Light, silky curtains billow from open windows to tickle the heavy oak furniture given to Arafinwë by Grandfather Finwë. Some rooms have large glass tanks with many-colored fishes darting around in them; these fascinate Tyelkormo when we visit, and he will sit alone for hours with his mouth agape and his nose and palms smudging the glass. But we pass the sitting rooms with the fish and proceed to a balcony overlooking the back gardens-more of Arafinwë's topiaries and the song of tinkling fountains-beneath a blue silk canopy. The furniture is made of the light wood found beside the sea; the balcony is graced by several statures of Uinen that I recognize as my mother's work, carved from the soft, porous stone that washes onto the beaches of Eldamar. There is an hourglass on the table that Atar made for their first wedding anniversary, the glass oscillated, each half a different size and shape in a multitude of colors-the relativity of time, he said-and filled not with sand but with the dust of diamonds.

Eärwen pours wine for all of us-this time Atar accepts-before snuggling against Arafinwë on a wicker couch. I remember how my parents were when Amil was pregnant with my brothers, the way they rarely left the other's side, the way that they would press against each other even during mealtimes, as though, by doing so, they could embrace their unborn baby between them.

Eärwen rests a hand on her belly, as though the child can feel her caresses-and perhaps he can-and Arafinwë rests his larger hand on hers. I think suddenly of Grandfather Finwë's story about the night before their marriage ceremony and have to bury my face in my wineglass to keep from laughing at the thought of Arafinwë, with his proud Noldorin shoulders, being dumbstruck by a tiny Telerin maiden who seems like she could dance in the palm of his hand.

"So how fares my imminent brother-son?" Atar asks.

Eärwen breaks into a wide grin. "He will be here in exactly two hundred and forty-nine days. I already have my name picked out for him."

Arafinwë cautions us: "Do not ask her what it is. She will not even tell me."

"That's fine," Atar says. "I named Nelyafinwë when I was thirty-two years old and told no one for twelve years."

Everyone laughs but me. I am always bewildered by the things that parents will reveal when they are with other parents.

"Actually, Fëanáro," Eärwen says coyly, "as precocious as you are, I am surprised it took you that long to name your firstborn son. I would have thought you'd have had him named by your twentieth begetting day, at the latest."

"Ah, my lovely sister-in-law, if you think on it, you will realize that, in my thirty-second year, something very profound happened to me, for that was the year that I met my beautiful wife, and prior to that chance encounter, I had never imagined myself the father of any children. I thought it'd be Nolofinwë's duty to beget my father's heirs."

Now I stare at Atar with open bewilderment, for how could the one who defied what was thought possible for the Elves-fathering four children before his own hundredth begetting day-possibly have once doubted that he would have any children at all? I try to picture Atar without Carnistir in his arms or Tyelkormo walking so close behind him that he steps on his heels, and the picture-when it finally comes-is incomplete and sad, like a painting left unfinished.

"And now you have been blessed with four," says Arafinwë," and may Eru grant you more."

"Yes," Atar says, sipping his wine and smiling over the rim of his glass, "Nerdanel and I make such a request two or three times a week."

"Ai, Eärwen," Arafinwë says, "I only hope that after fifty years of marriage and four sons you are still willing to make an attempt for another two or three times a week," and Eärwen snippily counters with, "I only hope that you have the energy left for such pursuits, Arafinwë, for we would still be childless now if I hadn't motivated you properly after our dear Fëanáro's feast following the Winter Festival this past year."

"Why does everyone beget their children at my house?" Atar asks. "I still suspect that Findekáno was conceived at Tyelkormo's welcoming feast."

"Yes," says Eärwen in a brisk, matter-of-fact voice, "he was. So, Fëanáro, when he becomes lonely for his parents and homesick tonight, you can remind him that you, in a way, have brought him home."

There is more laughter. I hear my voice join in, though I am suddenly not entirely aware of my surroundings. While my elders discuss their children-present and future-I have been sipping liberally of the sweet Telerin wine. Atar's hourglass shimmers like a puzzling apparition; Aunt Eärwen's laughter melts perfectly with the sound of the fountains. The Teleri are known for their heady wine, and I do not like the strange sensations it gives. I set my glass to the side and wait for my head to stop spinning.

"And Eärwen and I shall visit frequently once our son is born," says Arafinwë, "so that he too can know his origins. Keep the westernmost bedroom on the third floor ready for us." He winks.

"Two hundred and forty-nine days!" Eärwen says brightly and sighs. "Ah, Fëanáro, for how long have we known each other? I have known you from before I was born, perhaps-have you ever known a time when I did not long for children? I would gladly take a dozen, Eru grant it. In fact, when I first saw Arafinwë-after he'd grown up, of course, because the first time I saw him, he spit apples all down my back-I knew in that moment that I would wed him. He and I will make beautiful babies, I thought, and he will make me happy until the ending of Arda."

"May Eru grant it," Arafinwë says softly. His hand tightens on hers; they both press firmer against her belly.

I remember Arafinwë's and Eärwen's first acquaintance, for it was not so long ago at Tyelkormo's eighth begetting day feast. Amil insisted that King Olwë and his lovely daughter Eärwen-my father's childhood friend-had to be invited. And Atar's half-brothers. I remember watching them together-my uncle and the woman who would one day become my aunt-and thinking them perfect for each other, so light on their feet and flighty. If only she were a Noldo, I'd thought, but that hadn't stopped Arafinwë, who'd suddenly taken a keen interest in Telerin harp music and had begun making weekly trips to Alqualondë to study the craft. A year later, they'd announced their betrothal; a year after that, they had been married, and I'd stood behind my father and Uncle Nolofinwë in honor of them at the ceremony. "Eru made Arafinwë with Eärwen in mind," Amil had said, watching them dance together at their wedding. "They were in harmony in the Music."

I wonder: Do they fight like Amil and Atar do? It is hard to imagine Eärwen's voice raised in anger; it is hard to imagine little Arafinwë slamming a door so hard that it breaks. But, Amil had assured me when I was still very small and terrified of the angry words I'd heard her exchange with my father that all spouses fight. Still I cannot imagine Arafinwë calling Eärwen the kinds of names that I have heard Atar call Amil. Obstinate bitch-I shift restlessly in my chair, wishing suddenly for the swirling oblivion that the wine would bring. And what did she call him? A graceless brat? I cannot imagine those words in my aunt's voice, but neither can I imagine them in Atar's, when he laughs and teases Arafinwë.

The hours pass; Atar announces that we must take leave of their company in order to retrieve Findekáno. Arafinwë and Eärwen both walk us to the door.

Atar gives Eärwen the letter that Amil has written, sealed in red wax with her seal. "Nerdanel sends her best wishes," Atar says. "She is ecstatic for you."

Eärwen seems suddenly very young and small. She takes Atar into a tender embrace. "I thank you, Fëanáro. I would like, if Nerdanel would not mind, if she would attend me at the birth. I am very excited now, but I shall be terrified in the moment. Your wife is the sister for whom I wished and never received as a child, and she brings comfort to me."

"At the least, she will keep Arafinwë calm," Atar tells her.

Arafinwë walks with us to the gate, where he and Atar exchange quick embraces. "Give our love to your family, Fëanáro," says Arafinwë, "and to Findekáno. He is a good child. I wish-"

He stops abruptly and looks at Atar, who waits with expectant eyes. The expression on Arafinwë's face is that of one who has endured a gentle ache for a very long time, without hope of it ever ending. But that look slips from his countenance with a soft smile. "I wish you well," he says at last, and Atar and I both know that those were not the words he wanted to say.

"Well," says Atar as we walk past the palace again on our way to Nolofinwë's, "this is the last stop before home."

Atar's eyes are dull, his expression worn, as though wearied by this visit in a way that he never is after a full day of work at the forge.

Nolofinwë's house sits on the other side of the palace from Arafinwë's. It is the largest house on the hilltop-excepting the palace, of course-a sprawling, stone mansion with tall spires at either side. We walk up a long stone path with gemstones set in spiraling patterns, twinkling at our feet like fallen stars. Halfway up the path, Atar and I split to walk around a fountain that plays in the middle of the walkway. When I rejoin him on the other side, he rolls his eyes and mutters, "Nolofinwë. Sheer silliness."

Two servants stand by the door, staring at nothing until Atar and I are right before them, at which point they bow neatly and say, "Good afternoon, Princes Fëanáro and Nelyafinwë." One opens the door, and the other leads us inside. "Lady Anairë will receive you in the lower parlor," says the one who leads us down a cascade of stairs. The air in the house is heavy; the walls are choked with ornamentation. Some of the windows are open, but no breeze can stir the heavy drapes. As we pass through the rooms, I see statues of my mother's, paintings of my father's, but they are lost amid the lustrous clutter. Not a speck of dust dances in the slivers of light that have dared to creep past the draperies.

Beside me, Atar's muscles have gone rigid; his footfalls cut the silence of the house.

The Elf leading us scuttles into the room ahead of us, where he bows and announces us: "Your Princes Fëanáro and Nelyafinwë, my lady," bows again, and on Anairë's word, departs.

She rises to greet us: a tall, handsome woman; my aunt; the wife of Nolofinwë. Her dark hair is swooped and fastened behind her head; her gray eyes are as deep and clear as a pool of water untouched by wind and untroubled by ripples. Her gown is a rich, dark gray material. Like Eärwen, she is pregnant, but her pregnancy looks out of place on her, almost feigned, like she has stuffed a pillow under her gown. Surely a woman of her stature could not have fallen to such carnal weakness? "Welcome, Fëanáro. Russandol," she says. Her lips twitch into a smile. She is beautiful, I suppose, in the same way as a statue.

Atar hands her Amil's letter first this time, as a way of greeting. "Greetings come from my wife and family," he says. She thanks him and takes his hand; her lips brush his cheek. She takes my hand next-her hand is cool and dry like marble-and kisses my cheek a little closer to my lips than Atar's.

"Russandol. You grow ever more beautiful. You do great honor to the House of Finwë."

"I thank you." I want to say her name, but what do I call her? Aunt Anairë? Just Anairë? I have called my other aunt and uncle by their names alone for as long as I can remember, but of course, they are closer in age to me than Anairë, who is older even than Atar. I feel like I should call her my lady, like a servant, but that seems silly. I am, after all, her brother-son, even if just by marriage. So I call her nothing at all and feel awkward and ungainly in her presence, an unaccustomed and unpleasant feeling.

"Please." She gestures to a finely embroidered brocade sofa. "Do have a seat. May I have some wine brought? Water?"

"No, we are fine. We wish no insult, but we have a long ride and cannot linger long," says Atar.

Her lips tighten into a smile. "Findekáno is with his father, readying for the journey. He will be along shortly."

Journey? I think. Surely she doesn't mean the ride to our house? But then, I realize, that for Findekáno, that probably is a journey. I wonder: Has my small cousin ever ridden so far on his own before, on horseback, not in the comfort of a chariot? In the company of strangers?

I have seen my cousin many times, of course, at festivals and feasts. I held him at the welcoming feast Grandfather Finwë hosted in his honor, only a few weeks after Tyelkormo's first begetting day. He was tinier than Tyelkormo at his age and more placid than I expected from an infant, moving only to clutch a lock of my hair and obstinately holding on until Anairë laughed and peeled his fingers from it. (Both Macalaurë and Tyelkormo seemed to be all waving arms and insulted shrieks when they were babies. Carnistir was twice as bad.) Since then, I usually greeted him as he sat on his father's knee or clutched his mother's hand, a small, pale-faced child whose damp eyes reminded me of an animal who has been wounded and remains mistrustful.

"We are indebted to your generosity, Fëanáro," she says, and I am grateful for the conversation, though it seems to barely ripple the thick silence of the house. "Findekáno has had many marvelous tutors, but he has taken to none of them and is so rarely inspired these days. It seems a shame that a child of such illustrious bloodlines should amount to naught."

"Well, Nelyo shall instruct him in lore." My nickname drops like a chunk of stone in the still, formal house. I wince, knowing that Atar did it on purpose. "Macalaurë, of course, will work with him on music, at least once per week. And I shall take him with my son Tyelkormo to the forge."

Anairë's face cracks into a startled smile. "The ... forge?"

"Well, yes, did you not wish him to learn craft?" Atar's naiveté is carefully wrought. Again, I am certain that he has alarmed her on purpose (for Tyelkormo has not begun work in the forge himself, even after many years of studying craft with both Amil and Atar); his eyes are gleaming with delight.

"Yes, but I had hoped it something gentler, more civilized. Perhaps sculpture. With your wife."

"Then he shall, as you fear, amount to naught, for love of craft boils in the blood of the Noldor."

Anairë tries to hold her stony poise, and it is like a study of anatomy to watch her eyelids succumb first, then her cheeks, and last, her mouth. "Fëanáro, I do not question your wisdom, for obviously, you are the most learned of your brothers." Like Atar's earlier ploys, Anairë too works in subtle cruelty, for Atar is not the most learned of just his brothers but the most learned of all our people. "What you feel is safe and suitable for Findekáno shall have to content me. You have, after all, four sons of your own." She seems to be reassuring herself. "And Nolofinwë gives you his trust."

Amil would hardly allow us to venture into danger based on Atar's trust alone if she herself felt misgivings, but I do not say that. Decorum holds my tongue, and we are interrupted by the arrival of Nolofinwë and Findekáno.

I am always struck by how much like Atar his half-brother Nolofinwë looks. If Arafinwë inherited his appearance-his golden hair and slight frame-from Indis, then Nolofinwë was made in the likeness of grandfather Finwë. Like Atar, he is tall-though not quite as tall, and he is a bit broader in the shoulders-and his hair is dark. His skin is flawlessly porcelain; his features are beautiful enough to belong to the Valar. But I stop always at his eyes. They are the blue eyes of Indis, but that is not what gives me pause, but rather, the lack of light in them-the light that enlivens and consumes Atar's countenance-makes me think always that, would Atar's spirit flee his body, the body that remained would look exactly like Nolofinwë.

And Findekáno, who clutches his father's hand and ducks behind his legs when he sees us, is inconsequential, the kind of child who is always underfoot because of the simple fact that he is so easily overlooked. He wears gray robes trimmed in blue, everyday clothes that are nicer than the finest clothes worn by Tyelkormo. His tiny neck, his tiny wrists and fingers, are adorned with jewelry. He reminds me of the dolls that are sometimes given as playthings to children, miniatures of their parents in body but with babies' faces.

Atar and I rise. I look intently at Nolofinwë as he greets us, but Atar stares-his brows knit in displeasure-at the child at his half-brother's side.

"Fëanáro, Russandol, you remember my son Findekáno?" With several clever twists, Nolofinwë has brought Findekáno around to stand in front of him.

"Well met, Uncle Fëanáro," Findekáno mumbles. He is tugging at his hair, which has been braided too tightly, and staring at the floor.

Atar grunts something in greeting. I pay him no mind and kneel before Findekáno, sinking onto my heels until our eyes are level. He looks at me with alarm, and his hand falls guiltily from his hair. "Findekáno," I say. "Cousin mine. How do you like to be called? Do your parents call you Káno?"

"No. Just Findekáno," he whispers.

"Shall I call you Káno?"

"You may."

"You know me, do you not? Do you know my name?"

"You are my cousin Russandol," he says. "The one with all the maidens in Tirion."

Nolofinwë barks with nervous laughter. "The things children hear in the court," he says to Atar. I smile to imagine the look of righteous horror on Atar's face and am glad to see Findekáno's lips turn into a slight smile too. His hand has returned to his hair; I have my mind set that, as soon as we pass the city gates, I shall loosen it for him.

"Findekáno," Anairë says, "tell your uncle and cousin how much you look forward to spending the summer with them in Formenos."

His eyes drift back to the floor. "I begged every day to stay here in Tirion, but Atar would not listen," he says softly, and both his parents shout at him in alarm, and my heart feels like it has broken in half in my chest. I want to gather him into a hug, as I would my brothers, but I am not sure whether he would view it as a comfort or imprisonment.

I stand abruptly. "Perhaps he is too small to leave home," I protest. "He is only-" but Atar silences me with a stern glance.

"I went to Aulë when I was his age," he says coolly. His eyes leave mine and go to Nolofinwë and Anairë, who stand in stiff anticipation. "I was pained to leave my father, but I grew content in time." To Nolofinwë, he asks, "Do you have his things? For the hour grows late, and we must soon leave." As if on command, two servants bring in a pile of trunks. Atar bites his lips and does not speak.

Nolofinwë accompanies us to the stable, where the trunks are tied onto the back of a pack pony. A stablehand leads a stout dun pony forward for Findekáno. Nolofinwë lifts him onto its back. Findekáno is weeping; Atar is pretending not to notice, and I am fighting the urge to push Nolofinwë aside and gather the child in my arms, for have I not seen three baby brothers, and do I not know the comfort a child takes from warmth and love? "Atar, do not make me go," Findekáno whimpers. "I promise I'll learn better here. I promise." He is clutching at Nolofinwë, and Nolofinwë is peeling his arms away. I have to stride away to the end of the stable, rubbing at my cheeks to hide the tears that have suddenly spilled from my eyes.

A hand falls hard onto my shoulder and spins me around. Atar puts his lips close to my ear. "Nelyo, do not-" he begins, but I interrupt him. "It is not right! He is thirteen years old, just a child! He does not want to go! He belongs at home, with a tutor, with the love of his family!"

"Then give him that, for he shall never receive an adequate quantity of either here," Atar hisses in my ear and whirls around to walk heavily back to our horses, where Nolofinwë gives his son a stern kiss farewell and leaves him, still weeping, in our care.

~oOo~

Findekáno's silent tears fall until we pass the city gates. His hands clutch the reins at the withers of his pony, and his crumpled little face tips forward, letting his hair spill over it to hide the shame he feels at weeping so openly as we pass through the lower streets of the city. Away from his parents and any chance of salvation, I know he feels weak in the presence of my father, as so many do.

Atar speaks to him dutifully, asking questions: "Are you hungry?" or "Do you wish for a bit of water?" to which Findekáno only shakes his head.

Past the city gates, I ask, "Would you like to ride with me for a while, Káno? I can loosen those braids for you if you'd like," and he looks at me with confusion.

"R-ride with ..." His words stumble into incomprehension, and his eyes shine like big blue marbles.

We stop, and I lift him from his pony onto my horse, in front of me. I feel him stiffen with alarm, and I pretend that it is only a child's simple fear of falling. "Do not fret," I say in his ear and draw him back close against me, "I will not let you fall."

I hold the reins with my left hand as we ride and with the right untwine the braids from his hair. His hair is like warm silk spilling between my fingers, alike to Tyelkormo's in texture, almost as dark as Atar's. When the braids are loose, he shakes his head with the joy of an animal released from a barn into freedom and I laugh and am grateful that he laughs awkwardly in reply.

I expect that he might fall asleep against me, for this is my brothers' way, but he remains wakeful and alert, although he grows more relaxed. It is a secret that Atar taught me when Tyelkormo was small and fussy and I would be left in charge of him while my parents worked: to hold him to my chest, against my heart. "Let him hear your heartbeat," Atar told me. "It's all he heard for the first year of his life while still inside your mother. It's comforting to him." I quieted many of Tyelkormo's tantrums in this manner-and later Carnistir's as well-now, it takes the tears from my little cousin's eyes and the tension from his shoulders, and he slumps against me for the last half-hour of our ride home.

I wish to tell him that he will be happy with us, that he will love my parents and his cousins, but I am not sure that this is true. The heavy silence of his house still echoes in my head; after living like that, how will he survive the busy noise of our home? I ask him about his lessons instead, and he answers me in a dutiful, clear voice like he must have answered his tutors at home. Yes, he studied lore and knows his letters. Yes, he likes to read. Yes, he had learned a bit of the harp and had been promised the lute, but his Atar had sent the tutor back to Alqualondë before he could learn. Yes, most of all, he likes to sing.

"Well, you shall like my brother Macalaurë then, for he is exceptionally gifted in music. I'm sure he would teach you the lute, if you wished to learn."

"I would."

Atar is riding silently beside us, watching me with one eyebrow raised in curious astonishment. I grin at him and he looks away, nudging his horse into a canter. Findekáno and I-constrained by two ponies hitched behind us-can muster nothing faster than a plodding trot. "We are nearly home, Findekáno," Atar calls over his shoulder.

Home. I wince, for to Findekáno, it is not home at all, it is a strange place he has gone to only in his father's chariot, a place where he stayed for a few hours-maybe an overnight for the exceptionally special feasts-before returning to the peace of Tirion. I try to imagine myself displaced from our home and into Nolofinwë's, and I ache with loneliness for the bustling mornings and the dusty library and my wide, soft bed and the sticky kisses of my baby brothers. I know that the boy seated in front of me, still a child, must suffer from a longing much more profound than can be conjured by my nearly-adult imagination.

But maybe, by the end of summer, he'll learn to think of it-not the building or the wide land outside the city gates, soon to be forsaken for Formenos, but the bustling comfort of our family-as home.

~oOo~

We hear Tyelkormo and Carnistir before we even are even in sight of the gates. Rounding the hilltop, there they are, each wearing one of my tunics (which hang down to their ankles and are quite muddy around the edges, I note with dismay), "sparring" with each other with their wooden practice swords.

Tyelkormo spots us first and shouts. Atar dismounts quickly before they run up and startle the horses and catches both of them in his arms. "How are my little ones?" he asks.

"We are well, Atar, how are you?" asks Tyelkormo with uncharacteristic primness. As though realizing the error of his ways, he sneezes loudly, spraying Atar with spit.

I dismount carefully and lower Findekáno to the ground behind me. Atar has put Tyelkormo and Carnistir down as well and is wiping his face with the edge of his cloak. They are staring at Findekáno, their faces pinched and puzzled. I take his hand and introduce him to them. His eyes dart back and forth between Tyelkormo's and Carnistir's faces as though appraising which might pose the greater threat.

"Aren't you going to greet your cousin, little ones?" Atar asks.

"Greetings Findekáno," Tyelkormo mumbles. Carnistir says nothing and stands, staring and licking the point of his sword.

"Carnistir!" I chide. "Greet your cousin!"

His steady gaze does not waver. Still, he does not speak (though a trickle of drool is running down his chin). It is his unnerving way of meeting unfamiliar people: staring at them with his eyes vacant and glazed, unspeaking, until Atar grabs his arm and says, "Carnistir! You're acting like an orc!"

He starts, like someone suddenly woken. "Aaahhh," he says at last. He takes the sword out of his mouth and puts his thumb in its place. Atar and I do not pressure him further to speak; we understand that in Carnistir's bizarre world of dreams and colors, "Aaahhh" is a perfectly polite greeting.

Atar is interrogating Tyelkormo now. "Why are you wearing your brother's tunics? You have them filthy, and after Macalaurë and your mother finished the washing today too!"

"We were playing the Outer Lands game," Tyelkormo says with wide, innocent eyes. "I was Grandfather Finwë and Carnistir was Uncle Olwë."

"Aaahhh!" Carnistir says again and swats Tyelkormo on the backside with the flat of his sword.

We begin walking down the path to the house and stables. I lead my horse and reach to take Findekáno's hand, but Tyelkormo darts into my body first, grabbing my hand with both of his and staring sternly at our cousin, whose eyes are on the ground and is taking delicate steps, falling behind me. "Tyelkormo," I say, and his eyes lift to mine in jealous anguish, thinking that I will make him walk alone in favor of Findekáno. But I do not. "If you wish to hold my hand, then you must hold your cousin's as well," and Tyelkormo and Findekáno reluctantly join hands. (Are they only a year apart in age? Findekáno is dwarfed by my beast of a brother!) Atar hoists Carnistir onto his hip; Carnistir is still waving his wooden sword around dangerously, smacking Atar on the head with it once or twice, but Atar doesn't seem to notice.

"There is one problem with that scenario, little ones," he says. "Finwë and Olwë would not have fought against each other."

"But no, Atar, listen!" Tyelkormo begs eagerly. "If Uncle Olwë was kidnapped by orcs and enchanted, then he would have fought against Grandfather Finwë until he could be exorcised of the enchantments! And-" Realizing suddenly that he has spoken amiss, he claps his mouth shut.

But Atar is already staring at him suspiciously. "Where have you heard such tales? Of orcs and enchantments?"

Tyelkormo tugs at my hand and scuffles his feet along the dusty path. "I don't know." He pauses. "Someone." He pauses again, realizes that it is going to be him in trouble unless he speaks, and reluctantly admits, "Macalaurë."

I wince in sympathy for poor Macalaurë, who has been forbidden many times to tell our little brothers scary stories about the Outer Lands. Carnistir has nightmares and Tyelkormo "gets ideas," Atar says. Macalaurë and I would not have known anything ourselves about the Outer Lands if I hadn't found a book of letters that Grandfather Finwë and Uncle Olwë wrote Atar on the subject-he was researching the lore of the Great Journey-and gotten so many wild ideas about orcs and Lords of Darkness that Atar finally told us what had really happened so that we would stop asking to sleep with him and Amil every night. I suspect that he had wanted to keep our minds innocent of any such knowledge. "The Dark Lord shall return one day," he'd told us, "but for now, we shall rejoice in the peace of Valinor."

Atar is irritated now, having spent a long day in Tirion and returning home to find that his second eldest has been outwardly defiant, and Tyelkormo does not escape his wrath so easily. "Speaking of Macalaurë," he says in that low, dangerous tone that we, his children, all know. Carnistir squirms in his arms. "Are you not supposed to be helping him prepare supper?"

"He sent us away," Tyelkormo says. "He said we were a pain in his ass. Carnistir kept putting rice in his ears."

Carnistir hears his name and twists in Atar's arms to look down at Tyelkormo. In an effort to alleviate the onslaught to come, Carnistir presses his hands against Atar's cheeks and gives him a loud, wet kiss-without teeth-full on the mouth. Atar laughs-the low, rumbling kind, like thunder-letting you know that a storm is still brewing on the horizon, but it will be content to be held at bay, at least for a while.

~oOo~

We have supper in the accustomed place, in Amil's favorite courtyard, at the round, glass table. Amil greets Findekáno with a hug and a kiss; he remains so rigid that it looks like she is hugging a statue. "Findekáno, you may sit next to whomever you choose," she tells him in the same sweet, delicate voice that she uses with Carnistir. "You're our special guest of honor tonight."

He chooses to sit next to me, to my right, in Tyelkormo's usual place. On his other side is the empty chair that will belong to Macalaurë. Tyelkormo glares at this and pushes into the chair to my left before anyone else can claim it.

Amil has set the table, hastily and sparingly, to minimize the number of dishes that will have to be washed tonight, the night before the night before our big journey.

We wait and wait, but Macalaurë does not appear with supper.

Carnistir-sitting beside my mother because it is her turn to feed him tonight-begins mewing with hunger. I don't know why; it's not as though the child eats his supper anyway.

Atar rubs his forehead like he is trying to push away a pain. "Nelyo, go see if your brother needs any help in the kitchen."

I go back into the house. The kitchen is in disarray, as I expected. Macalaurë is darting between the oven and the counter and the stove, mixing things in pots and pushing things in casserole dishes across the counter. The front of his tunic is patchy with food stains. He refuses to wear an apron in the kitchen, and I don't know why. He's a sloppy cook, the evidence of that strewn about the kitchen in such profusion that we will spend an hour tonight cleaning up. I withhold a sigh. While he sprinkles parsley across a burnt-looking rice dish, something starts to boil over on the stove. "No!" he cries, and runs across the room to lift the pot from the burner, and as he lifts, his foot skids in a patch of spilled gravy and boiling water pours over his hand.

The pot goes into the air and to the floor with a crash. Boiled carrots explode everywhere.

I run to him, "Macalaurë!" and catch him in my arms as he begins to sob, clutching his scalded hand.

"Nelyo." His voice is muffled; his face pressed into my shoulders. "I tried to do it well, but it's awful! It's all wrong! And, ai ... it hurts ..."

I push him back from me to examine his hand. It is a sore red and already beginning to well into blisters. "Macalaurë," I say and gently take his hand, making him cry harder. "Go to the washroom and put it in some cool water and wash your face. I'll finish supper."

I pick the carrots off from the floor and wash them. We'd scrubbed the kitchen floor the day before last, and I figure that Carnistir has put much worse into food when Atar and I have our backs turned to be much concerned about a few flecks of dirt. Macalaurë has (attempted) to reheat the leftover turkey that Atar made the night before, but when I prod it with a fork, the prongs spring back at me like they were being nudged into rubber. Well, I figure, there's nothing else to do. We don't have any fresh meat, so it's rubbery turkey or salted venison, which we'll need for the journey to Formenos, or nothing. I slide the rubbery turkey onto a plate and hope Macalaurë made lots of gravy.

He did, but it has simmered too long on the stove and has a crust forming on the top. I sigh and peel it off and hope (like the carrots) that no one will notice the little bits that get away from me and sink to the bottom.

Macalaurë comes back with his hand wrapped in a damp cloth and his face wiped clean of tears. His lower eyelids are still red, but his face has regained much of its composure.

"What can I do to help you?" he asks in a small voice.

"Just help me carry it outside. Everything's ready."

We have become expert at loading our arms with dishes and carrying them down the hall and to the courtyard. Macalaurë gives me an alarmed look when he sees me set down the carrots but says nothing. We go back for the wine, and I whisper, "I did wash them," and he says back, "Right about now, Nelyo, I don't much care if you did."

I select two bottles of very good wine to compensate for the shoddy supper. "Atar always complains that we eat our weight in supper," Macalaurë grumbles, "and I've figured out how to eat less: When you cook it, you sure don't want to eat it too."

I laugh, toss an arm around his shoulders. "It's going to be fine."

Back outside, we take our seats on either side of Findekáno, exchanging small worried looks. "We shall now say Eruhantalë," Atar says. He sits across the round table from me. "I give thanks this day for the beasts of burden that carried my son and me to Tirion and brought home our much-welcomed guest, my brother-son Findekáno."

I am surprised at his words. Like a reflex, my head snaps up to meet his eyes, but he is looking at my mother.

"I give thanks this day for the water we are so freely given, that lets us keep clean ourselves and our home," Amil says.

I am thankful also for our horses and for the gift of light, by which our world is given color. (Atar looks surprised at the last part but nods in approval.) Macalaurë mumbles something about being thankful for aloe, which elicits strange looks, as he holds his injured hand unseen beneath the table. Tyelkormo is grateful for the animals! And butterflies! And Carnistir stares for a moment and, at last, says simply, "Tyelkormo," balls up his napkin, and puts it in his mouth.

"That's sweet of you, little one," Amil tells him, carefully removing the napkin, "to be grateful for your brother." She looks up at Findekáno. "What about you, dear? For what are you grateful?"

Findekáno only stares at his empty plate.

Amil laughs nervously. "It can be anything, love. Anything at all."

Macalaurë and I shoot each other alarmed looks over Findekáno's bowed head. "Káno?" I say softly. I touch him, and he twitches as if startled by a shock of static electricity. Atar's louder, demanding voice overtakes mine: "What are you thankful for, Findekáno?"

I cannot see his eyes as he says, "I have nothing to be thankful for."

Nerdanel

On the night before a big journey, Fëanáro and I always retire to our bedroom early, for we have a bad habit of waiting until the very last moment to pack our things for the trip. We bustle about our bedroom like children, full of excitement, talking about our plans for the upcoming months: Fëanáro wants to take Carnistir to the sea; I want to find more of that red marble that makes such lovely statues; Fëanáro wants to lie beneath the inspiration of the stars; I want to watch our children play in the garden. Even though our armoires are on opposite sides of the bedroom, we scamper and bustle and get in each other's way. I am putting necklaces into a velvet-lined box for safekeeping and Fëanáro keeps walking past and bumping into me each time he passes; he also has an annoying habit of carrying only one or two things when I know his arms can accommodate more, and each time he bumps me, I turn to see him pass with a single tunic or two underwear in his hands. "Fëanáro! Would you stop?" I say, sounding like an irate child, and he counters with, "Would I have married a decently petite woman like everyone wanted, then I would not be constantly bumping you."

"Well, perhaps you should have done so then!" I cry and fling a necklace at him, which he catches easily at his chest.

"If I had wanted to do so then I would have. But I happen to like bumping into you." He walks by me again, going back to his armoire and drops the necklace over my shoulder and into the box, bumping me as he passes, and takes a pair of trousers from his armoire.

"Oh, Fëanáro, don't take them! They're torn!"

"I shall wear my festival robes in the forge then, Nerdanel."

It is our custom to banter constantly with each other, but sometimes, in public, we forget the presence of others and begin shooting sharp remarks back and forth like a rain of arrows exchanged between enemy camps until we see the eager voyeuristic gleam in the eyes of our companions and realize that they think they are observing one of Fëanáro and Nerdanel's infamous marital spats. But these exchanges are hardly fights—not even spats—for the true discord between us comes only with rage washed in tears.

Soon, our trunks are packed and Telperion is just beginning to wax. Fëanáro kneels in the middle of our bed, barefoot but fully clothed otherwise, fidgeting with the clasp on a necklace that he'd made for me in his youth. I gather soaps and lotions to use on the journey: Once, I did not bring enough, and I learned my lesson that year, for it is awful how quickly a camp with five males becomes unbearable. My nerves are jangling with the kind of unfettered eagerness usually known only in childhood: only a few hours left! And how shall I bear them? How shall I ever get to sleep? Anticipation is like a wire drawn too tight: I wait, watching it hum with tension, wondering, when will it break? When will it find release?

"Ah, I hate the night before," I complain, plopping on the edge of the bed. Fëanáro glances up from the necklace.

"And I hate this clasp. It's too weak. It's going to break one day, and you're not going to notice, and it shall then be lost."

"You could find fault with perfection, Fëanáro."

"There is no such thing as perfection, my love." His eyes revert to the clasp, which he is trying to break with his fingers, as though to prove its inferiority. I slide across the bed, to its center, to him. Our bed is huge and impractical, custom-made after we were married and moved back to Tirion, but Fëanáro is a high prince, and high princes are entitled the occasional extravagance. When I brought my sisters for the first time to our home, I overheard one saying to the other, "A bed like that is not made for sleeping," and at the time, I was hurt by her slanderous tone. (For we did sleep in our bed! Side by side, lying on a pile of pillows and wrapped in each other's arms, with an ocean of silk on either side of us, pressed so close that we could have lain comfortably on a child's cot.) I was hurt by the constant implications that Fëanáro had married me for a reason less than love or—worse, somehow, because I knew how untrue it was—that I had consented with such knowledge. But, as we grew older and remained together—against the predictions of some—and our great love for each other was slowly proven to the skeptical world, I had to concede, to a point: Fëanáro and I weren't thinking of sleep when we commissioned a carpenter to build our big bed for us.

So I sprawl with my head at his knees, looking up at him, wondering how I can still desire him so strongly, after fifty years of marriage and four children. These things are supposed to subside with time, I am told. It is not the ways of our people to be consumed by bodily desires for the whole of our endless lives. He gives me no heed as I reach up to caress his cheek; he picks at the clasp of the necklace in his hands. He gives me no heed, but I know that I am at the center of his awareness, that I have only to touch him the right way, to say the right words, and the necklace will be discarded and forgotten, and he will be lying in my arms. My hand slips down his face, down his throat, to the neckline of his tunic, which I begin to unlace gently. "Fëanáro," I whisper, but he doesn't look up, and his breathing remains slow and even. So well I know his body now—better even than my own—and long gone is the exciting mystery that marked the early years of our marriage, when I would kiss and touch every inch of him in search of the secret places that would make him cry out in surprised pleasure. I know to seek those places now—the tips of his ears, the line of his collarbone, the soft skin behind his knees—I know every angle and plane, every tiny mark and scar, and still he fills me with the most inexplicable and aching desire.

I spring up from where I lay and kneel in front of him, our knees touching, sitting in mirror images of each other, and let the tunic fall from his shoulders. He works the clasp of the necklace; his breathing is metronomic, but with his chest bare, I can see his heart pounding so hard that it makes the skin on the left side of his chest flutter. "Fëanáro," I breathe, and his name in my voice is more beautiful than the air that fills me and gives me life. I kiss his unresponsive lips, his jawline, his neck and shoulders and hear a loud snap as the clasp breaks in his hands.

The necklace is thrown away, skittering across the floor, and he falls back and pulls me on top of him, lying with our heads at the footboard of the bed, our hands colliding and tangling, trying to tear the clothes from each other. "Why?" he gasps, as I tear the laces on his trousers, not caring, wanting only flesh pressing against flesh, and I say, "Because I love you. So unbelievably love you."

"Nerdanel, I love—" he says, and those are the last words to pass between us because he enters me then, and we speak through our spirits, and in a flash of light, he consumes me, and I see that for all the beauty Eru put into his body, his spirit magnifies it a thousand-fold, and he loves me so perfectly that I weep in his arms.

~oOo~

I am awakened by light.

The Trees are mingling and dazzling brilliance pours through the drapes, throwing little rainbows from Fëanáro's crystals and onto our bedroom walls. We forgot to close our drapes last night, but I am not rising to close them now, in the early morning. I am not rising to shut out light so beautiful that it can only be a gift of the Powers. I close my eyes and watch my blood beat red-on-red inside my eyelids.

And Fëanáro. Would I rise, I would disturb Fëanáro, who sleeps in a gentle peace he rarely finds, his arm around my waist and his head on my breast. I cannot hear his breathing—when he falls into sleep this deep, he seems to barely breathe at all, something that had jerked me awake with terror in the early days of our marriage, rigid with the irrational fear that his spirit had fled his body in the night—but I can feel his heart pattering against my side where he presses close to me, and I am confident now that a spirit like his shall never flee.

Soon, I will have to rise, for today is the day that we leave for Formenos, and if we do not leave early, then we will be journeying through Telperion's hours to reach a campsite with water nearby. I will have to awaken Fëanáro, and he will clutch me harder and protest like Nelyo and Macalaurë do when I awaken them for their lessons in the morning. "We will wake after the Mingling of the Lights," he told our sons and Findekáno at supper last night, but it cannot be the Mingling of the Lights already? For did I not only close my eyes a moment ago? In the depths of Telperion's hours?

We lie with the entire lengths of our bodies touching—shoulders, hips, thighs, feet—and our limbs raveled. I can feel his spirit against mine, though it does not blaze as it did last night, and his flesh is almost cool to the touch. He is subdued, reduced to embers, able to sleep for once in cool, liquid peace. For his fire has gone into me, but even as I wishfully stroke my belly, I know that no baby will come of it, for my body is still wearied from bearing Carnistir four years ago, and it will be many years yet before we conceive another child.

The light spilling through the windows grows golden. It is morning. I feel Fëanáro's spirit stirring against mine, flaring and subsiding. He is awake, and I tighten my arms around him, to move him from my breast so that I can rise and start the morning, but he grips me tighter and murmurs, "No, not yet. One more minute."

So like his sons, I think and stroke his hair. "Why, Fëanáro? You are awake."

"Because I want to lie here with you."

"But we have a lot to do."

"Let us be frivolous and wasteful of our time then. Just for a moment. Please."

His breath warms my skin. I twine my fingers in his hair and close my eyes. How easy it would be to drift back to sleep! But Fëanáro's head lifts from my breast and I feel him shift upwards until warmth brushes softly against my lips.

My eyes open, but he closes them again with his fingers. "Fëanáro," I say, but he whispers, "Shh, I am giving you your morning kiss." His lips wander mine, from corner to corner like a dutiful explorer, never exerting more than gentle pressure, coming to rest in the middle with the tips of our noses touching. "Now you may awaken," he says softly, and we open our eyes at the same time and contemplate each other.

We smile, and he gives me a quick peck on the lips before rising from the bed. "I told you I'd only take a moment. I'm good for my promises," he says. He laid out his traveling clothes last night, and he begins to dress now. I slide out of bed, suddenly regretful—I could have asked for two moments, even three, and I would still be lying beneath him—and sweep up the clothes that we tossed on the floor last night. His trousers are torn, but it will not take me long to mend them tonight by the campfire. I find the ruby necklace with the broken clasp that he tossed away last night and smile. "Do you want this?" I ask him, holding it aloft so that it catches Laurelin's light and shoots red spangles onto our bedroom walls.

"Yes, take it. I shall give it as an assignment for Vorondil to fix it in Formenos. It is not a bad piece of work, exactly …" He comes to me with his trousers unlaced and only one arm pulled through his tunic to turn the necklace in the light. I see his bright eyes appraising, measuring, watching the darts of crimson light and evaluating the accuracy with which he carved the facets on each ruby. "I was very young and impatient when I made this," he confesses.

He is still very young—barely one hundred years old, only recently considered fully mature by the standards of our people—and he is still quite impatient, but I suppress a smile and say nothing. I tuck the necklace into my jewelry box and slip my feet into a pair of boots. "I shall awaken Nelyo and Macalaurë, if you wish to attempt Tyelkormo and Carnistir?"

"What of Findekáno?" he says, and I start, for I have forgotten that Findekáno is even with us. I would have ridden off and left him sleeping alone in an empty house. How shameful, to forget the presence of one's own brother-son, especially after I fought so hard against Fëanáro to have him here.

"I shall awaken Findekáno as well, if you take Carnistir," I say, for I have difficulty awakening our youngest son without a fuss.

I go to Nelyo's bedroom first, for Macalaurë or Tyelkormo often sleep with him, and I shall save needless trips to their rooms if this is the case. But Nelyo is alone, lying on the edge of his king-sized bed, as he always does, in a pile of dimpled pillows with the blankets pulled so high that all I can see of him is a swatch of long, red hair. The other half of his bed is pristine—would I have viewed this half alone, I would have sworn that the bed was not slept upon—with the sheets still taut and the pillows stacked neatly inside their smooth, silk cases, as if they wait for another to lie beside him.

I gently peel away the covers from his face. Nelyo always sleeps on his belly; he is nearly grown, but, sleeping, he looks so much like the child I will see only now in my memory that I hesitate in waking him. Forty-seven years, I think. How could he have changed so much in so short a time?

Of course, in forty-seven years of my own life, I grew and married Fëanáro and bore Nelyo, but that matters little to me now as a mother, when I wish that Fëanáro could have captured Nelyo's youth in glass as easily as he captures light in stone.

I place my hand in the center of his back, between his shoulder blades, and his eyes open and he sits up obediently. "Already?" he says, fighting to keep the bleary sound of sleep from his voice, rubbing his eyes. He looks at the window, where a sliver of golden light has managed to slip through a crack in the drapes. "Yes, I suppose it is," he says, answering his own question, and puts his legs over the side of the bed.

"Good morning, Maitimo," I say, kissing his sleepy-warm forehead. I always call him by the name I gave him when he awakens for, to me, he is most beautiful then, with his tangled red hair and rumpled nightclothes.

"Do you want me to awaken Carnistir?" he asks sleepily.

"No, don't worry about that. You're father is going to him." I kiss him again, on the cheek, before starting for the door. "Breakfast in an hour."

"Yes, Amil," he says.

Macalaurë's bedroom is across the hall. His drapes are open and golden light pours across his bed, but it has not awakened him and he lies, still dressed in yesterday's clothes, on top of his sheets with his head scrunching a pile of sheet music and his harp resting on his pillow. I stoop close to his head and sing in his ear, "Macalaurë," and he squeezes his eyes shut, flaps his hand at me, and grumbles, "No, Amil, go away. I just went to bed."

"And whose fault is that? Wake up. Breakfast is in an hour."

"I'm not hungry."

"Well, you have an hour to become hungry then." His eyes haven't opened yet, and I kiss his face until they do. "Yes, Amil, I'm awake," he mutters, sitting up and reaching for his harp before one of us knocks it onto the floor. He stretches with the lazy grace of an adolescent boy, like a cat in the sun, and doesn't bother to suppress a yawn that shows me the molars sprouting in the back of his mouth. "This is ridiculously early to be waking up," he informs me.

I laugh and call over my shoulder. "Breakfast in an hour, Macalaurë. Dressed. In clean clothes."

And then Findekáno. Findekáno, in the guest room down the hall, whom we placed across from Fëanáro's and my bedroom in case he has nightmares or needs one of us during the night. But he hasn't. He is needy in the way of a small child—not unusual, even at his age, for Tyelkormo still acts much in the same way—but he bites back that neediness like one might suppress offensive words in an argument or a grimace of pain while trying to look courageous. Nelyo, with his gentle dignity, is the only one who has managed to get the child into even the rudiments of a conversation. Macalaurë and Tyelkormo he watches with mistrust. Carnistir earns edgy suspicion. And Fëanáro clearly terrifies him. He is cold to me, returning any affection in a brusque, dutiful manner, but I tell myself that it is not any fault of mine, that he reacts as any child taken from his mother.

I should know, for Fëanáro used to act the same.

He sleeps like a doll tucked into bed: on his back, with his arms flat over the covers, his face turned to the ceiling. He doesn't mutter or whine when I wake him—Tyelkormo tends to do both—but slides from bed and retrieves the traveling clothes that Nelyo helped him to choose last night. I ask him if he needs help dressing, and his hair rustles along his back as he shakes his head no. I want to kiss him with the same affection as I did my sons, but my feet carry me from his room with barely a "I'll see you at breakfast, then, Findekáno" passing my lips, and on the other side of his door, I press against the closed door, ashamed at my apprehension of him, a small child certainly less confounding and difficult than Carnistir on his best days. And a child who is present in our house by my insistence alone.

Downstairs, Fëanáro is already in the kitchen, cutting a pineapple with one hand while Carnistir sleeps draped across his opposite shoulder. Tyelkormo is still in his nightclothes—barefoot, with his hair a tangled mess—but he is obediently setting seven places around the small wooden table. We planned a simple breakfast today, something that required little preparation and no cooking. I give Tyelkormo a kiss on the top of his tousled golden head and begin slicing a loaf of thick-crusted bread that I baked in multitudes yesterday; such bread lasts well on short journeys for the thick crust keeps the soft insides from becoming stale. On each plate I will also put a sliver of lembas for energy. This, too, I have baked in large quantities and will keep at all times in a leather pouch at my side, even as I sleep.

I set a piece of bread on each plate—two pieces on Fëanáro's, Nelyo's, and Macalaurë's—and retrieve a block of sweet butter and a jar of raspberry jam out of the pantry. Fëanáro is cutting the leaves off of strawberries and throwing the fruit into a big bowl with the pineapples. Carnistir lets out a sudden shriek and plummets from sleep, squirming and kicking in Fëanáro's arms.

Fëanáro drops the knife on the counter and cuddles Carnistir in both arms, bouncing him and shushing him. Carnistir's eyes open and his lips quiver, but Fëanáro staves off the brewing tempest with kisses. "Did you have a bad dream?" he asks, and Carnistir nods, clutches a handful of Fëanáro's hair, and cries into his shoulder.

"It's dark and cold, he says!"

"Well, we don't listen to him, do we?"

Macalaurë and Nelyo shared an imaginary friend while they were young, and the three of them used to ride and play together; Tyelkormo talks to butterflies and birds and foxes and claims that they answer him, but such apparitions visit Carnistir only in his dreams. Since he was an infant, he has awakened screaming with nightmares at least once per week. Fëanáro and I had even taken counsel with Irmo in Lórien when he was two years old, but we had been assured that nightmares—even the violent ones that haunt Carnistir—are normal enough in small children to not be concerned, a vestige of our dark history in the Outer Lands. We had been assured that they would pass the more convinced he became of his safety here.

I take up the knife where Fëanáro laid it, and he gives me a grateful smile and sits at the table, Carnistir cradled in his arms, and kisses the tears from his cheeks. "I love you," he says in a soft, tender voice that makes me weaken to hear. It occurs to me, sometimes, that so few people know Fëanáro to be capable of such tenderness. Carnistir is no longer huffing dangerously; he is staring up into Fëanáro's eyes with the reverence one pays a god. "You are so precious to me, my littlest one." He kisses Carnistir's forehead, his nose, his lips. Carnistir's eyelids droop shut. "I love you," he whispers again, but Carnistir is already asleep

He gives me a questioning look, but I motion him to stay put and resume chopping fruit for the fruit salad.

Nelyo comes in, fully dressed in his traveling clothes and boots with his cloak draped over his arm, his hair combed neatly and tied back on the sides. Tyelkormo runs to him, feet pounding, and tosses his arms around Nelyo's waist. Nelyo lifts him with an ease that I envy. Since Carnistir was born, lifting my next-youngest son is a despicable chore. I crave his little body against my breast, but my arms are like sandbags—heavy and ineffective—and after only a few minutes, his weight tires me until I want to bury my face in a pillow and sleep for hours.

"Well, look at you!" Nelyo says to Tyelkormo, tousling his messy hair further. "You look like you got tangled in the farming equipment!"

"Would you mind dressing him, love?" I ask him. "And helping your father with Carnistir?"

Carnistir sometimes wriggles so hard that it takes three to get him dressed, but Fëanáro and Nelyo are practiced at the task, almost choreographed in their routine of restraint and distraction. Fëanáro stands carefully so as not to disturb Carnistir before he has to, and I hear his voice and Nelyo's receding as they walk together down the hall and up the stairs to the bedrooms.

I look at my sons sometimes—the four of them together, at supper, with their bright eyes and four different colors of hair—and doubt that they're mine. Yes, I carried each of them in my body for a year. I bore each of them into the world through hours of painful labor. I held and nursed each of them for another year. But they are more Fëanáro's sons than mine. They have his face: his straight nose; his quick, bright eyes; his smile like a burst of light into darkness. They have his lanky, strong body and flitting grace. Oh, they have my isolated features too; I am not so foolish as to assume that Fëanáro's heredity is so superior to mine that it is completely dominant. Nelyo has my red hair. Macalaurë has my soft manners. Tyelkormo has my wide, strong hands. Carnistir has my complexion that is a barometer to his emotions, flushing whenever he is upset. But they are still Fëanáro's sons more than they are mine.

I think sometimes about the daughter I might have had, and I know that she would have been mine as the boys are Fëanáro's. I imagine how protective her brothers would have been of her. I see Nelyo teaching her to shoot and use a knife to protect herself. I see my gentle Macalaurë getting into fights with the lords' sons who try to dishonor her. Tyelkormo would bring her roses from the garden, and Carnistir would snuggle into her arms for music at night. She would turn down apprenticeships with me and with Fëanáro, though gifted enough to pursue either. She would prefer the more delicate arts, and to Taniquetil she would have gone, to learn with Vairë, to become a weaver who would have equaled the skill of even Fëanáro's mother. But like Fëanáro's mother, she lacks even the substance of memory and is but a thought, an indulgence of my mind.

I know things at times through aching intuition. I know that my fifth child will be no more mine than the four I have now. Carnistir's birth took too much out of me, and Fëanáro will be ready to conceive again before I am. My body will hold the child as a vessel holds water, but it will be Fëanáro who will be his true creator, for I will lack the energy for anything more ambitious than his physical nourishment. No one will even recognize my fifth son as mine; he will be so like his father as a cutting taken from a plant and stuck in the soil to grow in his image. I know this, but it does not pain me, for I ache to hold the babies that Fëanáro will give me, and I know that I would forsake my body, as his mother had done, to give them life.

I hear a small sound behind me, and it interrupts my thoughts. I whirl, expecting Macalaurë or Tyelkormo, who can dress himself when properly motivated, but it is Findekáno who stands in the doorway with the settled look of one who has been there for a while. He is not an unattractive child, though he is smaller even than Macalaurë was at that age: His hair is dark and silky, his eyes are wide and blue like china saucers, and his skin is flawlessly porcelain. But he strikes me more as a painting of a child than an actual being of flesh and feeling, lifelike in color and proportion but a two-dimensional impersonation nonetheless.

"Findekáno!" I say, and my voice is too bright and sounds alarming even to my own ears. He shifts and looks at the floor. Oh, why had I sent Nelyo away with Fëanáro when Macalaurë could have easily completed the same task? Nelyo is the only one of us who can find the life within this strange little child.

And his clothing! I only hope that he does not see Fëanáro's eyes when he returns, for I know my husband and know that he will not be happy. Nelyo had come to me yesterday, his silver eyes wide with worry. "He has nothing suitable," he'd said, and I'd doubted it—for how could the eldest son of a high prince go anywhere unprepared?—but an inspection of his trunks had revealed clothes crafted mainly of silk and satin with rich embroidery and ornamentation, nothing appropriate for six straight days of riding in the wilderness. Nelyo had chosen the simplest clothes possible for him: a cream-colored satiny tunic and a pair of stiff green trousers. His boots are so polished that they gleam. I imagine him hunting with his cousins in the forest or working with his uncle in the laboratory; I imagine him assisting with the washing and the cooking and scrubbing the floors, all in his glistening, dazzling raiment.

I make myself smile at him. "Findekáno, there is a pitcher of apple cider that your Uncle Fëanáro made in the pantry. Why don't you fetch it and pour seven glasses?"

He looks at me awkwardly. I'd stroked his hands when I'd tucked him into bed his first night here and had known that they were hands that had done not even simple work, even something as simple as retrieving a pitcher and pouring cider. His skin is soft; his nails are filed and buffed into neat little ovals; he makes me want to clench my own hands into fists out of disgust for my calluses and ragged cuticles. Now, he pokes into the pantry and comes out with the pitcher of apple juice teetering in his hands. Hoisting it onto the table, he looks as though his frail arms might break. I want to take it from him, to help him pour it, but at that moment, Macalaurë saunters in.

He grabs a cherry from the pile from which I have just finished removing stems and pits. He pops it into his mouth, followed by another, and another would have gone after that if I didn't slap his hand and jerk my head in Findekáno's direction.

"Here, Káno, let me handle that." Macalaurë, the smallest, most delicate of my sons, pours the juice easily. He has been working hard with his father in the forge and his arms bunch into little knobs of muscle. Already, he is losing the softness of youth; his body is growing hard and strong like his father's. He'd come home the other day from the picnic in the forest with a wide smile and little bruises dotting his throat. (When I'd inquired to their cause, he'd blamed wrestling with Tyelkormo. Tyelkormo, who has not yet learned to lie to cover the indiscretions of his older brothers, scrunched his eyebrows together and spat, "I did no such thing! Nelyo says you got them from being bitten in the forest!" and poor Macalaurë had turned a most alarming shade of red.) I imagine that he will wed while still young, unlike my Nelyo who, for all his beauty and manners, has had every serious courtship thwarted by bad luck.

Tyelkormo races into the kitchen in a flurry of pounding footsteps, banging into Macalaurë and hollering with excitement. In his traveling clothes, the trip to Formenos has moved beyond thought and into imminence. Nelyo arrives a minute later and, without being asked, takes the fruit salad and begins dishing it onto the children's plates. Fëanáro is the last to return with a bedraggled Carnistir in his arms and a frazzled look on his face. Carnistir is already wearing his cloak, and the hood is tugged low over his eyes.

"Baby, why don't you—" I try to remove the hood, but Carnistir howls and Fëanáro says, "I wouldn't. He insists on wearing it."

Fëanáro is used to molding stubborn metal and people to his wishes, but Carnistir defies him in a way that no one else dares. Carnistir is placed in the chair to Fëanáro's right, and he gives me a wicked smile from beneath the hood, as if he knows the power that he possesses over his father.

Findekáno stands in the midst of the bustle with his arms tight at his sides and his eyes darting from face to face around him. Tyelkormo has gotten up onto the counter and is tearing apart strawberry leaves and sprinkling them on the floor. "Tyelkormo!" Fëanáro scolds and, on his way to the counter, he bumps into Findekáno.

Findekáno shrinks away as one might shrink from fire and, with a look of surprise like he's been unaware of the child's presence all along, Fëanáro removes Tyelkormo from the counter and calls over his shoulder, "Nelyo, I'd like a word with you please."

They go into the pantry beside the counter, and Fëanáro pulls the door partially shut behind them. "Macalaurë, get the children into their seats, if you would," I instruct and make a production of picking the strawberry leaves off of the floor—normally, I would make Tyelkormo do it—so that I can hear what is being said in the pantry.

"Are you mad?" Fëanáro says. His voice is caustic, and I wince. At times, I think that he forgets that Nelyo is still just a child. At times, I wish he'd be less harsh with our eldest son. "You have dressed him to kneel before the Valar, not to wade through mud and thorns! Have you forgotten that this is a journey, not an occasion?" He spits out the word "occasion" as one might spit out poison.

"It was the best I could do, Atar." Nelyo's voice is usually like honey, smooth and rich, nearly as melodic as Macalaurë's but deeper, but now it wobbles, and I cringe. "He has nothing more suitable."

"I doubt that my half-brother would send his son into the wild with nothing but festival clothes."

"You may look yourself, if you wish, Atar, in his trunks. Perhaps you shall choose better than I."

There is a long silence. I can imagine the looks being exchanged between my husband and our son. I can picture Fëanáro's anger at Nelyo's immediate deference, at his suggestion of his father's superiority in a matter that—Fëanáro knows—he would solve no better than his son. I can imagine Nelyo's bravely submissive stare back.

"It would be like Nolofinwë to leave me with such a conundrum," Fëanáro says at last. "Have we nothing in this house that he could wear?"

"Tyelkormo's clothes are too big and Carnistir's are too small."

"Tyelkormo has nothing smaller, something that no longer fits?"

"He long outgrew anything that would be suitable for Findekáno. We gave away his old clothes last year."

There is silence, and I can picture Fëanáro with his eyebrows crinkling in that way of his, trying to find a way to deny the memory that Nelyo has easily recalled for him, and Nelyo's eyebrows crinkling in a like manner, hoping that his father's wrath will pass him by.

"You're right," Fëanáro says after a moment. "It shall have to do, then, until we get to Formenos and can have more suitable clothes made for him. He cannot work every day in such foolish, frivolous…." He sighs without finishing his thought.

I stand quickly and brush the bits of leaf into the waste bin and smile at my husband and son as they emerge from the pantry.

An hour later, we are assembled, waiting for our apprentices, nearly ready to commence.

Nelyo and Fëanáro are lifting the trunks onto the single small cart that will be towed behind our strongest workhorses, muscles flexing and twisting in Laurelin's rising light. Tyelkormo is darting around my legs, eager to leave. Carnistir is asleep again, this time in Macalaurë's arms, as he sits on a tree stump. Findekáno stands by himself, away from us, watching Nelyo.

I check the food supplies and count the blankets and furs one last time, always afraid that I will overlook something and we will find ourselves in the wild, far from other people, without enough food or blankets to warm us at night. There was a time when I was not been so conscientious; there was a day when I rushed from my father's forge with a half-finished knife still warming in the coals and leapt onto my horse beside Fëanáro, with only the clothes on my body, my engagement ring gleaming in the afternoon light, still warm from being clutched in his hand.

I count again the bottles of fresh water, for one does not know when an injury will waylay us between rivers, too far to travel for a drink. I sigh at my own unease, and Fëanáro walks up beside me and lifts the crate of fruits and vegetables.

"Wait! I haven't checked it!"

He holds the crate in his arms as I pry it open and count apples and pears and carrots by the handful. A thin sheen of sweat covers his skin, makes him look golden in the morning light. He laughs lightly at my meticulousness.

"I don't know when I became like this," I moan to him, rummaging through the eggplants, counting them in my head against the number of people and the number of days and the number of things that could go wrong.

"It's the children," he says. "Children change you."

Satisfied, I shut the crate and smile at him, neglecting to comment because I see no change in him. He carries the crate to the cart and swings it aboard with an easy strength that I had once shared. Suddenly, the morning light has weight to it and it presses against my skin like a hot blanket, bidding me to sleep. I feel my legs fold beneath me, and I collapse onto the tree stump beside Macalaurë.

"Amil, are you well?" I hear him ask. I hear myself answer him too, but I am not aware of speaking the words. Carnistir awakens and looks in my direction, his dark eyes full of worry.

"Amil!" he cries and hurtles into my arms.

I nearly drop him. He is only four years old, tiny still, but my arms are like wet rags and fail to respond to his sudden weight against them. Macalaurë catches him with hands against his back and chides him for startling me, but I know that my neglect was not caused by unawareness, and I despair. I have almost dropped my baby, I think, and my arms close around him at last and hold him close.

"Help your father and brother," I hear myself say to Macalaurë. The words undulate like molasses in the air. He stands and goes to help them hoist the heavy trunks and crates onto the cart, giving me worried looks over his shoulder as he departs.

I have to concentrate on keeping my arms tight around Carnistir. When will this pass? I wonder. When will I be normal again? With each birth, my exhaustion worsens; it clings longer and harder to me, longer than my children do even.

With Nelyo, I experienced a few months of lazy contentment after his birth, like falling into an afternoon nap, pulling me more easily into sleep but hardly the dark exhaustion that settles on me now. Even in the middle of the night, I awakened easily when Nelyo cried-before Fëanáro even, sometimes-and I did not resent going to his cradle and bringing him to bed with us for comfort or to nurse. Not long after the delivery, I began helping Fëanáro with some of his easier projects: setting gemstones, polishing metal, doing the meticulous engraving that he often lacked the patience to complete. At night, he would kiss me and caress me, and I would let him make love to me, lying beneath him with my arms heavy across his back, holding him close, full of the satisfied exhaustion that a productive day brings.

With Macalaurë, it was much the same, but he was fussier at night, and once, when he was a month old, I'd awakened to Fëanáro shaking my shoulder. "Love, I can't get him to stop crying. I think he's hungry," he said, his voice thick with apology, and I sat up, feeling like I was rising from sleep that clung to me with viscous tendrils like the gluey mud of a swamp. "How long has be been crying?" I managed, trying to pry open my eyes that felt like they'd been glued shut, and Fëanáro said, "An hour."

Those instances were rare with Macalaurë, but the tiredness lasted for a year, until he was weaned.

Tyelkormo was the biggest of our sons at birth, and for hours I labored to bring him into the world, fraught with pain like I had never felt with his brothers. I wept with fear for his life; Fëanáro wept with fear for mine. Tyelkormo was a trying baby, always active and into everything around him, learning young how to climb from his crib and awaken Fëanáro and me by tangling his fingers in our hair and yanking as hard as he could. My life became matched to his: waking to nurse him, to change him, to rock him back to sleep. In the times between, I slept. Fëanáro and Nelyo had him for much of the day, playing with him in the garden, interrupting their work and study while I slept upstairs. Even after I weaned him, even after he had begun toddling around the house, calling for his father and his brothers to play with him, still I slept in the bedroom upstairs. The healers advised Fëanáro and me to wait for a while before attempting a fourth child-it was unnatural for our people to bear many children before full maturity at their hundredth year, they said-and the contempt in their eyes said that we were too young to have any business with three children already anyway, but Fëanáro is a high prince, and such remarks would never be made aloud.

So we sufficed with kisses and caresses at night when we ached to make love to each other. I craved his body then with an ardor I hadn't possessed since our betrothal and early marriage. Like courting adolescents, we made and obeyed silly rules regarding the removal of clothing or the mutual pleasuring of each other. I did not undress in front of him, and I closed the door when I bathed. I avoided his forge because the sight of him in his short-sleeved tunics open at the throat and his skin glowing with sweat might be my undoing. I was grateful for Tyelkormo's neediness so that I could place him in the bed between us, removing all temptation that I might have felt if left lying in Fëanáro's arms at night.

By the time Tyelkormo was five, my exhaustion had passed like a storm over the sea, dissipating into harmless fragments, moving on to distant lands. I was alive again, embracing my sons, cheerfully baking in the morning and washing in the afternoons, lifting big chunks of stone to start ambitious sculptures. Further resistance seemed silly, so when Fëanáro begged me to lie with him one night, I succumbed. I was confident that I was healthy enough to bear another baby-those healers were fools, I swore! what did it matter that I was not yet one hundred?-but where our first three sons were begotten without any conscious effort from Fëanáro, Carnistir took years of fretful frustration to come into being.

We argued the night we begot Carnistir, over something silly as our arguments often are: Macalaurë wanted to study music in Alqualondë, and Fëanáro wanted him to complete a basic smith's apprenticeship at home first. When he came to me that night, his spirit was like an open wound, letting me see parts of him that should never have been exposed to air, and I felt his simultaneous contempt and desire for me. I saw how I looked to him, lying in his bed with tears drying on my cheeks, my nightgown shoved up around my thighs, both sloppy and sensual, trying to keep my mouth firm and angry. I felt him laugh at my resistant words even as I felt my callused hands grabbing his body to pull him into me; I tasted my own kisses, felt his proud thrill at the pleasure he so easily gave me. I experienced his climax with the same intensity as I did my own. I looked into his eyes and saw myself as he saw me, flushed, gasping, and trembling with ecstasy. And I woke the next morning and knew that I was pregnant.

Carnistir came a week early, before the midwife even arrived, and Nelyo had to ride to Tirion on Fëanáro's fastest horse to bring her to me. He was born with two teeth on either side of his gums like little fangs and nursing him was painful, and more often than not, I slept while Fëanáro nursed him from a bottle, rocking him in the big oak rocker that my father had made for me when I'd brought Nelyo home.

And the exhaustion still hasn't passed.

More often than not, I am well. I work, I teach my students and my children, I do my share of chores around the house, I lie with my husband at night. But when the exhaustion does come, it comes without warning and stays sometimes for days. I cling now to Carnistir, making my muscles clench around his small body like a drowning man might force his face above water even when he knows that there is no hope. I push my nose into his hair and breathe in his clean, powdery baby-smell and the scent of the soaps that Nelyo used last night to wash him. In the brightening light of morning, his black hair already begins to burn against my lips. I hope that the weariness will pass.

The apprentices have arrived, so I do not have long now before we will leave. Four extra pairs of hands help to load the cart, even Annawendë, I notice, Fëanáro's crude apprentice who takes our eldest son's hand as greeting and stands close against his shoulder while Fëanáro instructs them how to cover the cart with the waxed cloth that will keep the occasional rainstorm from ruining our possessions.

I was surprised when Fëanáro selected her as an apprentice, the only girl from about twenty hopeful youths who rode in from all around Aman to be questioned by my husband and demonstrate their potential at the forge. She is coarse in appearance and a little crude in manner. She comes from the south of the land, well beneath Tirion, and her accent was harsh to my ears. I was surprised even more by Nelyo's immediate interest in her, for she is not the type of maiden he usually courts, and when she arrived here for her first day of training, I swear that I remember a simple emerald ring on her ring finger that she does not wear now.

Her easy closeness with my son makes me wonder what affections they have shared. Only a few days ago, they would barely look at the other for fear of revealing some involuntary emotion; now she consents to allow him a quick kiss on the cheek when Fëanáro's back is turned. I feel a surprising jolt of contempt for her naïve rudeness and her plain face-why? Is she not much like I had been at that age? I too was awkward and ungraceful; I too was not-still am not-beautiful. But I look at Nelyo's bright silvery eyes and his perfect face turned always in her direction and doubt that she could ever be his wife.

It was my sister-in-law who first told me of the rumors slithering around Tirion about my eldest son. She had just married Nolofinwë, and she spoke with the confidence of one above me: married not only to the other high prince of the Noldor-even if not the one who would inherit the throne, should Finwë abdicate-but a more deserving princess than I, the daughter of one of Finwë's favorite lords, stately and graceful and beautiful. "I think you should know," she said, and she told me of the tales being passed between the maidens in the court, of my son who was allowing himself pleasures forbidden to all but those for whom marriage was imminent, and I flushed with shame for the assurance in her eyes. What did I expect? Wasn't I the girl who had run into the wild with the high prince and heir of the Noldor and wedded him among the brambles without the consent of my kin or his? Wasn't I the girl who lacked even the dignity to return home after my shameful act, to be married before Manwë, as was law and custom for Eldarin royalty, and instead roamed the countryside for another three years before deciding to march into the palace with a baby in my arms? What else did I expect from that baby, who had been conceived and presented in such a roguish manner?

"My Lady Nerdanel?" It is Tyelpwë, my apprentice. A thousand times I have told him not to call me that, yet he insists. His watery gray eyes glisten with apprehension. "We are ready to leave, my lady?"

Why does he phrase it as a question? I think with some irritation. Either we are ready to leave or we are not. Carnistir squirms in my arms, and I make myself stand and smile. "Thank you, Tyelpwë." I am relieved to feel my feet solidly against the ground again, like a tree with deep roots and not one that has met with the woodcutter's axe and stands ready to topple. My smile must have turned genuine because some of the anxiety goes out of his eyes, and he bows quickly and walks away.

Nelyo brings me my horse. "Will you ride with me?" I ask Carnistir, but he kicks free of my arms and runs to Fëanáro. Nelyo offers me a weak smile. "I should have known," I say to him, trying to keep the hurt from my voice. "He loves his Atar."

"We all do," Nelyo says, "but we love our Amil too."

I know why the maidens in Tirion love him so-why Annawendë loves him so-for he makes them feel special, as he does me, in this moment. To think that such sincerity could possibly survive beneath such beauty! I feel like a peon singled out by a god to be complimented by him, my own son who shares my likeness in subtle ways. It is shameful to admit that my heart races deliciously and sings He loves me! but it does. Such a feeling I have not had since I first courted Fëanáro.

I stand on tiptoe to kiss his nose. (What happened? Only yesterday, I was stooping to kiss him in the same manner!) He laughs and offers me a leg up. "I would offer to ride with you, Amil," he kids, "but I don't think your mare would take well to my added weight. She might buckle in the middle."

"Thank you anyway," I say, and he departs to mount his own horse. Everyone else is ready to go. I guide my horse into the line beside Tyelkormo's stout little pony; Nelyo falls into place beside Findekáno. Macalaurë is laughing with my apprentices at the back. Annawendë and Vorondil are in conversation, although both seem more aware of Nelyo's place in the line than they are of each other. Hoofbeats hammer the ground behind me, and Fëanáro canters to the front of the line with Carnistir perched in front of him. The smile on Carnistir's face is so wide that any lingering hurt I have is soothed. I would suffer a much greater pain to inspire such rare joy on my youngest son's face.

I look back at the dark house with all its little outbuildings and feel not even a twinge of regret for leaving. Formenos! my heart sings, the land of my youth, the wildlands that I love. I catch Tyelkormo's eye beside me and see the same joy in his face. Why do we even bother with Tirion? I wonder. When all of our hearts lie in Formenos?

But they do not, for a part of Fëanáro's heart lives atop Túna in Tirion, in the palace, and love for Fëanáro gives Finwë part of my heart as well, and like an infection, it spreads among us all and makes us ache for home at the end of the summer.

~oOo~

Even with three young children riding with us this year, we make good progress and reach the river by Telperion's waxing that evening. Through forests and plains we have ridden, stopping only to eat a midday meal and twice for short breaks, and my body is growing tired and sore in a way that has nothing to do with the weariness of childbearing. I am relieved to dismount from my horse-almost as relieved as she must be!-and turn her loose to graze in the meadows along the river. In the silver light of evening, the river is just a dark smudge in the distance and the bridge is invisible. But the sound of the water comes to us like the tinkling of bells, and I know that I will find rest tonight on her shores.

Fëanáro and Nelyo take the tent off the cart and work on assembling it while I send Macalaurë with Tyelkormo and Findekáno to the river for water. Carnistir sits on the ground, nearly hidden by a patch of tall grass, and I go to him and lift him up. "Will we ready our beds?" I ask him.

We are still too far south to worry about the cold at night, so I leave the bundles of heavy blankets and furs in favor of light coverlets. I give Carnistir a few pillows to carry to make him feel useful, and by the time we reach the tent, Fëanáro and Nelyo have it almost completely assembled. The male apprentices have a tent of their own; to my horror, as I approach Fëanáro, he asks Annawendë, "You will join us? I will not have you alone in the wild on a chill night."

It will hardly be cold tonight and this is barely the wilds-the light of the bridgekeepers' cottage is in sight and we are only an hour's ride from a town-and were Nelyo and Annawendë not standing beside him, I would forbid it. Why? I sound unreasonable even to myself. It is not as though I have to fear her snuggling up to Nelyo in the night-even though the alarmed looks they shoot each other suggests that such a thought has occurred to them too-not with Fëanáro and me lying only a few feet away, and it does seem cruel to leave her as the only one in our party with no one to share her tent. "I could not, Fëanáro," she stammers. (How does he get his apprentices to call him by his name when I cannot? He is so much more imposing than I am!) "You can and you shall," he answers in the same tone he uses when forcing Tyelkormo to do some unpleasant chore or instructing his students in a nuance at the forge. "Our tent is plenty large to accommodate my family and all of our apprentices, if I wished. I will hear no further arguments."

She gives Nelyo a wan smile when Fëanáro turns his back and he returns the same to her. Perhaps, even with the river so near, I will not sleep well tonight for trying to discern the sound of furtive footsteps beneath the soft roar of the water.

I am being silly. I drop the blankets by the entrance to the tent and crouch down to speak to Carnistir: "We shall have to make an extra bed then, little one." I see Nelyo's shoulders drop with relief; even in the silvery dark of evening, I can see a touch of crimson in Annawendë 's cheeks. Fëanáro walks by me and gives me a careful look, a look one might give a compound ready to explode, and Carnistir whimpers.

"He's hungry," Nelyo says quickly. "Shall I start supper?"

"Please do," Fëanáro instructs him, "and I will assist you in a moment."

As I carry the pillows and blankets in the tent, I feel Fëanáro's stare heavy on my back. He feels my unrest as clearly as I feel his. At times, I am wearied by the lack of privacy in thought that comes with our marriage; for every moment that I rejoice in the warmth of sharing a bond with his spirit there is a moment that I wish he could not perceive me with such acuity.

But he says nothing.

We have supper around the campfire, eating off of sturdy earthenware plates and drinking cold river water from dimpled tin cups. Fëanáro sits across from me, between Nelyo and Vorondil, who are engaging in a spirited argument about the nature of the components that form metals, dually trying to impress Fëanáro and Annawendë with the strength of their convictions. Fëanáro wears a crooked smirk, amused by their waving hands and voices wrestling with the other's, warring for space in the air between them. It seems natural to view him through the leaping flames.

Carnistir is leaning heavily against me, exhausted by the day's journey, and he does not resist when I spoon fried potatoes and applesauce into his mouth. Tomorrow, Nelyo and Fëanáro will try to shoot some game in the forests over the river, and we will have meat for supper, but for today, it is fruits and vegetables and a slice of bread for everyone. I slip a lembas cracker into his mouth and he chews it without protestation.

Nelyo stands to clear the dishes. "Nelyo, love, will you take your brothers and Findekáno for their baths? Carnistir is already half-asleep, but he needs his bath. Macalaurë and I will clear the dishes."

Our children and apprentices take turns bathing in the river, first Nelyo with his younger brothers and cousin, then Macalaurë and the male apprentices, and lastly, Annawendë, alone. I assure her, however, as sweetly as possible, that I will remain within earshot if she needs anything and send Nelyo to detangle his brothers' and cousin's hair in the tent. And judging by the way that Carnistir has tangled his fingers in his hair, Nelyo will be there for a while.

Fëanáro and I dress the little ones-freshly cleaned and combed by Nelyo-in their nightclothes. Carnistir has been revitalized a bit by the cool river water, and Fëanáro has to hold him while Nelyo attempts to shove his pinioning little legs into a pair of cotton trousers. Tyelkormo haughtily tells me that he can dress himself and makes a big production of yanking on his clothes. That leaves me with Findekáno, who stands like a wooden doll as I dress him, his big blue eyes fixed on the ground and shimmering with tears. I feel a sudden surge of sympathy for him: How homesick he must be, in an unfamiliar land, surrounded by strangers!

"Would you like to sleep with your uncle and me tonight?" I ask him. "Or one of your cousins?"

He stares uneasily at the ground for a moment, then shakes his head no without looking at me.

After he is dressed, I pull him into my lap. There is a moment of stiff resistance, then he topples into me like a tree pushed over by winds stronger than it is. He sits there obediently, but I can tell that it comforts no one but me. Fëanáro is making a point not to look at me.

Annawendë creeps into the tent, looking first to Fëanáro for reassurance, then sending small glances at Nelyo. Fëanáro stands. "Make yourself comfortable, Annawendë. Let one of us know if you need anything." He ducks out of the tent.

I pass Findekáno to Nelyo. In Nelyo's arms, he grows limper, and Nelyo kisses him like I could not. "Tuck them into bed, love," I say. "Your father and I will be back shortly."

I walk soundlessly to the river.

There is a small strip of sandy shore bracketed on either side by jutting rocks. I leap onto one of the rocks and sit, watching Fëanáro. I feel his awareness of me as surely as he feels my unannounced presence, but he does not acknowledge me and I speak not to him. He stands on the shore and undresses, letting his clothes fall beside him into the sand, and stands in the silver light of night for a long moment, a breeze rippling his black hair and making the light dance on it like it dances on the darkened water.

He steps into the river and walks forward, stopping when the water reaches his mid-thighs. Still, he does not turn, but I can feel his spirit bumping against mine, trying to understand why I do not undress and join him. Suddenly, he collapses and disappears beneath the water, with only a slight ripple to betray his abrupt motion.

I move to the edge of the rock and sit with my feet dangling so close to the water that, when a strong breeze makes the waves lap high, it kisses the tips of my toes. I watch the place where he went under but neither wave nor ripple signals his presence, and after a moment I grow distracted by the play of the light on the water and the gentle slurp of the waves on the shore.

A hand pushes through the water and grabs my leg.

I do not give him the satisfaction of a scream or even a yelp, but my breath rushes into my chest and I gasp, and he knows that he has startled me. His hair is as slick as oil on his shoulders; his skin is milky in the silver light. His eyes gleam in the darkness like the lamps he makes from iron and stone and implants with the light of the stars.

"Won't you join me?" he asks, and his hands are on my thighs, leaving wet prints on my dress, tugging me into the water after him. Before I can protest, I plunk into the water in front of him, fully clothed and gasping with the sudden shock of the cool water.

"Fëanáro!" I say. "How dare you? Now I have nothing to wear back to the camp! Now I am soaked!"

"You will wear my tunic then," he says and tries to kiss me, but I duck away from his lips and the kiss lands on my forehead.

"And what shall it look like, when I come back to the camp in front of our sons and apprentices, dressed in your clothes, carrying my dress in a soaking wet ball?" Fëanáro twists his face into an expression of exaggerated shock and scandal that enrages me further. His hands are tight on my waist, his fingers working my skirt up around my hips, holding me down in the water. "Stop that, Fëanáro!" I say, but most of my words are lost as he tugs my dress over my head and tosses it onto the rocks behind us.

"I assume, Nerdanel," he tells me, pressing against me until I feel his arousal growing against my leg, kissing my neck between words, "that our sons and apprentices will make the correct assumption that, being married and in the prime of our youth, we have had a bit of a romp in the river. And, seeing as how we have four sons, I assume that they realize that we have made love at least that many times and will likely not be shocked by the implication of a fifth."

I try to bat away his hands, but it seems that I no sooner swat at him in one place and he is touching me in another. Finally, I put both of my fists against his chest and push him away.

"You don't want to," he says.

"Don't want to what?" I spit.

"Have a romp in the river."

"No, I do not want to have a romp in the river! You drag me into the water fully clothed and expect that I shall then wish to lie obediently beneath you-"

"I hope not. You'd drown."

I force myself to be quiet for a moment. I close my eyes, trying to rid his image from my mind. I cannot: He is in my mind always; he is part of my mind, as I am part of his. Finally, I open my eyes and give him a long, contemplative stare, and he meets my eyes fearlessly. "Fëanáro," I say at last, and my voice is calm again, "I wish you'd stop. I'm not in the mood for your foolery tonight."

He floats with the water around his shoulders and his hair waving in dark fronds at the surface. His bright eyes are wide in the dark, and he reminds me of Carnistir slouching, full of hurtful anger, when he has had an accident in the bathtub.

"You are angry," he says. I hate sometimes how he states my emotions to me, like what I feel is never an uncertainty to him, never up to me to decide, but only his duty to report.

"I wish that you wouldn't have asked Annawendë to stay with us."

There it is, hanging heavily in the air between us. His eyebrows pop up with surprise, for it is usually he who is unsympathetic and cold to outsiders while I open the door of our home to those whom he would like to reject. Oh, the arguments we have had on the subject! On inviting his half-brothers and stepmother to our home, on attending their feasts in turn. On allowing Findekáno to accompany us to Formenos. And now I show the same unkindness to Annawendë.

His eyebrows rumple with puzzlement. "I do not understand why you despise my apprentice so."

Leave it to Fëanáro to take my discomfort with the relationship between our son and Annawendë and bring himself into it.

"I do not despise your apprentice, but I think that she has no business sharing a tent with Nelyo when they are obviously courting!"

"Actually, Nerdanel, they have not yet decided to court. They had a few dances the other evening and nothing more. If Nelyo were to court every girl with whom he had a dance, we might never see him again."

"You know right well, Fëanáro, that they intend to court!"

He sighs. "And if they do?"

"Then they do not belong sleeping in the same tent."

"Many times, Nerdanel, we slept in the same tent-in the same bed!-before we were wed."

"And you think that he will wed her?"

"You do not?"

Anger snaps inside me like a twig beneath a hastily placed foot. "She will not make a suitable wife for him!"

Fëanáro falls back in the water like he was pushed. His eyes are suddenly very bright in the near-dark, as bright as the stones he crafts, glowing with an inexplicable fire. "Your words sound very familiar to me, Nerdanel, for only fifty years have gone since I heard them last, from my stepmother, from the lords of the court. 'Do not wed her, Fëanáro; she is not suitable for you. You are a high prince, and a high prince is not meant to marry one as common as she! Why marry the unlovely daughter of a mere craftsman when the daughters of every lord in the court would have you? Would wed you on the floor of your father's chambers in this very moment if you desired. You could have Anairë! Eärwen! No, they do not have Nerdanel's heart, but they have beauty and they have connections and they will reflect well on our family at your father's pompous suppers, and yes, you may be sick at the thought of lying with them, of sharing your body with them, but you only have to manage once to marry and once to beget your father's heir, and your duty is done! And forever shall you possess the beautiful trophy-wife for the House of Finwë. Why not, Fëanáro? Why not?'"

His last words cut the still night with the violence of a blade meeting flesh, and he flounces from the river and, without bothering to dry himself, steps into his trousers and yanks them to his waist. He picks up his tunic from the sand, balls it up, and hurls it at the rock, where it lands beside my abandoned, sodden dress. "If your pride allows you," he spits, sneering, before grabbing his boots and disappearing into the night.

I float in water to my shoulders, my hair winding around me, unable to fumble thoughts of my own. Though he is gone from my sight, I can feel his anger burning still, burning brighter than my greatest emotion, and consuming my thoughts in flame. Fëanáro is like an animal driven to a corner: When wounded, he does not whimper, he does not make plaintive pleas, but strikes out and gnashes until his teeth are reddened with blood.

But I weep. I weep silently in the water, letting the river carry my tears away, across Aman to the sea, for I know that his words are true, that he was offered princesses and ladies of the court to wed; he was offered the chance to stand before Manwë and Varda in Valmar and speak the name of Eru before the witness of thousands, to be draped in silk, garnished in diamonds, and showered with rose petals; he was offered wedding bands of gold, forged by Aulë and blessed by all the Valar; and all this he cast aside to wed the daughter of a craftsman in a clearing in the forest, with no one to witness the union but the omnipresent eye of Eru.

I feel his anger subside a bit, diminishing from a white blaze to a soft red glow, and I wonder, does he feel my tears as clearly as I feel his rage? Is this what balms him? For many times, it is I who step first into him after we fight, and his arms hang futilely at his sides as I bathe his shoulders with my tears for long, agonizing moments before he collects me in a slow embrace.

Or maybe it was one of our sons, for they soothe him as well-impish little Carnistir, energetic Tyelkormo, light-hearted Macalaurë, or our gracious, precious Nelyo-who had graced him with a serendipitous kiss and embrace and made him forget my careless words.

I think sometimes of my life before I wed Fëanáro, of the simple rhythm of life in my father's house: rising every morning after the Mingling of the Trees, going to the forge or the workshop for the day, falling into sleep as Telperion polished the land in silver. When wanderlust seized me, I let it take me where it would, never expecting that it would bring me here, to float in a river with tears in my eyes, the wife of a high prince. My life was never complicated by love then, nor was it complicated by anger.

I sink beneath the water; I let it fill my ears with its empty roar; I let it erase the tears from my cheeks. When I rise, I will go back to the camp, back to my family, back to my husband. All spouses fight-do they not?-and the thought of sleeping alone at night is as cold as the thought of my body lying forgotten in a grave while my spirit flees into the night.

I slip from the water, dry myself, and dress in Fëanáro's tunic, which hangs nearly to my knees. His smell engulfs me, and I breathe in his scent now, and I see his hands, forging beauty from nothingness, caressing my cheek, my hands, my body. I feel his warmth beside me in bed at night. I see our sons, one by one, as they were in the moments that they were born, when Fëanáro and I wept together with joy, and see them as they are now, growing to look more like their father every day, hurtling through life at a frightful pace. I imagine erasing the complications in my life-ducking beneath the water and swimming to the shore, running through the night until I reach the bland peace of my father's house-and realize that, were this to be my wish, I must also wish to erase my joy as well.

I step onto the path back to the camp.

The campfire smolders to keep away animals in the night. The apprentices' tent is dark, but ours throbs faintly still with candlelight, likely kept by Nelyo or Macalaurë in anticipation of my return. I open the flap and duck inside, tying it closed behind me. Nelyo lies on his back, and I expect Macalaurë pressed against his right shoulder but Findekáno on his left? I feel a glow of pleasant surprise. Carnistir, who likes to sleep alone, is near to them but a bit away, bundled in his blankets like a cocoon. Annawendë is at the opposite side of the tent from Nelyo, sleeping alone, and I feel a blush of shame for my earlier mistrust of her intentions.

I'd made a bed earlier for Fëanáro and me in the middle of the tent, and Fëanáro lies on his side with his back to me. Tyelkormo is curled in his arms like a doll, breathing heavily and mumbling in his sleep.

But Fëanáro is awake. I cannot see his eyes, but I feel his awareness of me, as I undress, put on my nightgown, and slip into bed beside him. He prods at me in thought like one might toe a sheet of ice, feeling carefully for slick spots or places worn too thin to tread, and I save him the effort by laying my head on his arm and whispering, "Fëanáro, I'm sorry."

He does not respond.

"I love you," I say.

"I love you too," he replies, and Tyelkormo awakens, sees me, and squeals with muted joy, wriggling across Fëanáro to lie between us. Fëanáro rolls over to face me, resting his chin in Tyelkormo's hair. Both of our arms circle our son and reach for each other. I am agonized to see that his eyes are reddened-he has been weeping?-and realize that he has perceived my earlier thoughts, and he had imagined me gone, ducked beneath the river and running through the night to my father's house and the simpler life I knew before the day that he came into my forge and pressed into my hand an engagement ring.

Holding our son between us, I realize that life was simpler then but empty.

"I could not bear you to leave me," he whispers. "I will do your bidding until the end of Arda if only-"

I put my fingers to his lips. "Hush," I say. "I made my choice that day in the forge, and it is not a choice I shall ever regret. All things will end before my love for you."

His eyes drop shut, and his hand rests on my arm with a gentle pressure greater than a kiss, and I shiver suddenly with the realization that love so deep as that which flows within us will indeed end all before it destroys itself.

Findekáno

In my dreams: Uncle Fëanáro leads me by the hand to his forge. I have never been in a forge before, but I have seen glimpses of his through the doorway and the scary fragments of heat and dark make up the place in my dreams. The dream-forge glows terrifying red all around; it is hot; I am afraid to loosen my arms from my body lest I fall into the flames. Uncle gives me a complicated assignment, speaking like he does to my cousin Maitimo about alloys and tempering and heat of fusion and hands me a chunk of metal that is too heavy for my skinny arms and bites at my hands. I cry out and drop the metal to the ground, where it smashes and lies, flat as a puddle, like a crushed animal. Aunt Nerdanel appears beside him and they shake their heads in unison. Her hair is the color of flame, tangled with Uncle's, which is the color of dark. "It's not going to work. We tried, but he's hopeless," she says. And out the door we walk and into Tirion, where my mother and father have mysteriously disappeared; in place of our house is Uncle Fëanáro's, looking out-of-place in the brilliant city, its haphazard wings penetrating the houses of the lords and even Grandfather Finwë's palace. "Well, there's nothing more that we can do," Aunt Nerdanel says, and I am left alone in a street full of people who do not recognize me as a prince and turn away when I beg for help.

I restrain a cry and jerk awake.

For the past week, whenever I awaken, my heart leaps with the hope that my eyes will open and find the cream-colored curtains of my room at home, and my back will be pressing into the soft mattress, safe in my own bedroom in Tirion. But always, it is the same: a thin bedroll spread over rocky ground, the olive color of the tent filling my sight, and around me, the family of my half-uncle, who speak with a rapid confidence and laugh with a manic abandon that we do not at home. For the last six nights, we have slept like this in the wild, with the Treelight growing fainter as we move farther into the cold north, and with my nightmares growing in intensity with the darkness.

It is early evening now, and I have fallen into an unexpected nap. We have been camped here since last night and would be nearing Formenos by now, if we had not been waylaid after the accident.

It had been late when it happened, and we had all been tired, but Uncle Fëanáro insisted that we could reach a broad meadow with soft ground and a nearby spring, so we pushed on through the growing darkness, enticed by the thought of sleeping on softness and bathing in calm waters. Out of the shadows, a rabbit sprang and startled my cousin Tyelkormo's horse. As the horse reared to spring away, my cousin Macalaurë leaned forward on his own mount and seized Tyelkormo's reins, in the process, unseating himself. He tipped forward and hovered for a moment in the air before lolling into a lazy somersault and landing on his shoulder on the rocky ground, tearing his clothes and his flesh on a blade of rock that protruded from the earth.

So that is how we ended up here-still an hour's ride from the soft meadow-in a place that must surely grow rocks, for when I had drifted to sleep a few minutes earlier, the ground beneath me had been smooth and comfortable, yet now a rock jabs me in the small of my back and brings me fully from my nightmare.

Uncle Fëanáro has set lamps around the tent to dispel the darkness, and he sits beneath one now, with Cousin Macalaurë, examining his shoulder. Already, it looks better than it did last night, when Maitimo and Uncle Fëanáro had set up the tent crooked in their haste and peeled the tunic from Macalaurë, who trembled but did not weep. Aunt Nerdanel hastily took Cousin Carnistir into her arms, and in a voice that bubbled with unshed tears, offered to look for firewood. I sat with Cousin Tyelkormo in morbid fascination of the purple bruise on my cousin's shoulder, bisected with a deep gash already grown tacky with blood, and watched as my uncle prodded the wound, and Macalaurë let slip a cry before he bit down on his tunic held in a ball in his hands. Maitimo took his brother's head in his hands and held Macalaurë's face against his chest as Uncle Fëanáro washed the wound and stitched it and applied a balm to the bruises around it. Macalaurë quivered with silent sobs, and I was fascinated: I'd never seen someone so old and strong cry before. I'd always thought that pain melted away with age, in the same manner as bubbles disappear from champagne the longer it sits exposed to the air.

I've never had to receive such ministrations from a healer, much less my father, for we have people to do for us in Tirion what my uncle's family does routinely without complaint. I did see the young daughter of one of the lords tended, however, after she fell on the palace stairway and hit her head, and the healer who poked at her bruises and administered balm and a bandage did not then take the little girl in her arms-as Uncle Fëanáro had done with Macalaurë when he had finished-and whisper over and over that she was sorry, that she would rather endure torment than ever to hurt the little girl again.

Macalaurë does not cry now, as Uncle Fëanáro smears more balm on his shoulder. The bruise has faded; the stitches in the wound remind me of little pointy teeth poking over lips pressed shut. Macalaurë looks tired and sore. Cousin Tyelkormo is curled asleep in his lap, and Macalaurë absentmindedly strokes his golden hair. No one notices me as I stand and quietly duck out of the tent.

The plain on which we are camped is dotted with sparse patches of bristling grass over earth that looks scorched and ashy. If it wasn't so cold, I would think that the land had been burned, for it has the tired, gray look of something that has endured such an ordeal, but the nights bring a chill so deep that my fingertips burn with it. Telperion is waxing now, in the distance, casting the land in a faint silver hue, and I draw my heavy cloak tightly around my shoulders and listen for Maitimo.

Actually, it is not my cloak; it is Tyelkormo's. My father must not have realized how cold it is in the north, for he packed nothing more substantial for me than a light traveling cloak more adapted to repelling the midday heat than keeping the body warm in the north at night. But Tyelkormo is much bigger than I am-although he was born only a year before me-and his borrowed heavy cloak has grown tattered at the bottom from dragging on the ground. I see him stare at it with thinly veiled resentment whenever his parents or Maitimo aren't looking. He despises my presence here. I suspect that they all do, except for Maitimo.

Which is why, with the dregs of my nightmare still lying cold in my brain, I seek Maitimo first.

There is a cooking fire a few paces from the tent. This afternoon, Maitimo and Uncle Fëanáro rode off in the direction of the fuzzy line of trees on the horizon, returning home as Laurelin waned with a big turkey draped across the front of Maitimo's saddle. The bird-plucked and seasoned-roasts over the fire now, and the smell of it is warm and enticing in the chilly evening. Maitimo is supposed to be tending it, but as it has been roasting for two hours now, it is not a job requiring great vigilance, only a slight turn on the spit every half-hour or so. The male apprentices mill about at various cooking tasks, and the lack of Annawendë tells me that Maitimo cannot be far.

I walk behind the tent and hear his voice coming from a small copse of tiny, scrubby trees and follow the sound. He sits there, beneath the trees, with Annawendë, both of them cuddled together beneath his cloak, even though I know she has her own heavy cloak that is more than suitable for her own shoulders. He is laughing about something and kissing her between words; her eyes are closed, her lips are smiling, and her hand is twined in his hair. Now Maitimo is an affectionate person; always, he is kissing his brothers and me, but not like this. Not dipping in twice for a kiss on the lips, not letting his lips linger on our skin, certainly not opening his mouth! They have drawn the cloak tightly around them, and I cannot see his hands, but I notice furtive motion beneath the heavy cloth as though tiny animals were burrowing beneath.

I try to stay stealthy, but Maitimo hears me and squints into the darkness. "Káno?"

At the sound of my name in his voice, I run forward, slowing only when I get close to them. I intend to hurl myself into his arms, but Annawendë's presence stops me. "I had a bad dream," I say weakly, twisting my toes against the dusty ground. There is no sighing or fuss, but I sense that I have interrupted them. The gleeful laughter on their lips has died.

"Káno," Maitimo says, and opens his arms, letting the cloak fall away, "come here."

I step into his embrace, and he drags me onto his lap. I don't want to be there, so close to Annawendë, but at least it is warm.

His hair tickles my face. Red hair! I have never seen hair that color on anyone else; some of the families in Tirion have a rusty hue to their hair that is called red, but it is more an orangey color, not nearly so breathtaking as Maitimo's, which is more the color of dark blood. I remember being held by him at my first begetting day feast-my first memory of my eldest cousin-and reaching up to touch his hair, expecting it to feel like metal and being shocked at how soft and warm it was.

"Of what did you dream?" he asks, and I would normally tell him, but Annawendë is gazing at me and I don't want her to know. When the moment comes to speak out loud about a nightmare, it suddenly seems silly, and while I could bear to tell Maitimo alone, I fear that Annawendë will scoff.

"If you tell me," he prods, "then the dream shall turn to smoke in the air and can never bother you again. If you keep it up here, though," he taps my head, "it shall fester and return to you tonight, until you speak it aloud and make it into nothing."

Still I shake my head.

His arms tighten on me and he sighs.

Desperate to speak something that he wants to hear, I say, "Macalaurë is having his shoulder cleaned again by my uncle."

"Oh?" This captures Maitimo's interest. "How does it look?"

"He is not crying," I say.

"Well, no, he would not. The balm is for the muscle beneath; it does not hurt like it hurts to have a fresh wound cleaned and stitched."

I can only imagine the pain that would be caused by such, for I have never had a wound bad enough to require stitching. A few scraped knees and a couple minor scratches are all that I can boast, and my nursemaids matter-of-factly covered them with flesh-colored bandages like they were little shames not to be revealed. My uncle's family is not so delicate, and they ride through the forests in short-sleeved tunics, not minding the stuttering red scratches left on their arms by the brush. Tyelkormo is even missing three teeth in the back of his mouth from falling out of a tree; Aunt Nerdanel does not mind, saying that he should soon be growing his adult teeth anyway. The other evening, Maitimo bathed us in the river and I looked at his body as he washed Carnistir, and his skin was marred in a few places by threadlike scars that might have once been cuts, scars like tiny cracks in a porcelain jar. I touched one before the thought of committing such an act reached my brain-a tiny, puckered line about two inches long on his hip-and he turned to me and smiled. Nothing offends him, I realized-even being touched in such a familiar manner while naked-and he said, "That taught me to be more careful in the forest while hunting. Macalaurë grazed me with an arrow. It could have been much worse." I pressed my hand against his warm skin, feeling the unyielding bone beneath, and felt slightly sickened at the thought of torn flesh and bone.

"He will be sore for many days," Maitimo says now of Macalaurë. "But it was a brave thing he did. Tyelkormo fancies himself mighty but he is still small and could have been badly hurt if his pony had bolted."

"Will we have to stay much longer?" I ask. I hate how tiny my voice sounds after his.

"Likely not. Macalaurë will be able to ride with Atar or me by tomorrow, if we keep his arm bandaged and bound. We are only a two-day ride from Formenos. It makes no sense to linger."

Annawendë has snuggled into his shoulder, and she gives me a tiny smile. Perhaps my presence here has awakened a longing inside her, a longing to sit close with my cousin like this with a small child in his arms-only their child, not me.

Well, perhaps she shall get her wish, for Maitimo is not many years younger than my uncle Arafinwë, and Uncle Arafinwë is already married with a son on the way: my cousin, Atar tells me, someone I will be able to take as a friend and companion for the rest of my life. Funny how I have four cousins already and he never thought to say the same of them. Yet how quickly he sent me to live among them!

Though Maitimo is the only one who has so far tempted my heart into love. Macalaurë is kind and gentle but distracted by his music. His baby brothers are a hassle for him; why should he have any concern for the little cousin shoved into their midst? Carnistir is too small for closeness, and he is very strange. He pointed to me the other day and said that I was blue. Dark blue. I was wearing a cream-colored tunic at the time and tan trousers, so I do not know of what he was speaking.

And Tyelkormo is jealous

He is enviably beautiful-almost as stunning as Maitimo-with thick golden hair the color of honey and wide gray eyes flecked with blue. He is huge too; I am only a year younger, yet he could best me as easily in a contest of physical strength as a child twice our age. Certainly, he could outrun me, outclimb me; already, he is a skilled horseman and packed with his things is a beautiful longbow made small enough to fit him. I have no doubt that he is able to use it and certainly use it well. Uncle Fëanáro is only too aware of his third son's beauty and dresses him to suit in dark greens the color of leaves of a deep forest and brilliant blues the color of the sky in Laurelin's hours, letting his hair lie against the rich colors like beams of daylight against darkness. I feel like a pale shadow beside him, yet he stares always at me with envy in his eyes, clinging to his parents or Maitimo-Macalaurë even-or hurrying to lift Carnistir away whenever I come near.

He is the cousin whose affections were used to entice me into this trip. "Your cousin Tyelkormo," Atar and Amil would say, "is nearly your age-imagine the fun you shall have! You shall be the best of friends!"

I had been romanced into fantasies about roaming the deep forests with him, hunting game too ambitious even for Tyelkormo, or the pair of us studying in my room late at night, whispering to each other about the awfulness of his father for making us labor so hard. My heart had quivered with longing for such companionship. Tirion is a busy place and many of the lords have children or grandchildren my age, yet I am the only young prince, and that sets me on a pedestal that is too tiresome for them to climb. Amil has made the effort, bringing other children into our home and leaving us with a pile of toys to wile away the hours staring blankly at each other. When their parents come to collect them, they always ask loudly within earshot of Amil and Atar, "Did you enjoy your time?" and the children nod obediently yes, and I feel like a piece in one of the board games that Atar plays with Uncle Arafinwë where the objective is to capture power from your opponent.

It should be no surprise then that I was overjoyed at the news of a baby brother and cousin within one month of each other. At last, I would have companions! But then, I got plopped into the middle of this family I barely know, expected to befriend cousins who were more strangers than family and who obviously did not wish me here. Except Maitimo.

I snuggle into his chest, suddenly overcome by love for my cousin who was a week ago barely known to me, ignoring Annawendë. In this moment, I am certain that the summer will not be entirely miserable, as long as Maitimo is with me.

~oOo~

Supper comes late that night, for the turkey takes a while to roast, and my stomach is grumbling by the time we finally sit down on rugs around the campfire.

At home, we dress for supper in clean, tidy robes and assemble in the dining room precisely fifteen minutes after the Mingling of the Lights. My uncle Fëanáro does most of the cooking for his family, with the help of Maitimo and Macalaurë, but at home, we have hired cooks to do this for us. Most nights at least one of the lords is dining with us, so my nursemaid always braids my hair and secures my silver prince's circlet onto it. Atar instructed my nursemaid to pack my circlet, I know, easily accessible at the top of my trunk, and I know also that Maitimo saw it while we went through my things to pack for the journey, but when he put everything away, I saw him put it back into the trunk first, at the bottom. If he and his brothers have similar circlets-and they must, for they are the sons of the King's heir, whereas I am just a prince without hope of succession-then they do not wear them and I wonder if they have even brought them to Formenos.

Fëanáro's family dines casually. My aunt and uncle take turns trying to wrangle food past little Carnistir's lips, and tonight it is Uncle Fëanáro's turn, so Carnistir sits pressed close beside him, sharing his cloak. Tyelkormo has moved onto Maitimo's lap and eats half from his own plate and half from his brother's, sending me sharp, darting stares across the fire. I have been seated beside my aunt; Macalaurë is lumped together with the apprentices, who are making sympathetic conversation with him, except Annawendë who-of course-has taken her post beside Maitimo. Macalaurë's face looks pale and he is wrapped in two heavy cloaks, eating awkwardly because my uncle has bound his injured arm to his body. Maitimo told me that this is his worst injury, that Macalaurë lacks the love of being physically rambunctious that Maitimo shares with his two younger brothers. Tyelkormo had been slightly scornful. "That's probably why he fell," Tyelkormo reckoned. "I would have kept my balance."

I saw fury in Maitimo's eyes, but his voice was only edged with anger as he said, "He fell saving you, do not forget, Tyelkormo. Would he have not acted so quickly, it would have been you having stitches, most likely."

That shut Tyelkormo up, for which I was glad.

Oh, how I wish that I could love my cousin like I intended! He seems so small and innocent on Maitimo's lap, nibbling on a bit of turkey wrapped in bread, the firelight making his golden hair glow. But then he looks at me and all love melts from his eyes.

Aunt Nerdanel has fixed my plate for me, piling on bread and bits of dried fruit and corn that I am expected to eat straight from the cob. And turkey, of course: A whole bone swathed in meat, dripping grease into the rest of the food on my plate, seasoned by Uncle Fëanáro with a blend of seasonings that remind me of that which is put on the spicy shrimp served in Alqualondë. The outside is hot and crispy but, nearer to the bone, the meat is red and cool. I watch my cousins devour all of it-even the part that is red-though my lips recoil at the touch of cold, dead flesh and hunger dies in my stomach.

I drop the bone onto my plate and begin picking at the corn again. How awkward to eat entirely with your hands, without utensils to make you feel less intimately connected with your food! Macalaurë stares at the abandoned turkey bone, at the red flesh I have left behind, and says, "If you aren't going to finish that, Findekáno ...?"

Uncle Fëanáro and Maitimo look at each other and roar with laughter. "I'm glad to see you're feeling better, Macalaurë," says Aunt Nerdanel. I nod, giving her permission to pass the bone to Macalaurë, and he picks and eats the meat that I couldn't bear to finish, one-handed and awkward.

Macalaurë speaks around the turkey bone at his lips. "The pain is growing easier to bear. Of course, part of that is certainly the pound of balm that Atar has wasted on my shoulder, every hour since this morning. Still, I may only manage to eat half my weight in food tonight instead of the whole, like I usually do."

They laugh again. I wish I could join in, but my voice gets stuck in my throat, unsure of what's proper behavior in a family that sits on the ground and eats with their hands yet, within a leaf's fall, descends into serious philosophizing on topics of which I have never heard. "A pound of balm and half your weight in supper is well worth your health and comfort, Macalaurë," Uncle Fëanáro tells him. "I am glad that you are returning to wellness. We will set out again tomorrow. You, Macalaurë, will share my horse with Nelyo, and I will take Carnistir on Nelyo's horse. That way you can rest your arm-sleep even-without fear of falling."

"I will feel like a small child again," Macalaurë says.

"There is nothing wrong, every now and again, with allowing yourself the luxury of feeling like a small child."

I cannot even imagine that Uncle Fëanáro was ever a small child. I suppose that he must have been born small, but it is hard to imagine him as helpless as little Carnistir or me-even Tyelkormo. It is hard to imagine that he needed help in the bath or dressing himself. It is hard to imagine that he ever woke with nightmares and sought the consolation of my grandfather-his father. Yet when I look at him, I am always startled by how young he looks-younger than my father even, although Uncle Fëanáro was already twenty-eight years old when Atar was born-with eyes that glitter with the eager curiosity of a child my age. He and Maitimo might be close-born brothers, not father and son, if one were to go on the assumption of looks alone.

Aunt Nerdanel looks young as well, but sometimes, her eyes become very tired.

We sit around the fire after supper, letting our dirty plates and damp cups sit untended on the ground behind us. I have been with this family for a week, and I know that normally they would call for music, and Macalaurë would bring out his harp or his lute or sometimes just sing with his voice, which sounds like it comes from a place deeper than his narrow, boyish chest, but they do not wish to burden him while he is injured, so Maitimo reads instead from a heavy volume that he carries with his traveling things, called Ardacarmë. Uncle Fëanáro must know it very well, for his eyes close and he moves his lips along with the words.

Tyelkormo brings his knees to his chest in Maitimo's lap, and suddenly he is smaller than I ever imagined he could be. Annawendë sits a bit away from Maitimo now, as though afraid to share the spotlight with his voice. Carnistir is wrapped in Uncle Fëanáro's arms, sleeping already, and Macalaurë sits still with the apprentices, their upper arms pressed companionably close, looking less tired than he did before the meal. I notice how the firelight looks in his hair because that must be how it looks in mine.

I can feel the cold night pressing at our backs, but beside the fire, we are bathed in drowsy warmth that makes my toes tingle with heat. Aunt Nerdanel leans over and asks, "Would you like to sit with me?" and I allow her to draw me into her lap, my eyes slipping shut even as she cradles my head onto her shoulder.

~oOo~

When I next awaken, it is morning.

I perceive the Mingling of the Lights, even though it is hard to see through the thick canvas walls of the tent. But I can feel it somewhere deep inside me, like one feels the low notes of music vibrating around the heart even when the music is too far away to hear.

Aunt Nerdanel must have tucked me into my bedroll last night, alongside Tyelkormo, who also must have slept straight through the night or else he never would have tolerated lying next to me. To our right is a pile of furs, and I know that, were I to delve into them, I would find little Carnistir, who Maitimo says prefers to sleep alone and unwatched in his dreams.

I sit up, trying not to disturb the blankets in a way that might awaken Tyelkormo. Macalaurë lies not far behind us, sleeping without his tunic and on his belly with his shoulder exposed to the air, sharing a bedroll with Maitimo to keep himself warm. Annawendë is off to the side, alone, an invited guest trying to be inconspicuous among the family. Aunt Nerdanel and Uncle Fëanáro share a bedroll in the corner, their boots lying in a jumble beside it, their pillows dented, and their blankets rumpled, but they are nowhere inside the tent.

The tent flaps are untied so I can easily slip outside without being heard. Uncle Fëanáro and Maitimo are careful to set up the tent in a way to minimize drafts, and I had forgotten how cold the mornings are in the north, before Laurelin's waxing, and I regret forgetting my borrowed cloak. I dare not go back into the tent, however, and chance waking one of my cousins.

A shroud of mist undulates over the land, alternating between covering and revealing the gray landscape and stubby trees. I sit on the damp ground by the burned out campfire, hugging my arms around myself and rocking back and forth to keep warm. I allow tears to blur the landscape even further than the mist has already done.

I miss Tirion. I miss my family. I miss home.

Even the things I despised, I miss: the cramped, bland study room; the frustrated voices of my tutors; the scratchy robes Amil would have forced upon me for our weekly suppers with my grandmother and grandfather in the palace. I miss my blue-eyed, stern-voiced Atar and pretty Amil with her belly that swells a little more every day, and if I am good, she lets me put a hand on it to feel my baby brother kicking. I miss the big hugs I get from Grandfather Finwë and the little candies that Grandmother Indis sneaks to me and the friendly teasing that I must regularly endure from Uncle Arafinwë.

I had thought that age diminished pain-for babies cry more than children and adults do not cry-and thought that maybe this "journey" was meant to help me learn to live without suffering. If I could endure this-the loss of my parents, the puzzling customs of the Fëanárians, the barely disguised contempt of some of my cousins-then surely I could endure anything. But I must have been wrong about things, for I watched Macalaurë weep in his brother's arms the other day, his muscles rigid with pain that I thought would have left him by now. And I wondered how Atar and Amil could possibly have wished for me to be hurt so.

Even Uncle Fëanáro gathered Macalaurë in his arms and apologized, wished for torment upon his own body before the slightest anguish upon that of his son. I tried to get Atar to hold me like that, in my last moments with him in Tirion, but he took his arms from me and walked away, leaving me with strangers.

At home, I am punished for feeling sorry for myself. When I receive poor marks from my tutors or am asked to abandon play for some unpleasantness, I have learned not to push out my lips into a pout or let any tears be seen glimmering in my eyes, for the punishment is always worse than the antecedent. I have learned to let the tears fall in private, burying them into my silken pillows or letting them drop into the despised scented bathwater when my nursemaid turns her back. "You are through with being a baby, right?" Atar asked me once, three years ago. "Well, only babies cry."

But Macalaurë cried, and he is hardly a baby but big, nearly grown, and he wept in the open, pressing into Maitimo's chest, in front of his father, without repercussions.

Uncle Fëanáro is strange, though, different from Atar, so maybe he permits tears. Not like he looks like has ever shed any himself; they probably dried in the heat of his eyes before they could even cloud his vision.

The longer I sit, the more I become aware of the cold, wet air. My hair is sodden with it; my skin is puckered with cold-bumps and gray in the wan morning light. I stand to go back to the tent but my feet carry me past it, to the south and a small grove of trees nearby. In my loneliness, I am grieved by the idea of having to watch my cousins sleep side-by-side in easy, companionable peace while I sit wakeful and alone

I walk, and as the grass grows thicker nearer the trees, I see that it has been matted into silvery tracks leading into the small forest. I stop and stare at the ground; I had never even heard of tracking before coming to this family a week ago, but as we rode, Maitimo taught me how to look for tracks in the grass and count the number of feet in an attempt to discern what kind of creature we followed. Not surprisingly, Tyelkormo is excellent at this exercise, nearly as good as Maitimo. I pause and count the tracks now: four, but they are side by side, overlapped in places as would be made by two people walking very close, and I know that I have found my aunt and uncle.

The small forest arises from a hot spring that bubbles at its center like a large round bathtub; the water is hotter than the air even at Laurelin's zenith. Maitimo took me and his two youngest brothers there to bathe on our first night here, and the hot water at first made my toes recoil, but he encouraged me to ease myself in gently, promising that I would get used to the heat. I had, and it was quite pleasant thereafter, and we splashed and played and even Tyelkormo forgot for that hour that he despised me. When we rose from the water, the cold air stung like a slap against our naked skin, and Maitimo quickly wrapped each of us into a heavy cloak, and-teeth chattering-led us back to the campfire to dry and dress.

The tracks lead in the direction of the spring, and I follow for reasons that I do not understand, only a vague desire to know these people among whom I have been expected to live, to be loved by them.

I see their clothes before I see my aunt and uncle, for in the chilly morning air, the steam rises from the spring with greater ferocity than it did when Laurelin's heat still lingered in the near to the earth, and even the surface of the water is like a fogged mirror. Their nightclothes lie tangled together just before the series of rocks that lead like stairs into the spring with slippers snuggled into their midst-Aunt Nerdanel's nightgown and Uncle Fëanáro's loose cotton trousers and tunic-and a single, dark red cloak that I recognize as my uncle's hangs on a tree branch that acts as a cloak-hook. The steam thins, and I see them, sitting on a low rock, shoulder deep in the water. Aunt Nerdanel is settled back against Uncle Fëanáro, and he lathers her hair. She is speaking of Macalaurë, of his injury, of her concern that he will not be ready to embark today.

"Nonsense," says Uncle Fëanáro. "His injury is not so grave. You and I have both suffered worse."

"Yes, but this is not you or me but Macalaurë."

I settle behind a rocky outcropping, where I can see them and hear them but can go unnoticed. Uncle Fëanáro allows a very pointed silence, and Aunt Nerdanel sighs. "You know, Fëanáro, that I am more protective of Macalaurë than our other sons. Nelyo and Tyelkormo and Carnistir are all yours, strong like you, but Macalaurë is most like me, and I fear for him."

"He will be fine, Nerdanel, for he is like you, and you are also strong. I wish you would not so easily forget that. He will ride with Nelyo and be given the most considerate care; I will tightly bind his arm and give him a draught to help with the pain. I wish him to consult a healer in Formenos anyway, for I had to pull his arm back into place after he fell, and I may not have done it right for fear of hurting him."

Aunt Nerdanel leans back against Uncle Fëanáro's shoulder and kisses him under the chin. "It would ruin your reputation in Tirion if it was known that you felt such unease."

Uncle Fëanáro rinses her hair with spring water cupped in his hands. "I do not love many," he says, "but those whom I do claim most of my heart. Our sons I love more than my own life." He turns her face to him and kisses her mouth.

I wonder: Should I be here? Atar and Amil were always clear on certain points: that I should not enter their private rooms without permission or unannounced and that I should never listen to conversations meant only for the ears of those at whom they were directed. I am, in a way, doing both of these things now, yet with the Fëanárians, it is hard to tell which rules still apply, for they are so regularly in violation of our customs that I wonder if this, too, is pardonable. Uncle Fëanáro and Maitimo, after all, discuss matters of court with Tyelkormo and Carnistir in their laps. I think of the careful etiquette instilled in me from a young age, being taught that, as a prince, I am a representative of my people and expected to act as the most venerable of the Noldor, to exert great effort even to do so. The Fëanárians make no such efforts. Their clothes are simple and practical, as plain as those of the farmers outside Tirion. They do not hide their skin beneath long, constraining clothing; they leave their wounds unbandaged and angry-red. My Aunt Nerdanel even wears clothes like those of her husband-a man's clothes!-boots, short tunics, and trousers, that reveal a man's muscles beneath a woman's soft flesh.

And then there are the Valar. I have never heard my uncle or my cousins mention the Valar except distantly, as one might mention an acquaintance or a rarely seen relative. They are certainly not as devoted as my parents and grandparents. My Aunt Nerdanel wears the symbol of Aulë on a pendant around her neck, but she wears it under her clothes and she removes it at night when she lies beside my uncle. This is when I saw it, shining in her hand with the blue-white light of the lamps as she tucked it out of sight in her jewelry box. They certainly do not feast in honor of the Valar or bow at the mention of their names; they have only the odd custom of Eruhantalë before the evening meal, a custom in which I only awkwardly participate, feeling that if I showed the sincerity of my kin, then I would lay bare places of my heart not meant to be seen.

I consider disappearing back into the woods and leaving my aunt and uncle to their hot water and their kisses, but I press my cheek harder against the stone instead and allow the steam from the spring to cover me like a shroud. They kiss and kiss; I can see the tacky lather lying unrinsed in Aunt Nerdanel's hair. I wonder if, like my mother and Aunt Eärwen, Aunt Nerdanel is with child, for such cozy affection seems to mark couples who are expecting. "Shall we?" Uncle Fëanáro whispers to her, and she thinks a moment before replying, "We had best not. The boys will be waking soon."

"I can be quick."

She laughs. "I'm sure you can, but Carnistir's nightmares have forced us into enough awkward explanations without having to conjure another." She turns her back to him, and he sighs and finishes rinsing her hair.

"What of Findekáno?" she says, squeezing her eyes shut against the rivulets of soapy water.

My heart drops like a stone in my chest, so loud that I expect them both to turn and see me.

"What of him?"

"Do you think he is adjusting to this? At all?"

"A bit. Nelyo has been very kind to him."

"But Tyelkormo has been rather cruel."

"That is Tyelkormo's way. I'm sure he sees Findekáno as competition, and you know how greedy he is for affection. But he will learn, over time, that his family's love is big enough for both of them, and they will become friends."

"You think so?"

"I do." Uncle Fëanáro reaches over his shoulder to the rock behind them and retrieves a comb. He begins combing Aunt Nerdanel's hair, surprisingly delicate in removing the snarls.

I duck behind the rock, where I cannot see them and am certain that they will not see me. I want to leave now, but the ground before me is littered with twigs, and although I walked silently upon entering the forest, I suddenly loathe taking that chance again, knowing that my aunt and uncle will know that I have heard their words should my foot happen about a fragile branch and give away my intentions. Yesterday's nightmare of being abandoned makes my heart flutter like a songbird desperate to be loosed from its cage.

The conversation turns. "I was a bit surprised to hear that Anairë conceived so soon after Findekáno," I hear my uncle say.

"I must confess to the same, Fëanáro," aunt Nerdanel says with a sigh.

"They do not even sleep in the same bedroom!" Uncle Fëanáro says with an air of incredulous offense.

"You need not a bed and a bedroom to make love, Fëanáro. I should think that you of all people would know that. Besides, it is Noldorin custom for husbands and wives to sometimes sleep apart. A custom that we do not honor but a custom nonetheless."

"I know that it is Noldorin custom, Nerdanel! I am, after all, a Noldo. But it is a silly one."

"So you think of most customs, my love."

I feel a blush of indignation that makes my heart pound for my parents, who are being nonchalantly discussed miles from home by relatives they rarely even see. Then I feel a surge of surprised realization that I have accidentally happened upon conversations of a similar nature about Uncle Fëanáro and Aunt Nerdanel by my own parents, and the righteous anger subsides a bit. Though, if I could, I would tell them that sometimes I go to my mother's room for comfort at night and she is not there or my father lies with her. Those are the nights where I creep as silently as I can back down the hall to shiver away my fears in my own bed.

"There is a custom, my love, that I think we should honor, that says that when a husband wakes early to carefully wash and detangle his wife's unruly hair in a hot spring, then she should not question his subsequent desire for bonding and should obediently lie back and submit to him."

"Yes, dearest husband, and then we shall have to quiet Carnistir when he walks down the path and finds us and goes to Nelyo crying that Atar is trying to drown Amil in the spring. Or have Tyelkormo telling everyone at every feast for the next ten years about how his parents were spawning in the pond south of Formenos."

They begin to banter in the manner that I have learned is normal for my aunt and uncle. Aunt Nerdanel, for once, seems to be winning. I use the distraction of their overlapping voices to set out away from the pond on my hands and knees, crawling like a baby, being careful of the twigs that litter the ground. I am making muddy patches on the knees of my sleeping trousers and scratching my palms, but I do not care. I have heard of my uncle's notorious temper and have no desire to be the first to experience it on this trip.

When their voices begin to fade and the spring is lost entirely in the mist, I rise and begin running to the edge of the woods, then across the plain-leaving silvery tracks in the grass next to theirs, I realize, but it is too late to choose another less obvious way; I shall have to hope that they do not notice-and toward the camp. I slow to a walk when I am within sight of the tent, and it is a good thing that I do, for I walk not ten paces and Maitimo comes out of the copse of trees with Carnistir in his arms.

Excuses tumble from my brain and settle on the tip of my tongue, reasons why I might be out walking alone in the early morning, but Maitimo does not enquire. "Káno!" he says and stops and waits for me. He is still in his nightclothes and his hair is tousled, but his smile is bright like he has been awake for hours. Carnistir mumbles and blinks in his arms.

As I get closer, his forehead wrinkles with concern, and he says, "What happened? Your trousers are filthy!"

"I fell," I say, and he stoops to lift me with his free arm to his other hip, opposite Carnistir.

"You have to be careful walking in the early light in the north, Káno, for it does not become very light here until Laurelin waxes. Are you injured?"

I shake my head, and he begins walking.

It feels good to be carried. Atar had decided two years ago that I was too old to be carried and that I should walk everywhere beside him, at his right side, the place of the eldest son. He does not realize how hard it is for one so little as me to match his long-legged strides! But Maitimo does not mind carrying me; in fact, he does not even ask, but hoists me to his hip like my weight is nothing to him. Even Tyelkormo gets carried about at times, and he is much bigger and stronger than I am.

Maitimo is talking of the day's journey, of the place we will camp tonight, by a large lake, atop a cliff. "We can swim!" he says. "Have you ever swam, Káno?"

Atar had taken me a few times to the gardens just outside the city, and there is a huge pool there filled with floating flowers and big orange fish that nip your toes. And, of course, there are the fountains of Tirion, and my nursemaids occasionally allow me to splash and play in them. But never have I been in water so deep that I cannot place my feet on the bottom and breathe at the same time. I tell Maitimo this. "No worry," he says. "Atar and I will keep you close."

We walk, and I am amazed at how smoothly Maitimo steps, without jostling me a bit; if not for his hand beneath my bottom and the pressure of his body against mine, I might think I was flying. Opposite me, Carnistir's eyes have opened fully, and he stares at me in that strange manner of his, with the same intensity paid to books. His eyes are a very dark gray, like neither my aunt's nor my uncle's-the black centers are almost lost in them-and his eyelashes are dark and thick and make his eyes seem exceptionally large. I stare back at him, feeling my heart patter, refusing to be intimidated by the stare of a four-year-old, and Maitimo chatters on about how easy it was to teach Tyelkormo to swim-which is no comfort to me, as Tyelkormo can easily do a thousand things that I cannot-but neither Carnistir nor I pay him much mind.

Carnistir reaches out a tiny hand and places it over my nose. His fingers spread until they brush my eyelashes and make my eyes flutter closed. His hand is very warm-almost feverish in its heat-like the hands of my uncle and all of his sons-like their blood always burns closer to their skin than does a normal person's-and it covers the top of my face like a warm mask. The uneasy feeling of being scanned and read like words on a page lingers, but there is a gentle peace in that hand as well.

"Carnistir!" Maitimo chides and jiggles him until he withdraws his hand. "I have told you before not to grab at people's eyes! You're going to hurt your cousin!"

Carnistir looks at Maitimo, and blows a spit bubble that pops and trickles down his chin. "Blue," he says. "He is dark blue, most beautiful, dark blue like velvet."

"Shh," Maitimo hushes him and kisses his forehead. "You and your colors, Carnistir, silly little one. But you love our cousin, don't you? Do you love Káno?"

Carnistir's dark eyes swivel back to mine, and I wish that Maitimo had not put so direct a question to him. I have always felt that Maitimo might love me a little, for he loves everyone, and that is the beauty people find in his face, but I know that I am not loved by the rest of his family, even my aunt and uncle. They tolerate me, but I am an obligation to them, like a debt owed, though no one can remember what they borrowed that brought me to their door.

"Do you love Káno?" Maitimo asks again, and I squirm uncomfortably in his arms, but he only holds me tighter. I can smell his hair, not the scent of lavish soaps that marked him before we left-such scents attract insects and aren't used on journeys-but his natural smell that reminds me of earth and light at the same time.

Carnistir presses his face into Maitimo's neck. His words come out muffled, but he says, "Yes."

We have a quick, cold breakfast and leave early. It is a long way to the cliff top where will we spend the night, and Uncle Fëanáro wants to get there early. "Swimming!" Tyelkormo chortles, and Uncle Fëanáro says, in a surprisingly placid voice, "Yes, little one, we shall swim. But also, your brother will need his rest."

We all look at Macalaurë, who had bitten hard on his teeth to keep from crying out while being helped into his tunic. Despite the hourly applications of balm throughout the day, his muscles stiffened overnight, and Uncle Fëanáro had to tie Macalaurë's arm against his body with a long swatch of cloth torn from an old tunic to keep it from being jostled as we ride. He will share his father's horse with Maitimo because Uncle Fëanáro's horse is the biggest and strongest of all, an enormous, black snorting monster. It takes both Uncle Fëanáro and Maitimo to boost Macalaurë onto the horse's back without hurting him, but Maitimo springs up easily behind him. The horse snorts and stomps, but Maitimo tightens the reins until he knows that he will not get any more liberties with the master's son than he does with the master.

I knew how to ride before coming here, of course; once a week, I had gone to the bottom of the city for a horsemanship lesson with my Grandfather Finwë's horsemaster, a small, curt little man who would put me over low hurdles and made me ride hands-free, with my wrists crossed over my chest, posting and guiding my pony using the strength of my legs alone. Atar and I would ride through the city sometimes to visit with people, stopping at houses for tea and cake, where Atar could nod sympathetically at their troubles and I could sit-straight and stiff-like the perfect, obedient eldest son that he wants me to be. With only these short trips in the well-kept city streets to practice my horsemanship, I had never realized that the horsemaster's lessons were grounded in practical use, but in the forest, I am grateful that I know how to take a low jump over a fallen tree or that I can guide my pony with my legs only while holding branches out of my face. I had beamed proudly to see how impressed Maitimo and Uncle Fëanáro had looked, though the smile had withered a bit when I saw how much easier Tyelkormo's maneuvering was, and no one had thought to feel surprise at his competence.

As we ride, Maitimo quizzes us on sums and letters and natural lore, starting easy and going until only Tyelkormo answers. He lingers long today on the questions that all three of us can answer-even little Carnistir, who has just begun his letters-and before I realize it, we have ridden miles and it is time for our midmorning break. We stop in the clearing of a thick, green forest.

The first days of the journey were hard on me. Despite my regular lessons in horsemanship, I had never ridden so far for so long, and my backside and my spine had ached so badly that I was kept awake at night by it. I could have asked Maitimo for liniment to spread on my aching body, but my pride had made me suffer, sore and sleepless, while Tyelkormo lay in easy dreams. But now, I am growing accustomed to the long rides, and I swing from my pony, trying to imitate Tyelkormo's nonchalant ease.

Things are going remarkably well. The morning is growing warm, so we all swap our heavy cloaks for lighter ones, and Uncle Fëanáro passes around a flask of water from which we all sip. Aunt Nerdanel distributes bits of lembas biscuit that will keep our energy high throughout the day. Tyelkormo has run off into the forest and comes back with a massive, bristling caterpillar crawling across his palm. "Nelyo! Nelyo! Look!" He hops up and down in front of Maitimo, who shows an appropriate amount of enthusiasm for the prickly critter in his brother's hand. "Turko, that is magnificent," he says.

Carnistir tugs the leg Maitimo's breeches. "Nelyo? Nelyo? Nelyo?"

"Can we keep it?" Tyelkormo asks in a rush. "Can we watch it turn into a butterfly?"

"Nelyo?" Carnistir says.

"Actually, this species is-"

"Nelyo!?"

"What Carnistir?"

"I have to pee."

Maitimo sighs. "Carnistir, how many times have I asked you to be a little more dignified in your requests-"

"But Nelyo, I do have to pee!"

"You could try saying, 'Nelyo, would you mind taking me to relieve'-" Maitimo begins, reaching down to take Carnistir's hand, but already there is a dark wetness spreading across the front of his trousers, and he starts crying.

"I told you I had to pee!" he shouts, as Maitimo lifts him gingerly from the ground and carries him away to change his trousers.

Aunt Nerdanel appears behind me, carrying the water flask and offers it to me. "You will learn, Findekáno," she says, "to savor any moment of peace in this family because-the sooner you blink-the sooner it will be gone."

I start to smile, but then I remember the things I have heard her say about my parents and the things that I have heard my parents say about her and my uncle, and the effort seems too great. I sip water and watch her. She is making an effort, I can see, to be kind to me, smiling broader at me than she does with her sons, reaching out to smooth my hair with exaggerated gentleness. I push the water flask back into her hand. "Thank you," I say, and she straightens and takes the flask next to Macalaurë, patting my hair as she goes.

Tyelkormo is standing alone, talking loudly and pointedly to the caterpillar that has curled into a ball in his hand. "Nelyo says that you're going to be a moth, but I believe that you will become the most beautiful butterfly in the world!" There is a whimper of hurt in his voice at being so hastily deserted by his beloved older brother. He turns and stalks in my direction.

As he passes, without giving me so much as a glance, I hear myself say, "Tyelkormo?" and my heart leaps in surprise to hear his name in my voice.

He stops and spins to look at me, with haughty surprise in his eyes like one might have if his toilet suddenly called his name in the morning. "What?" he says.

"May I-may I see it?"

"See what?"

"Your caterpillar?"

"It's gone."

"But-" I can see his hand closed in a loose fist over the caterpillar. I can also see the anger in his face, the way his eyebrows scrunch together; I can hear his rapid breathing. Tempt not the Fëanárians into anger, Atar had said once, when I was very small, but I remember it now and would have shrunk away if not for the fact that Uncle Fëanáro has overheard the entire exchange and barks out, "Tyelkormo!" before I can turn away.

Tyelkormo's eyes widen, but he keeps his expression hard. "What?" he says defiantly.

"Show your cousin the caterpillar."

"It's gone, Atar!"

In two strides, Uncle Fëanáro is between us. Suddenly, golden Tyelkormo is not so imposing. My heart is pounding loudly enough that I cannot even hear the wind rustling the trees; I can feel my hands quivering at my sides, and I wish Maitimo would return with Carnistir in his arms and hoist me onto his other hip like he did this morning and carry me off to safety. I am sorry for wanting friendship with my golden cousin. I am sorry for not being deterred by the hurt anger in his face. But Uncle Fëanáro wants me to witness this; I can tell that by the way that he glances at me as he towers over Tyelkormo. He glances at Aunt Nerdanel too, who has paused with the flask in her hand beside Macalaurë, frightened surprise in her eyes.

"Do you think me a fool, Turkafinwë?" Uncle Fëanáro asks. He does not shout, but his voice terrifies me nonetheless. "Do you think I cannot see that you still hold something in your hand?"

The carefully maintained rage in Tyelkormo's face tightens until his lips begin to quiver, then tears are racing down his face. He sobs and hiccups, looks at me and back at his father, then spins and hurls the caterpillar toward a clump of weeds a few years away. I see its greenish body turning in the air before it falls into the leaves with a faint rustle. "Now it is gone!" he shouts, and Uncle Fëanáro seizes him by his arm so abruptly that he screams with terror.

"You have become a whining, unbearable brat, Turkafinwë! To show such disrespect to your cousin and your father, then to treat a living creature like it is but a pawn in your foolish games. You shall ride with me for the rest of the journey. I am ill with watching you show off on your pony like you are a hunter with twice your skill."

Tyelkormo is sobbing, and he seizes a fistful of Uncle Fëanáro's tunic like he wants to yank him into an embrace, like he craves the comfort a father can give him from such misery, but then he pushes roughly away and races into the forest, weeping with sobs so great that he is nearly gagged by them. More cries join his, and I look up to see Maitimo standing a feet yards away with Carnistir in his arms, writhing so hard that it takes both of Maitimo's arms to hold him and keep him from following his brother into the forest.

Uncle Fëanáro stoops in front of me. His eyes take me back to the dream-forge of two days ago, a place filled with steel, white with heat, so hot that no flesh can bear it. That is what I see in my uncle's eyes as he says nothing and roughly embraces me-the first time I can ever remember being held by him-and the feeling that surrounds me is so much like the heat of steel that my heart races, expecting pain that does not come, expecting my body to be raised in blisters wherever he touches me. I am not even aware of the tears on my cheeks until he raises his fingers to brush them away, leaving scorched tracks of dryness on my face. He kisses my forehead and, without a word, stands and strides away. I touch the place of a kiss, wincing as though expecting the tenderness of a burn, but the skin in smooth and unharmed and tingles faintly with the memory of his lips.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but that does not stop the tears that course anew down my face. I am lifted from my feet and into a warm embrace; I breathe in the smell that is becoming familiar, of dust and stone: my Aunt Nerdanel.

"A moment's peace," she whispers to me, her lips twitching into one of the easy smiles that I have only seen her share with her sons and her husband, the smile of a secret shared joke. I settle into an embrace that is both harder and softer than my own mother's: I feel the easy strength in her arms, from years in the forge, but her breasts are larger and cushion me with pillowy softness that comes from bearing four sons in quick succession. I bury my face in her shoulder and let my tears soak the tunic that smells of her scent mixed with my uncle's. When I peek out, I see my cousin Tyelkormo rustling in the edge of the forest, in the clump of weeds, looking for the caterpillar he has thrown away and fears he has killed.

~oOo~

What should have been a five-minute stop is dragged out by all of the drama. Aunt Nerdanel figures it best if everyone sits back, relaxes, and forgets their strife.

Uncle Fëanáro sits cross-legged beneath a tree, eating bits of dried fruit and holding laughing conversation with my aunt's apprentices, who stand before him like votaries before a Vala. I watch as Tyelkormo comes around the tree and settles into his father's lap. As if given a secret signal, the apprentices disperse, and I watch Uncle Fëanáro cuddle his third-born son, rubbing his back in slow, soothing circles and whispering something to him that makes his golden head bob in assent.

I feel a little bit of resentment that forgiveness should come so quickly for Tyelkormo, who has terrorized me since my arrival a week ago. I turn my back to them and wander over to where Macalaurë and Maitimo sit side by side, where Maitimo is again rubbing balm onto Macalaurë's poor shoulder.

"Findekáno? Káno?" The voice comes from behind me and uses the nickname that only Maitimo uses, yet it is not Maitimo. I turn and face Tyelkormo.

"I am sorry for treating you so poorly," he says. I appraise him; appraise his sincerity. He wears a dark green the color of pine; just beneath the short sleeve on his right arm is a ring of grayish bruises, a perverse armlet given to him by his father's notorious temper. Against his vibrant raiment, his hair looks exceptionally bright, and his blue eyes are wide and repentant. I feel a twinge of envy that one who was supposed to be just like me should turn out to be so beautiful. In front of his chest, his hands are clasped in a loose ball, like he is ready to kneel in casual prayer, but he lets them fall apart and towards me. The bristly beast that started all the discontent crawls across his palm.

"I found him. I want you to have him. To keep him," he says.

"But-I would be sad. He would be sad. To take him away from his home."

My voice breaks on the word "home," and something flickers in Tyelkormo's eyes. Could it be empathy? Does the proudest of the Fëanárians know how to place himself behind the eyes of another?

"They have no families, Káno," he says with patience that is almost delicate. "They live alone until they become butterflies, then they fly alone always until they find their mate. You would not deprive him." He moves his cupped hands in my direction, and the sudden motion makes the caterpillar wrap himself into a defensive little ball that makes my insides twist with painful sympathy.

"But he would miss the forest. He would miss the trees," I say. "I would wish that he be left here."

Tyelkormo draws his hands back into his chest, clasping the caterpillar once more. He sighs. "You are right, Káno," he says. He walks to the edge of the forest and nimbly, using only one hand, shimmies into a tree. In his green cloak and tunic, he fades easily into the branches, and when he comes down a minute later, he can use both hands, for they are empty. He runs into the arms of his father but not before turning to give me a smile.

He is most beautiful when he smiles.

~oOo~

We ride again. Tyelkormo upholds his punishment and rides with my uncle, looking sad and uncomfortable, a child too large to be forced to ride with a parent.

I wait until we stop for the midday meal, in the middle of a plain that is washed with Laurelin's brightness but does not steam with heat like the midday light in Valinor. Uncle Fëanáro is heating a hunter's stew that he has made hastily from bits of meat and vegetables left over from previous suppers. Tyelkormo sits a few yards away, wrapped in his cloak and staring at the ground, scratching letters in the dust with a twig. I approach the heat of the campfire-or is it Uncle Fëanáro?-and wait patiently for him to turn.

"Uncle Fëanáro?"

If he is startled by my presence so near to him, his voice and face betray nothing. "Yes, Findekáno?" he says.

"I would like to pardon my cousin from his punishment."

Tyelkormo looks up from the ground, and his eyes are shocked and very blue.

Uncle Fëanáro speaks slowly and carefully. "It is not your place to pardon him, little one, for I am his father, and as such, it is my right to prescribe punishment as I see fit."

Many times I have seen my own father at court; my uncles and grandfather, too, I have watched, and I know the gracious manners that one must adopt in order to be persuasive. Hard words deflect from a hardened heart, my Uncle Arafinwë told me once. A hardened heart must first be soaked in the sweetest wine.

I incline my head and lower my eyes. "Such is your place, Uncle, but I simply wish you to know that his forgiveness is mine to give, and I have given it. His pardon, of course, remains your prerogative."

Uncle Fëanáro's eyes widen at my words. So do Tyelkormo's. There is no mistaking, in that moment-despite the differently colored hair and the blue in Tyelkormo's eyes-that they are father and son.

"You would release him then?"

"Yes."

He cautions me. "A release cannot be rescinded, Findekáno. And a forgiven offense is not remembered, and even should one of its like occur again, we shall speak of it not."

"I know."

Uncle Fëanáro's voice is slightly astonished, as though he cannot believe the words he is saying. "Then Tyelkormo may get his pony. I release him from his punishment."

Tyelkormo gasps and leaps to his feet to run to his pony, which has been leashed to Uncle Fëanáro's saddle, mounts, and begins trotting in a big circle around the meadow.

Uncle Fëanáro smiles sadly after him before looking at me. "He would not thank you in words, my brother-son, but there is gratitude in his heart."

I say, "I know."

~oOo~

The afternoon is spent riding through a tight forest with low-lying branches that keep trying to slap my face. Insects buzz in dizzying little orbits around our heads. The air is thick with summer warmth, and I want to shed my cloak, but to do so would leave my arms susceptible to the biting branches. I tail closely behind Maitimo and Macalaurë, who-because they are bigger than I am-struggle more with the scratching, clawing branches and clear an easy path for me.

"Vairë's needles, these branches chap my backside!" Macalaurë hisses to Maitimo. The only one close enough to overhear is me, and when Maitimo casts an alarmed look back over his shoulder, I look quickly away and pretend not to have heard.

"Perhaps we shall put balm on your backside as well then, little brother," Maitimo says. "I will leave that foul duty to Atar. Although, were Vingarië in our company, perhaps she would like to do it."

"Oh hush, Nelyo! Unlike you, I keep my clothes on when I'm with a maiden."

Another wary look is shot at me; I concentrate on the light coming through the trees and even rumple my forehead to heighten the effect of concentration. "You haven't had opportunity to do otherwise," Maitimo whispers.

"I could have would I had wanted it."

"Sure. Like you didn't want it."

"Perhaps I did, but I have superior morals, Nelyo. 'Walking Annawendë to her cottage' ... tucking her into bed with you was probably more like it!"

"Quiet, Macalaurë. I have done no such thing."

"You haven't shown her how to do the sword-swallowing trick?"

"Quiet, Macalaurë!"

"You haven't let her hold your princely scepter?"

"I ought to push you off this horse and leave you!"

Macalaurë is laughing, and I wonder why so much fun in this family seems to be centered on feigning anger and threatening harm to each other. "You haven't shown her your Fëanárian ability to delve for treasure in dark places?"

"Macalaurë! I swear!"

The path widens, and Aunt Nerdanel canters up beside us. "Nelyo, really, must you abuse Macalaurë in his injured state?" she scolds and rides past to join Uncle Fëanáro at the front.

Maitimo's lower jaw flaps in indignation, and once she has passed, Macalaurë laughs and says, "Yes, Nelyo, be kind to me in my injured state."

"I am glad, Macalaurë, that you are well enough to banter me again. Perhaps you are also well enough to be cast into the lake tonight and to sleep alone in your own bedroll?"

"Sorry, Nelyo. I am well enough to banter you but well enough for neither of those other things," Macalaurë says with exaggerated regret.

I imagine myself on the return journey home, teasing my cousins with the same ease as they tease each other, mocking Maitimo's skill with weapons and in the forge, sharing a horse with one of them as I shared Maitimo's on the day that he had brought me from Tirion and unwound my hair with his warm, nimble fingers. Theirs is the kind of family that others watch with envy at festivals, too at ease with each other to be anything but showing off, flaunting comradeship that is unattainable to everyone else.

~oOo~

We stop early that day, well before the Mingling of the Lights, in a verdant meadow dotted with waving fronds of yellow flowers. The air between the brothers quivers with excitement, even Macalaurë, who has grown wearied again by the long, taxing ride. Uncle Fëanáro and Maitimo set up the tent with haste, and Macalaurë urges us little ones-my two little cousins and me-to hasten currying and watering the horses.

Carnistir is sleepy and pouting; now is the time that he usually spends napping, leaning against Uncle Fëanáro, but Tyelkormo nudges him and tells him to hush. "We are going swimming, Carnistir. Don't be stupid."

Carnistir lets out a wail and then is quiet.

Aunt Nerdanel and Annawendë go with Macalaurë (who is forbidden from swimming until his wound heals and his shoulder loosens enough to use competently) down a path to the lake. Maitimo and Uncle Fëanáro strip to a single tunic and don old trousers torn at the cuffs and knees. We are subjected to the same and led barefoot and shivering to the edge of the meadow and into the forest. The male apprentices accompany us, whooping with eagerness, skipping and swinging on the tree branches, tumbling down the faint path to the lake they have been promised. Tyelkormo and Carnistir hold their brother's and father's hand, respectively, walking comfortably through the dead leaves that cover the forest floor, but the little twigs nip at my feet, and I have to struggle to keep from limping when Maitimo and Uncle Fëanáro are looking. We are walking up a slight incline, and the effort tugs at my legs already tired from the long ride.

Beyond a final thick stand of underbrush, I can see Laurelin's light, tiny squares and triangles of brilliance making halos of iridescence around the green leaves. I push the branches out of my face-eager for the light and soft ground-step into a clearing, and recoil when I realize that the world falls away in front of me.

I backpedal until I bump Maitimo and he laughs. "No fear, little one. You will not fall."

Holding his hand, I edge closer to the cliff and peer beyond the nothingness and at what lies below. Holding his other hand, loosely, Tyelkormo also looks with greater confidence, standing so close that his toes curl over the edge of the rock. Beneath us, filling our sights, is an expanse of cobalt water, winking gold in the afternoon light. At one side is a beige strip of beach, made tiny by distance, and I can see my aunt and cousin assembling there with Annawendë. Behind the beach, there is almost as sheer a rise of rock as the one upon which we stand, and I can glean tiny steps carved into the stone.

The apprentices waste no time in peeling off their clothes and running, one by one, to leap into the nothingness beyond the cliff's edge, pulling their knees to their chests and falling to the lake below like rocks, their eager cries diminishing as they fall and dying with the cymbal-crash of their bodies hitting the water. I realize suddenly that I will be expected to do the same and terror twists my gut until I can feel my noontime meal of hunter's stew burning in the back of my throat.

"No!" I cry, and press into Maitimo's thigh, hiding the shameful tears on my face from my cousins, gulping in the dusty, sweaty smell of his trousers. My tears soak the worn cloth in a matter of seconds. A thousand bad things I imagine. I imagine falling onto a rock unknown from times before. I imagine a gust of wind sending my small body into the cliffside. I imagine my spirit forgetting to jump with my body, a dissected creature dying as I fall.

He crouches beside me. "Káno, Káno, you will be fine. I will jump first to catch you, and Atar will not let you become hurt. Káno, hush, my little one, all is well. All is well."

He strokes my hair and I sob against his shoulder. "No! No!" I want to plug up the tears, for I can feel the heavy stares of Tyelkormo and Uncle Fëanáro on my back and know that they do not look favorably upon my weakness, but pride cannot save one's body from destruction, and so I cling to Maitimo and he kisses the tears from my cheeks and holds me away.

"I believe that there is valor hidden in your heart, Káno, and I have faith that you will find joy-not fear-would you trust your uncle and me, for we would lay aside our own lives before we would ever allow harm to come to yours."

Never has anyone made such a confession to me. I back away and look at him, hiccupping as stray tears trickle still down my face.

"If he wishes not to jump," says Uncle Fëanáro from behind me, "then I shall take him to the beach with your mother, Nelyo."

Maitimo stands but not before kissing my forehead and whispering in my ear, "I have faith in you, Káno. I will see you in the water."

He walks to the edge and peers below. I want to grab the back of his trousers and draw him back to me-suddenly fear of my own bodily harm is replaced my fear for his-but he turns and comes back, stripping off his tunic and his trousers until he stands naked in the golden light of Laurelin, the breeze rippling his red hair back from his face.

I look away, at the blue sky beyond the nothingness before us, for my parents instructed me never to look upon an adult in nakedness, and Maitimo is nearly an adult, so to be safe, I treat him as such. Apparently the eccentricity of the Fëanárians includes a casual regard for nudity, for they all strip without shame and with no attempts to hide themselves, even my aunt and uncle. My parents do not abhor familiar eyes on their flesh but, nonetheless, they make attempts to avoid it and certainly they would not undress so casually in front of their own students, if they had them.

But their bodies are not so perfect as my cousin's, and when his back turns to me and he walks to the cliff's edge, I allow myself to look at him. His tall form bisects the blue nothingness beyond the cliff, his taut muscles and straight shoulders betraying no apprehension, and my heart pounds as I watch him rise onto his toes and spring away from the rock, falling headfirst toward the water below.

Tyelkormo and Carnistir rush to the edge to watch him fall, but I cringe back towards the forest and count my heartbeats during his fall. One-two-three. Splash. I hear the apprentices whoop and understand that he has landed safely.

Uncle Fëanáro undresses my cousins, who are prancing in their eagerness to fall through that nothingness. Carnistir bites his father a half-dozen times on the neck before he is finally ordered to stop. Tyelkormo springs on the balls of his feet, chirping like a baby bird ready for its first flight from the nest.

"Tyelkormo first," Uncle Fëanáro says and calls down to Maitimo, "Ready?"

A faint cry answers, and Uncle Fëanáro backs away from the edge and cradles Tyelkormo in his arms like a little baby, only face down. He swings him. "One," he says, and Tyelkormo begins to count along with him. Swing. "Two." Swing. "Three." Swing and release-and Tyelkormo flies into the blue nothingness like a knife tossed at a target, keening with joy, his feet turning over his body as he falls beneath the edge of the cliff and out of sight.

Carnistir runs to the edge and crouches there, watching his brother fall. There is a subdued splash-more a ripple-and I hear Tyelkormo yelling and laughing. Carnistir stands and races to be cradled in his father's arms.

"One." Swing.

Carnistir doesn't count along. He squirms. "I have to pee," he says.

"You can pee in the lake," Uncle Fëanáro tells him and gets ready to swing him a second time.

"Last time I peed in the lake, Nelyo yelled at me!"

"That's because you peed on Nelyo. You have to swim away a bit before you do it." Uncle Fëanáro draws him back, but Carnistir chomps hard on his arm until he cries out, "Ai!"

"Please, Atar! I have to pee now!"

Uncle Fëanáro sets him down. "For love of Eru," he mutters and leads his youngest son into the bushes by the path. They reappear a few moments later, and Uncle Fëanáro cradles him again. "One."

"No, wait! I have to pee!"

"Carnistir! You just went!"

"I have to go again."

"That's impossible."

"Then I'm afraid."

"Why are you afraid? You did this last year."

"I know."

"So what could you possibly fear?"

"Nothing. But I do."

Uncle Fëanáro sighs. He kneels and cuddles Carnistir. "Carnistir, I love you. I will protect you, as will your brother. You have nothing to fear."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Fine. I'm ready then."

"You don't have to pee?" Uncle Fëanáro teases.

"Maybe." A giggle. "No."

Uncle Fëanáro calls down to Maitimo, who faintly answers. He swings his youngest son three times and releases him into space.

Carnistir lets out a high-pitched screech as he falls. His body curls into a ball in the air before disappearing from view. I hear a lot of laughter following the ripple of his landing, and Uncle Fëanáro turns to me.

"Findekáno?"

"I believe that there is valor hidden in your heart, Káno."

Is there, I wonder? I look at Uncle Fëanáro, who does not believe that there is. He believes that I will answer his unasked question with a request to return to lower ground, to sit on the beach beside my aunt, a place that's safe enough even for my injured cousin. I can see in his eyes that he is only making an attempt for the benefit of Maitimo and possibly his wife, forcing his face into rigid patience when his eyes crackle with eagerness to fly off of that cliff too.

Is there valor hidden in my heart?

I hold my arms out to my uncle. He stands and ponders me for a moment, then stoops and tugs my tunic over my head. I try to give myself the dignity of removing my own trousers, but my hands are shaking too hard and find themselves clutching Uncle Fëanáro's shoulders as he pushes my trousers from my waist with surprising gentleness. Then I am lifted into the air and held in his arms with my face next to his to see the world as it looks from the place of one so tall and mighty. His body so close to mine exudes energy that makes me feel as though I am flushed with fever, only it does not drain me but rather makes every bit of my being quiver with anticipation and the belief in possibility. I can feel my heart pounding desperately inside my chest; pressed so near to him, he feels it too and stops just short of the edge, with a sliver of sapphire water just visible to me, and strokes my hair. "Breathe, Findekáno," he says, and I realize that part of my exhilarating lightheadedness comes from holding my breath.

I gasp for air, and he holds me while I relish the cool air filling my lungs as I once savored the rich meals prepared for me in Tirion. There are tears on my face; I am terrified, but I am going to fly off of this cliff and find the valor in my heart.

He lowers my body and cradles me like he did my cousins. His hands are strong and fearless, hot on my shivering flesh. He swings me once, and the lake below comes into view. I close my eyes and bite my lip but the whimper escapes anyway, and I do not see the water the second or third time he swings me, and I open my eyes just as I feel his hands release me.

For a moment, I am sure that I am flying like the great Eagles of Manwë, for my body floats in the air parallel to the ground, and the lake stretches beneath me like a length of spangled blue silk, and I feel that, with my arms outstretched like a bird, I might lie there forever as easily as I might lie in my bed. But then gravity seizes me, and with the force of an agile fist closed upon a fly in midair, I am dragged toward the water, my stomach pressing against my spine and rising into my throat. The wind roars in my ears and stuffs itself so hard into my throat that I cannot breathe-I am drowning in air-and the only reason I know that I am screaming is because I can feel my voice buzzing in my throat.

As the water races towards me, I shut my eyes, dreading the slap of it against my skin, but right as my knees kiss the surface, warm hands close around my chest and break my fall, and I plunk into the water with all of the harmlessness of a cherry dropped into a glass of lemonade. For a second, my face is submerged and water roars in my ears, but as quickly as I drop, Maitimo lifts me up again, coughing and spluttering.

"Careful, little one," he says, patting my back as I spit out a mouthful of water. "Don't survive the fall only to drown!" He holds me close and wipes the water from my eyes, and his voice is proud.

I look around me. Not far away, Vorondil holds a struggling Carnistir. Tyelkormo is paddling in small circles around Maitimo, as confident and easy in his movements as a fish. The other two apprentices are shouting and splashing each other; Vorondil watches them enviously, and Maitimo shifts me to his side so that he can hold out his other arm for Carnistir.

Carnistir wriggles from Vorondil to Maitimo. "Atar?" he says, looking even tinier with his coarse hair slicked to his head.

"He'll be down in a moment. Patience little one."

I wonder how Maitimo can hold us both and still keep his head so easily afloat. I can feel his legs reeling beneath us, but his body barely bobs, and he might have been standing securely on the ground. The water is deep beneath us, icy around my feet like a yawning mouth. "Don't tire yourself," Maitimo calls to Tyelkormo, who has grown bold and paddled away from the group. I am satisfied to notice that, soaked, Tyelkormo's hair is almost dark enough to be mistaken for brown. As my heartbeat slows, I realize that the water around us is freezing, and I start to shiver.

Opposite me, Carnistir's lips quiver; his normally flushed skin is sepulchral. His thick eyelashes are stuck together in dark spikes. He turns into Maitimo's neck and mews, "Atar."

"He'll be here in a moment, little one," Maitimo reassures him, and holds us both tighter to share in his warmth. "See?"

We both crane our necks to look back up at the cliff in time to see uncle Fëanáro launch himself into empty space, hovering for a long moment, a dark silhouette against a bright sky, then turn in midair and fall twisting, headfirst toward the water. He slips beneath the surface with barely a ripple.

Carnistir is kicking and scrabbling to be free of Maitimo's grip, but Uncle Fëanáro doesn't surface for nearly a minute. When he does, he comes up beneath Tyelkormo, who is swimming far away from the group now and who shrieks with terrified delight to be lifted suddenly into the warm summer air above the water. "What business do you have way out here, little one?" Uncle Fëanáro scolds lightly and plunks Tyelkormo back into the water and swims with him back to the group.

~oOo~

The afternoon unwinds after that, languid and timeless. The water is cold but I grow accustomed to it, and Maitimo teaches me to swim with his hands lightly beneath my body, keeping me from sinking, until I hear him laughing and realize that I am swimming on my own and he is no longer holding me, floating close enough to catch me should I sink but far enough that he is not tempted into needless assistance.

"You're a natural, Káno!" he exclaims, and I am so excited that my body clenches into a ball like a stone and he has to lurch forward to keep me from falling to the bottom. "Don't do that, now, little one! Remember, keep your body spread thin across the surface."

"Thin across the surface," I repeat and paddle away.

Tyelkormo is floating behind me, glaring at me, but when I meet his eyes, he ducks beneath the water and swims to his father. His affection, I see, is short-lived.

Eventually, the golden light begins to wane and we swim for the shore, where Aunt Nerdanel meets us at the water's edge with heavy cloaks and blankets. Maitimo hastily wraps himself, and I notice that he and Annawendë are making a point not to notice each other. Macalaurë is stretched out on a blanket in the sand, his arm unbound from his body and his eyes heavy with sleep. Maitimo lies down beside him-a blanket wrapped around his waist and a cloak spread over his shoulders-and presses his cold, wet cheek to Macalaurë's.

"Ai! Nelyo!" Macalaurë sits up, knocking a laughing Maitimo aside.

"I just thought you might like to know how the water was."

Maitimo lies back on the blanket beside Macalaurë, letting Laurelin's dying light dry his body. I sit beside him and he loops an arm around me and pulls me close.

Tyelkormo walks by and glares at me, then plops down hard in Macalaurë's lap. "Ai! Ilúvatar in Eä! First cold water on my face, then Tyelkormo sits on my balls-"

"Macalaurë!" Aunt Nerdanel scolds. Annawendë, sitting beside her, giggles, and Macalaurë blushes and ducks his head as though he has forgotten her presence there. "Do not mind his poor manners, Annawendë," my aunt says. "There are some injuries that make even the noblest of men-like my Macalaurë-forget the presence of a lady. We get our revenge when we scream at our husbands during childbirth."

"I hope to one day have my revenge," Annawendë says, and now it is Maitimo's turn to blush and exchange quick little glances with Macalaurë.

~oOo~

Back at the camp, the night is settling over the land and we shiver so hard that it is hard to pull on our clothes. Maitimo starts a roaring campfire and we sit around it, crushed close to each other to share the warmth of our bodies, cuddling two and three under a single cloak.

My stomach is like a hollow pit in the center of my body, and even the raw potatoes that Aunt Nerdanel buries in the embers around the fire look good enough to crunch into cold. Uncle Fëanáro has disappeared in the direction of the lake to retrieve our abandoned clothes, and he returns with not only our tunics and trousers draped over his arm but five silvery fish wrapped in a net.

Aunt Eärwen is Telerin and close friends with my mother, so we often go with her to Alqualondë and eat fish and crabs at the table of Eärwen's father Olwë, the High King of the Teleri. I am surprised to find other Noldor who enjoy such delights, but Maitimo explains to me, as we unpack the plates and cutlery, that his parents have traveled all over Aman and have learned to enjoy many foods typically shunned by the Noldor. The fish, fried over the flames until it is hot and flaky, is the best thing that I have eaten through the entire trip, and I gladly accept seconds when my aunt offers them. "It seems we have found another who can eat his weight in food," Uncle Fëanáro teases.

After supper, Macalaurë proclaims his arm well enough to undertake some light harping. "That is," he says, "if anyone wishes to listen?" We hasten to clear the dishes and settle again around the fire.

With my belly full, exhaustion quickly overtakes me. Tyelkormo and I cuddle up to each of Maitimo's sides, looking at each other across his chest. I wait for more of the jealous glares he gave me earlier, but Tyelkormo smiles at me as his eyes fall shut, and I am left adrift in confusion about his feelings. Maitimo covers each of us with his cloak, and his body warms mine. I can hear the slow rhythm of his breathing, like the sough of the waves on the sand earlier, and beneath that, his heart beating. I try to remember being held like this by my father when Grandfather Finwë's musicians perform after our weekly suppers in his palace and wait for the familiar stab of homesickness, but all I feel is sleepy contentment and the warmth of Maitimo's chest against my cheek.

My body feels like it is still adrift in the lake, being gently tossed by the waves. Macalaurë's song rises and falls like the water, for it is a hymn to the cool waters of Arda that give us sustenance and joy. I can hear no hesitation in the notes played by the hand on his injured side, and I feel myself being borne to sleep on a rain of notes slowly filling a lake as smooth as glass.

Tyelkormo

I always smell Formenos hours before we pass its gates. The reek of civilization tickles my nose: the tamed scent of crops and cut wood underscoring the pungent odor of the forges; the smell of Elven bodies. I am delighted at the thought of our imminent arrival and a little disappointed too, like encountering a mouthful of sand in the dregs of sweet wine while picnicking on the beach. I love the wilds of our country but also I love Formenos, which is different than Tirion, more haphazard and relaxed. Also, in Formenos, our lessons extend beyond craft and lore-to archery, tracking, horsemanship, sword-fighting-and every year, I find that the anticipation of testing my body against those of my brothers makes me lean forward in the saddle and urge my pony faster.

Not like I expect to beat any of them except Carnistir-especially Nelyo, who is tall and strong and very skilled in athletics-but I relish in the knowledge that, by the summer's end, they have to work harder to better me than they do at the summer's beginning. And, this year, I have Findekáno-or Káno, whatever his name is-to challenge, and he is almost my age, so defeating him will be a prouder moment than besting Carnistir and should better prepare me to overtake Macalaurë.

Proud only in theory, however. I look at Findekáno, who is riding beside me, giving me those careful glances that tend to annoy me like he wants to say something but does not. He is as cold as wet grass between your toes in the morning, yet when I shun his rare affections, he has the audacity to act hurt. I realize that he didn't want to leave his family-any more than we wanted him to join ours-and I sympathize, feeling a pang of sick pain whenever I think of leaving Atar, Amil, and my brothers for a whole summer, but he does not have to inflict his misery further upon us. And he is very small, which annoys me too, mainly because I know it is caused not by misfortune but by a life of luxury that does not require him to engage in sport much less labor. My brothers and I practice both. Our bodies are hard with muscle from lifting heavy loads of laundry, from dragging reluctant horses from the pasture, from scrubbing the floors of the forge and picking basket after basket of vegetables, strength that we hone further whenever we ride or wrestle or race through the woods in pursuit of quarry. But Findekáno has never used a bow and does not even own a knife, and when his smooth hands touch me, I am repulsed as one might be by the engorged belly of a snake.

Nelyo intends to instruct us together in letters and lore, which enrages me further because, though we are close in age, I am more learned than Findekáno. He fumbles the arithmetic questions with which Nelyo drills us on the trail and his voice quavers when he reads and I have never seen him draw any letters, so I am left to assume that he is shamed by them, for how else can one avoid writing words for more than a week, even just to inscribe one's name in the wet sand by the lake for fun? And, before the arrival of Findekáno, Atar had been making vague hints that I might be permitted a few lessons in the forge this summer, and I certainly don't wish to be denied this so that I might spend my afternoons resetting his broken jewelry alongside Findekáno, a task I have been doing for three years and had grown bored of after the first week.

He is still giving me those tight little glances of his. He tries to ride with tall confidence but his bony knees stick out at awkward angles from his saddle, betraying his lack of skill. I sigh and nudge my pony into a canter, to ride alongside Atar.

"Atar!" I say, to make conversation as a way of excusing my rudeness to my cousin. (Why Atar is so unsympathetic to my feelings when I know that he despises Findekáno's father is puzzling.) "We're almost there, aren't we?"

"About an hour, little one," he says wearily. He is weary not of riding but of Carnistir, who has been riding with him for a week now and has been crying intermittently for the last three days of it. He is crying now, like a baby much younger than four years. Carnistir is weird-we all know that-and he is afflicted with very vivid and sometimes scary dreams, and they always seem to get worse as we near Formenos. Carnistir loves Formenos almost as much as I do, yet he dreams badly inside the dark walls of our father's second house. Atar and Amil even consulted healers in Lórien about my baby brother, and they said that his night terrors were likely caused by changes in climate. For the past two summers, I have had to share a bedroom with Carnistir because Formenos is very cold at night and Atar does not wish to light many fireplaces.

This year, I shall share with Findekáno, which is relief after being awakened several times a week by Carnistir's senseless howling, and Carnistir shall sleep on a cot in the sitting room of Atar and Amil's suite. A few times over the past week, Amil has tucked me into bed with Findekáno, and he is much easier to tolerate asleep than awake. He does not kick, and although he whimpers in his sleep sometimes, at least he doesn't scream.

"Carnistir," Atar pleads to my little brother, who is still wailing plaintively, "a thousand times I have told you that such visions are only in your imagination. Look around you! There is no darkness! Laurelin is radiant and it is a beautiful day. Won't you stop crying?" Carnistir hiccups and sobs louder. He is facing backwards on the front of Atar's saddle, pressing his face into Atar's chest. Atar takes hold of him by the top of his head and turns him to face me. "Look at Tyelkormo!" he says, and I smile at Carnistir, who stops crying and suffices to grimace at me while tears race down his cheeks. "See what fun he is having? We are almost to Formenos!"

Carnistir whimpers one last time and holds his arms out to me. "I want to ride with Turko!"

My baby brother prefers our father to everyone, even Amil. Amil claims it is because Carnistir was born with teeth so Atar mostly nursed him from a bottle to give Amil a reprieve from his teeth. "He thinks Atar is his mother and I am his father," she always jokes and sighs whenever Carnistir runs to first to Atar where a normal child would go to his mother. So in the rare instances when he leans away from Atar and holds his hands out to me, I feel gloating pride, the warm glow of being loved enough that someone little and helpless like Carnistir would pick me first to hold and protect him.

Atar cocks an eyebrow at me, silently asking me if I mind sharing a mount with my squirmy, temperamental little brother. "I don't mind," I say quickly. I love being big enough to be trusted to make my own choices.

We pull to the side of the trail so that the others may pass while we switch Carnistir between horses. "Now if we do this," Atar warns him, "I don't want to hear you whining in five minutes that you want to be back with me, and you shall ride the rest of the way to Formenos with your brother. Do you accept this?"

Carnistir nods, and Atar dismounts and lifts him from his horse and onto my pony, who stomps in protest of the extra weight but doesn't dare shift away from the imposing Fëanáro.

"Hold him tightly, now," he tells me, putting my hand around Carnistir's waist. "And no fast riding or silly tricks. And stay close to me or your mother or Nelyo. No wandering off on your own."

About all of these things Atar has to warn me because I do tend to be a little adventurous at times, like when I was riding without my hands the other day when a rabbit leaped out and spooked my pony. I would have fallen if Macalaurë hadn't grabbed her reins in time, and he fell and hurt his shoulder quite badly.

(No one knows that I was riding without hands but Macalaurë, and he didn't tell Atar so I didn't find it necessary to mention it either, although I was kept awake half the night thinking about the sticky blood on his shoulder and the way he cried when Atar poked the needle into it.)

Atar canters back to the front of the line; either he or Amil lead us always; even Nelyo is not yet trusted to the task. I fall back into line and find myself again beside Findekáno.

He is looking at me again, so I turn and give him a quick smile, hoping that he'll say whatever is on his mind that makes him keep looking at me, but he only smiles back, turns to face forward again, and stares at the trail. I try to wipe the remnants of tears from Carnistir's round, ruddy cheeks with the edge of my cloak, but he wriggles and bites at my fingers until I stop. "Turko, Turko!" he says, and I wish that he would stop calling me that-and silently curse Nelyo for starting him in the habit-with his head rolling on my chest like a ball. I say, a bit snippier than I intended, "What?"

He points to Findekáno. "Káno. Káno is so pretty."

Little children say the most embarrassing things at times. Findekáno turns and gives me a nervous look, his eyes shifting from my face to Carnistir's so quickly that I expect he is getting dizzy. "Boys aren't pretty, Carnistir," I say with an embarrassed laugh. "Girls and horses and flowers are pretty."

"Not Káno the boy, stupid!" he says, and I have to bite my lip hard to keep from chastising him; after all, I have no right because he learned the word from me. "Káno the color."

I grit my teeth. Carnistir labels people as colors. I am green, he tells me. Atar is clear and bright. Amil is pinkish-clear and bright, but not as bright as Atar. Nelyo is silver-blue, and Macalaurë is blue-gray. Apparently he has added Findekáno to his collection and affixed him with a blue label.

"He calls people as colors," I explain to Findekáno to hide my embarrassment. "Little brothers are kind of dumb sometimes."

"I'm getting a little brother soon," he tells me. His voice is high and watery, annoying, like thinned paint.

"I know. Well, good luck with that. Hopefully he won't call people after colors."

I try to sound dismissive, to end the conversation, but Findekáno keeps going in his thin, pinched voice that always sounds like he has something stuffed up his nose. "Amil says that she thinks he will be very wise."

"Mmhmm. Yeah, my Amil always thought Carnistir would be strange, and he is."

"What did she think you'd be, Tyelkormo?"

I turn, startled: His words, his inflections, even the way he says my name remind me of Nelyo. My stomach twists bitterly; how many times have I gone to cuddle with Nelyo in the last week and found my place taken by this sad wisp of a child, who now had stolen even my eldest brother's beautiful voice?

"Brave. Strong." I hate how my voice sounds choked, like there is something lodged in my throat. "She thought I'd love nature. And I do."

"Yes, my mother said that I'd be courageous and noble, but I'm neither of these things."

I realize that decorum would have me argue him over this point, but I couldn't find evidence of courage or nobility in him if I wanted to. Nelyo would find something. He'd use the fact that Findekáno consented to be tossed off a cliff by Atar as evidence of courage, but it is a passive act to be thrown and a courageous one to jump of your own volition. I am not yet allowed to jump or I would have.

Instead, I say, "Well, mothers can be wrong too, I guess," and Findekáno looks down and nods sadly.

I want to feel sympathy for him. After all, Carnistir's fears awaken my urge to be a big brother, to take him in my arms and hold him, wanting to absorb his pain like a sponge. But Findekáno's rounded shoulders and shameful eyes bright with tears irritate me.

Carnistir's head is tipped back against my shoulder and he is looking up into my face. His black hair tickles my neck and distracts me until I stop brooding about Findekáno. "What, Carnistir?" I say, and he twists until his arms can wrap around me, nearly unseating both of us in the process, nuzzles my neck, and says, "I love you Turko don't be mean," in a whispered rush like a furtive summer breeze darting through the trees.

~oOo~

The last half-hour we ride fast, pushing even the carthorses to their limits, devouring the last miles of plain between Formenos and us in hasty strides.

The city soon comes into view, a black pile of stones among the hills. I squint until I can see the biggest stone that sits cast away from the pile, so close to the base of the largest hill that it looks as though it sprouted from the mounded earth behind it. That is our house, built of the icy black stone that grows from the ground in Formenos in the same way that trees grow in Tirion. Carnistir is clapping his hands gleefully and the only tears on his cheeks now come from him staring unblinking at the city on the horizon while the cold wind slaps at his face.

Gone is the china-blue sky of Tirion. Here, the clouds roll across the sky in menacing gray piles. When the clouds do crack, the sky reveals vivid fragments of blue the electric color of lightning, so beautiful that I cannot look away until more clouds have poured across it to fill the gap with roiling charcoal. I asked Atar once why the sky was bluer beneath the clouds and he told me that the color was the same but that the gray clouds made me appreciate what I took for granted in Tirion. He says that's why he loves Formenos, because every moment reminds him that it is a gift to be alive.

When we are close enough to the city that I can see the light between the houses, three figures ride out from the gates, galloping across the rocky plain to meet us. Across their shoulders they carry three different standards; they are the three lords of Formenos, come to meet us, as always, and I watch Atar and Amil's horses break from our group, urged into gallops to meet the lords while Nelyo herds the rest of us toward the gate.

Atar's eyes do not go dangerously bright nor is his voice tight in his throat when he meets the lords from Formenos like when he meets the lords in Tirion. When we get closer, I see that they have stopped upon converging, and it is Atar's laughter that I hear first, then the voices of the lords, their accents hard like plunking stones into water. "We were concerned when you did not arrive yesterday evening," one of them says. He carries a golden banner with a serpent twisting around a dagger, sewn in glimmering red thread.

"We were waylaid a day when Macalaurë-my second eldest-injured himself while attempting heroics. Otherwise, we were blessed with fair passage," Atar replies. After the voices of the lord, his accent winds gently into the air between them like a strain of music.

"His injuries are not serious, I hope?" says the same lord.

"We shall seek the healing counsels of your excellent sister, but no, I believe that he shall live to sing in the halls of Alqualondë and give me at least two grandchildren." Atar gives a quick smile to Macalaurë, still riding in front of Nelyo, blushing and looking down at his unbound hand. "At the least, he saved my son Tyelkormo from harm."

Now it is my turn to blush.

The lords lead us to our house. Like our home in Tirion, it stands outside the city gates, though by only a short ride. Our Formenos home is smaller than our home in Tirion, more compact. It is three stories tall with an attic on top that is soaring-high in some places and so low in others that even I have to stoop over to stand there, constructed in a neat square with a courtyard in the middle and no wings flying off at crazy angles. It is tradition for the lords to meet us on the plain and escort us to our house, which has already been opened and airing for the past week. There is bustle already at our arrival, making it easy to believe that our family can go nowhere without noise and commotion.

The wife of the lord who carries the crimson banner edged with pine green gets busy drawing us hot baths while the two sons of the aforementioned lord with the golden banner help us take the horses to the stable, and dry and curry them. I kick at the one son when he reaches up to help me dismount-I am more than capable of doing such an elementary task for myself-and he helps Carnistir instead. The wife of the lord with the violet banner stoops to admire my little brother, but he sets off shrieking to push between Atar's knees and bury his face against the inside of Atar's leg.

"He means no offense. He's just weird," I assure her, but she has already taken to admiring Findekáno, who is watching the commotion with wide apprehensive eyes.

"This is your cousin?" she asks me, and I just nod and go to find Nelyo.

Nelyo is acting gracious to the children of the lords, which doesn't surprise me, taking the hands of the sons in his and kissing the cheeks of the daughters. The daughters, especially, stand close around him, smiling and asking inane questions about our trip. I feel a sudden devious urge to go find Annawendë and bring her over to see the way the eldest daughter of the lord with the violet banner fawns over Nelyo and removes a bit of broken branch from his hair.

"It does not become you," she says, and he laughs.

I wander over toward Macalaurë, who his having a whispered argument with Atar about whether his arm is well enough to bathe himself yet. Atar wants Nelyo or himself to help Macalaurë. "How are you going to wash your hair one-handed?"

"I'm thirty-nine years old and you treat me like a child!" Macalaurë hisses, and Atar recoils with surprise and loudly says, "You'll want to watch your words, Canafinwë." Whenever he uses our father names, we know we're in trouble. Some of the fire goes out of Macalaurë's eyes, and he stomps away but tries to do so delicately to keep from jarring his bound arm and ends up looking ridiculous, like he's marching through thick mud.

Atar watches him go, but there is no anger in his eyes, only a bewildered longing. I tug his tunic, "Atar?" and he shakes his head and looks down at me.

He scoops me up, and I straddle his hip, and he kisses my face and smoothes my hair. "What do you want, little one? Or are you too here to tell me that you've grown up and don't need my help anymore? Hmm?"

I don't answer him. I rest my head on his shoulder and let him carry me into the house.

~oOo~

Our trunks have been taken already to our rooms. Atar rummages through Carnistir's and mine to select clothes that will be appropriate for supper with the lords, scattering most of our work and play clothes on the floor in the process. Carnistir leans against me, his thumb in his mouth, watching Atar with raised eyebrows.

"Amil's going to be angry," he says when Atar tosses my workboots onto the bed I will have to share with Findekáno. "Very angry." His voice comes out lisped because of the thumb.

"She'll forgive it."

He drapes the clothing he has selected over his arm and leads us by the hands to his and Amil's suite, which takes up a whole corner of the house on the one side. They have a sitting room and a study and a bedroom, of course, and two bathrooms, although Amil only uses hers, as far as I can tell, to give Carnistir and me our baths. Atar takes us into the bedroom and sits us on the bed while he lays out our good clothes on the backs of chairs. The family bedrooms are on the second floor of the house and they all open onto a porch that stretches along the back of the house, all except Atar and Amil's because their bed was built onto a dais that extends out where the porch should be and is encased in glass on all sides. The glass fascinates me because, when I lie back on their pillows, I can see the clouds rolling overhead, but were I to press my face to the window outside, I would only see myself looking back. I love lying between them at night, listening to the way their breathing matches the other's when they sleep, staring up at the stars that are so much brighter here than in Tirion.

Amil is in Atar's bathroom already with the door half-closed. He selects clothing for himself, barely looking at the material in his hands or the embroidery on the hemlines before dropping it onto Amil's vanity table and heading for the bathroom door. He undresses as he walks, nonchalantly, and it looks like his clothes are falling off of him. "Is the water warm?" he asks Amil as he enters, and she answers, "It's glorious!"

"Could you find room for company?"

"I can always find room for you, Fëanáro."

He closes the door behind him with a bang.

Carnistir sighs and slides from the bed, down the steps, and onto the floor below, where he begins pulling strings from the nap of a fuzzy rug set at the foot of the steps. I think briefly about stopping him, about making him lie on the bed beside me, where he cannot get into so much trouble, but the pillows beneath my head are too luxuriously soft, and I close my eyes and instead allow myself to drift to sleep.

When I wake up again, it is because Atar-standing with his hair dripping and a towel wrapped around his waist-is yelling at Carnistir. I sit up and, with a twinge of guilt, note the bald patch in the rug. There is a pile of strings beside it that is noticeably smaller than the bald spot, and as I listen to the words that Atar is yelling, I realize it is because Carnistir has eaten most of them. "I can't get you to eat green beans but you'll eat my rug!" Atar yells, and Carnistir starts crying.

Amil ducks around him, gathers me into her arms, and carries me into her bathroom. Her hair has been toweled dry-it tickles my cheek like the cool fronds of a plant-and she wears a silky robe. She smells mainly of bath soaps and a little bit of Atar, but always I can smell Atar on her, and she says that they ceased being able to wash away the scent of the other years ago. I have to sniff Atar from the bottom of my lungs, however, to be able to detect her warm, dusty smell on him. It is so rare that she carries me these days-since Carnistir was born-that I wonder for a moment if I am in the middle of a strange dream.

Amil and Atar constructed their own bathtubs for both Formenos and Tirion, carving them out of bluish marble so smooth that it is less like rock than it is silk. They are like small ponds, big enough that if I lie with my head and one end, then even with my legs stretched to the point of aching, I cannot touch the other side. Amil strips my clothes from me before I can protest and plunks me into bubbly water that comes to my chin, so heavily scented that my backside no sooner touches the bottom of the tub and I am propelling myself out again, shouting with protest.

"Amil! This water smells bad!"

She shoves me back in and holds me by a shoulder while she douses my head with a pitcher full of water. "It does not smell any differently than your bathwater at home. You have become used to unscented soaps, but believe me, Tyelkormo, you need this. You reek of the trail."

I try to smell my arm, but it now smells of lavender and a fruity scent almost like cherries. I grimace and submit to Amil's hands, which are scrubbing my scalp with a force that almost hurts.

"I can wash myself now," I remind her. "I'm old enough."

"I'm sure you can. But you're filthy, and I'd rather help you to make sure that all of the dirt is gone."

I sigh and settle back in the water. At least it is warm, and the bubbles crackling around me are rather comforting. I pick up a handful, blow hard, and watch them shoot across the room then drift back down to the water. Amil hums quietly, a tune that Macalaurë had played for us last night, and I suddenly feel very peaceful and relaxed for the first time in a week. It is rare when I get to bathe without Carnistir yelling and splashing while I sit vigilantly waiting for him to get that suspicious look on his face that means he is doing something in the water that he is not supposed to be doing. Even in my parents' bathtubs, which are big enough that he can sit on one side without touching me, he will wait for our caregiver to turn and dive under the water and bite my feet hard enough to hurt. He calls it playing fish bait, but last time I kicked out in my pain and made his nose bleed.

I wonder if that is the reason why I am bathed alone today?

I ask Amil, "Where's Carnistir?"

"Your father is bathing him," she says. "You are both too dirty to bathe together. Everyone should bathe alone after a long journey. There is no point in washing yourself with another's dirt."

"But you and Atar bathed together," I remind her, and her cheeks pinken and she says, "That's different."

"I'm not complaining," I tell her. "Carnistir can be a pain sometimes. Most times, actually."

"He loves you, Tyelkormo."

"Well, I love him too. But he's still a pain."

I wonder: Do I annoy my elders as much as Carnistir sometimes annoys me?

I wish out loud for the boats that Nelyo and Macalaurë made when Amil and Atar conceived me, and Amil says, "Your boats are still packed. Anyway, you don't have time to play now. We all need to get dressed and ready for supper."

I remember the clothes that Atar has picked out for me and sigh. Such clothes are worn only on tedious occasions, like fancy suppers with lords. Although such suppers are not nearly so tedious in Formenos as they are in Tirion, mainly because the lords of Formenos are not so tedious and Atar does not spend the meal with his eyebrows scrunched low over eyes bright like the first flashes of lightning that warn of a storm coming.

"What are we eating?" I ask, and Amil says she does not know.

"Is Atar making it?" Atar is the best cook in the family. Nelyo is good too, but his meals tend to be bland. And I would rather eat cold bread and drink tepid water than to eat the suppers that Macalaurë prepares.

"No, the lords of Formenos always cook for us on our first night. You know that, Tyelkormo. It is their way of welcoming us back to their city."

She lifts me from the tub, soaking wet, drains the water, and stands me back in the tub and pours several pitchers full of water over my head and body. The water is growing chilly, and I shiver. She embraces me in a big towel and carries me back into the bedroom. I stand at the bottom of the stairs leading to their bed and clutch the towel around shoulders that tremble with cold while Amil gathers my clothes.

Not surprisingly, Atar is not yet finished with Carnistir.

"May I at least dress myself?" I ask her when she goes to the chair and retrieves the clothes that Atar has discarded there. I eye the tunic with displeasure: It is a rich, dark satin with golden embroidery at the cuffs and collar. I know that Atar has selected it because the embroidery matches my hair and the satin brings out the bluish color in my eyes, but the material is too warm and heavy and Amil will keep a suspicious eye on me all night to make sure that I do not stain it.

She sighs. "Why are you in such a hurry to grow up, Tyelkormo?"

"I'm fourteen, Amil! I can dress myself!"

I realize how stupid and immature I sound the moment that the words come out of my mouth. Her face, gray with tired displeasure, brightens a bit-I have unwittingly reassured her that he third son will be a child yet a while longer-and she unfolds the golden-brown trousers Atar has selected and hands them to me. "Yes, Tyelkormo, if you feel that you are able to handle dressing yourself at the venerable age of fourteen, then it is my pleasure to allow it. I have much to do myself before supper."

At that moment, the heavy bedroom door opens, and I hear Carnistir whimpering and Atar impatiently shushing him. Atar has donned an old cotton tunic and trousers for the purpose of bathing Carnistir, but he wears only the trousers now. His face is dark with impatience, and he bounces Carnistir-dripping wet and wrapped in a towel to his chin-in his arms like he might like to bounce him out the window.

"Where's your tunic?" Amil asks.

"The tunic met with misfortune on the way to the bathroom," Atar says, and Carnistir begins to wail. "How old were our other children when they learned the proper times to relieve themselves?"

"Well, about a year, I suppose. Nelyo had those few accidents, but I still blame your bad timing more than I blame him."

Atar rolls his eyes and shoves Carnistir in our mother's direction, which only makes him cry harder.

Atar comes to help me dress, and I do not dare argue with him because his eyes are skipping around the room-resting on a single object no longer than a few seconds, as though the sight of everything displeases him-and I know better than to ire him when he is in such a mood. Amil is dressing Carnistir, cleverly keeping his head swaddled as long as possible in his tunic to mute his cries, and I think as I often do that Amil, in many ways, is wiser than Atar, even though Atar is celebrated for his superior intellect while Amil languishes in his shadow.

I relax my body until my limbs are gelatinous and supple and easy for Atar to slip into my clothing. Around my right arm, there is a ring of yellowing bruises where Atar had seized me the other day-the day that I lost my temper with Findekáno-losing his own temper and unaware of his strength or how much he hurt me. He pauses at those bruises now-my wrist is stuck in the sleeve of my tunic, keeping my arm motionless-and caresses them with his fingertips. His eyes are seething, emotions cascading like the bits in a kaleidoscope: anger, grief, sadness, impatience, regret, guilt ... fear? "What are these?" he asks me, and what am I supposed to tell him? You did that to me, Atar. Remember? The other day when you got so angry with me for losing my temper with my cousin that you seized my arm and forget that it wasn't the handle of a hammer or the hilt of a sword; you squeezed until I could feel my blood drumming against your hand. Didn't you feel it too? Didn't you wonder why my heart raced so fast at the force of your touch and the fire in your eyes?

I can hardly say these things to him, so I look at my bare toes curling into the rug and say nothing. Amil has fallen into silence; Carnistir watches me with his wide, dark eyes, not even mewling any longer. Atar rubs at the bruises, as though he can erase them with a gentler touch, and I can feel him deep in thought, thinking, remembering. When his memory takes him back to that day-that moment in the clearing in the forest-his fingers recoil from my arm as though burned, and I know that he feels my blood pounding against his palm now as he had not felt it then; he feels his rough hand squeezing so hard that he left blood to blacken beneath my skin that he would only find days later.

He stands so quickly that I fall back in surprise. He storms into his bathroom and closes the door.

Amil watches him, then turns to finish dressing Carnistir, who is suddenly as limp and cooperative as a doll. She pats him on the back and stands. "Get your brother to help you with the laces," she tells him, and she follows our father into the bathroom.

I ease my arm the rest of the way into my tunic, hiding the bruises for which I suddenly feel burning shame, and hastily fasten the clasps to cover my chest, my fingers shaking. The clasps grow blurry-the gold melting into the blue cloth beside it-and I sniffle loudly to keep my tears at bay. When I look up, Carnistir is standing before me, laces untied and feet bare. He stands on his tiptoes and, surprising me, plants a wet kiss on my lips.

"From where did they come?" Atar is saying to Amil in the bathroom. I try not to listen-I try to concentrate instead on lacing my baby brother's tunic-but their voices are all that I can hear. Atar's voice is anguished; I have only heard him use that tone when he speaks with Grandfather Finwë about his stepmother and half-brothers. Always, when I hear him speak like this, I think of the frantic struggles of an animal with its leg in a trap, trying to rehash the mistake that got it there, trying in vain to find a way to erase that same mistake and restart time in the place it would be had it never taken that misstep, whole and free.

"Where do you think they came from, Fëanáro? They came from you."

Amil is so merciless in her tone that I cringe, and my fingers fumble Carnistir's laces.

"Perhaps, Fëanáro, it is time that you face the person that you sometimes are with us. For every day that you love us and cherish us as the husband and father that you have sworn to be, there are a handful of moments when you hurt us, sometimes in ways that fade even slower than do bruises."

"But he's still a baby, and until now, I did not remember ..."

"You never do."

Atar says something so low that I cannot hear it, but Amil's response-though given in a voice that is suddenly gentle again-makes my heart clench in my chest like a fist in pain. "You cannot unwish our children, my love, no matter how you may question your suitability as their father. Those bruises on Tyelkormo's arm will be gone in two days, and he knows that you did not mean to hurt him, just as he surely did not mean to treat Findekáno as he did. But, for every second that you stand here now, with me, then you crush his spirit a little more, for perhaps he fears that, even in the better moments, you will let the dark times overtake your love for him."

The door opens and Atar comes forward, still shirtless and tousled from the ordeal of bathing Carnistir. He comes to me and sits on the bed and lifts me onto his lap. He holds my head to his chest, so close that I can hear his heart beating and smell his electric scent, and I wrap my arms around his ribs, wishing that I was big enough to embrace him completely.

Supper is held in the great room at the center of the house, a room larger than even our dining room in Tirion. At the center is a long table made of rough pine that contrasts the delicate carvings around its edges and the soft bluish light from the lanterns strung overhead. The chairs are high-backed and draped with green vines delicate enough to be real, until reaching out to touch them, one discovers that they are carved from the wood and adorned with bits of colored stone that make them shine in the light like real leaves. The smell of food enters my nose and spills down my throat and into my stomach, making me realize suddenly how hungry I am.

Atar leads Carnistir and me by our hands, and I hear our guests draw involuntary gasps of breath when we enter. Suddenly, I do not mind so much the clothing that Atar has chosen for me.

Atar is resplendent himself, wearing blue so dark that it is nearly black-a short-sleeved tunic that betrays the arms of a craftsman, not a prince-and a plain silver armband and matching bracelets, perfect in their simplicity. Around his neck is the symbol of our House, the Star of Fëanáro, with a clear gem set at its center that throws a different color from each facet, lit beneath by the Nelyo-stone, as he calls it. On his hands are no adornments, only the thin gold marriage ring that I've never seen him remove, even while working in the forge.

That he is wed is plain from the contentment in his eyes, but that does not stop the wives of the lords from watching him cross the room, and I imagine that they are wondering, What if it had been I who saw him first? and looking at my mother, who is very plain beside him, with her full breasts flattened against the cloth of her gown and her hair already beginning to spring out at odd angles from her head.

We are welcomed to our own table as though we are guests rather than hosts and given glasses of wine and bits of cheese on crackers. I look around for Nelyo, but he is missing-as is Findekáno-and Macalaurë is sitting at the opposite end of the table from us, talking eagerly to the daughters of the lord with the red banner trimmed in green, and nearly finished his second glass of wine. The wife of the lord with the golden banner stops before us and offers each of us a small bowl of fruit salad. "You sons, my Lord Fëanáro and Lady Nerdanel, are beautiful and gracious as usual. You have truly been blessed."

At that moment, Nelyo comes through the door, and I hear the conversation falter again, and the maidens who have been so interested in Macalaurë turn away from him in mid-sentence, their lips parted and their eyes wide and staring.

My brother is clearly unwed, and it is not just the heads of the maidens that swivel to watch him walk across the room. He holds the hand of our cousin Findekáno-my heart gives an involuntary, jealous squeeze-and he nods and greets the maidens and the wives of the lords but does not stop to kiss them, as he did upon our arrival earlier this afternoon. He comes up behind us, and I have to force myself not to turn and look at him-I don't want him to know how much it hurts to see him holding Findekáno's hand instead of mine-and he plants kisses on Carnistir's cheeks and the top of my head. "It is good to see that you have emerged from beneath the grime, little ones. I had forgotten how lovely the natural colors of your skin and hair are."

"Likewise to you, Nelyo," Atar teases him. "You have commanded the attention of every maiden in the room this night."

Nelyo sighs. "But I am not here for romance, for she whom I fancy does not intend to join us."

"Does not-why, whatever do you mean?"

"She says that she does not feel it is her place to dine with the families of the lords when she is only your apprentice."

"Is she mad?" Atar springs to his feet and rushes for the door to retrieve Annawendë before the supper is served. Nelyo sits down in Atar's chair with a sigh-between Amil and me-and lifts Findekáno onto his lap. I notice all three of the male apprentices have no qualms with dining with the families of the lords and are helping themselves to second helping of hors d'oeuvres.

"Your heart is truly set on her, then, Nelyo?" Amil asks softly.

"I fancy her deeply, yes. I had hoped to ask her to court tonight."

At this, I become alert. The romantic lives of my older brothers have become intensely interesting to me ever since I discovered how secretive they are. Suddenly, the long years I envisioned with my brothers, growing up beside them, dutifully learning the lore of metals from Nelyo and music from Macalaurë, seem ephemeral, and I grieve at the thought of our house with only Carnistir and me to add a child's life to the halls.

But, as though he knows it pains some of us to hear of him falling in love and marrying so soon, he says nothing more on the subject and rests his chin in Findekáno's hair and watches Macalaurë drinking wine and talking with the lord's daughters.

~oOo~

By the time the supper arrives, I have been tantalized by the delicious scents from the kitchen for so long that it is hard to restrain myself from reaching across the table during Eruhantalë and tearing off a handful of roast duck or shoving a fistful of corn into my mouth. Atar-who'd returned with Annawendë reluctantly in tow five minutes ago-notices my restlessness and watches me with increased vigilance from the corner of his eye. In Formenos, apparently, there are no rules for seating because Atar and Amil sit together at one end of the table with Carnistir and me across from them. At the other end, Macalaurë talks still with the lord's daughters, who perked up when Nelyo sat down with them-but only after pulling out a chair for Annawendë and seating her first, at which point they promptly wilted again. Findekáno sits between Nelyo and Macalaurë and stares at his plate, oblivious to the lively commotion around him. Between us, the lords and their wives and the rest of their children arrange themselves, and there is none of the decorum observed in Tirion-where one can speak only with companions within two seats of oneself-and the lords shout to Atar and he laughs and shouts back, and their sons are already yelling down the table to Nelyo-making plans to go hunting tomorrow-and soon the room is filled with the roar of voices.

They have prepared for us tureens of thick stew and ducks-killed just this morning-roasted in a sweet glaze until the outside is crispy. Bowls of vegetables form a colorful patchwork across the tabletop: pumpkin, chard, and others still beyond my reach, cold-weather vegetables that we rarely get to enjoy at home. There is bread taken from the oven only moments before by the wife of the lord with the purple banner, and this we tear off in great bits and dip into the stew. And then, of course, there is the wine, thick, bittersweet stuff the color of blood that I can drink until I'm sick-although I am limited to one glass, as usual-that makes Carnistir's face scrunch up with displeasure.

I finish my wine before I am even done with my stew, and when Atar and Amil are distracted, I switch my empty glass with Carnistir's full one, and he beams at me with his sharp little teeth showing on the top and bottom and takes a hearty swig from his mug of hot cider, which he loves. In fact, he has been so preoccupied with the hot cider that he has neglected to take a single bite of the food on his plate and dawdles until Atar gives him a stern look and commands, "Eat," in a voice that doesn't allow for argument. Carnistir gives me a pleading look-as if I might wish to trade my empty plate for his full one too-but there is no chance of that, as he has already mixed a few spoonfuls of stew into his squash and mashed the duck into unrecognizable bits.

~oOo~

When supper is finished, Atar, Amil, the lords, and their wives go into the sitting room to make up for nine months of separation and we, their children and apprentices, are expected to clean up before dessert is served.

The task is overwhelming, but Nelyo breaks it down into small, simple tasks-one for each of us-and with so many of us helping, the work is done in no time, allowing us to sit at the clean, empty table in the dining room and talk and play until our parents are ready for dessert.

The lord with the purple banner has a young daughter who was born in the same year as Carnistir-she was born in the late summer and he was born in the autumn, two months later-and she has clung to him since they first met the summer after their births, when neither was a year old yet. Poor Macalaurë has been left in charge of them, and Carnistir sits on his lap, using every tactic he can think of to keep the little girl from climbing up beside him, and Macalaurë's one good arm is kept very busy with trying to keep our youngest brother from tipping himself onto the floor. The little girl is not dismayed by his unwillingness and eventually weasels her way onto Macalaurë's lap, standing on his thighs and gripping his sore shoulder to keep her balance-making him cringe with pain-and leaning over to kiss Carnistir, who shrieks and rolls onto the floor with a loud thud.

They take off around the room, the little girl chasing a caterwauling Carnistir, who manages to keep a few strides ahead of her, and poor Macalaurë pursues them to keep them from running into the other room and disturbing our parents and manages to catch Carnistir and lift him up with one arm-wailing like it is molten lava leaping at his toes and not a tiny slip of a girl only two months older than he is-and calls me over.

"Do me a favor and find your brother," he says.

"Which one?" I ask. It is fun to be obstinate with Macalaurë, to tear at his placidity, especially when he is already frustrated. I have only seen him lose his temper three times-twice with Carnistir and once with me-and it is comic to behold how high his voice can get when he's angry and how flushed his pale cheeks become. And he always cries when he's done-great, gulping sobs that better suit distress than rage-and Nelyo or Atar have to physically restrain him from pounding at things until his fists bleed. He is still quite a ways from reaching this extreme, but with Carnistir screaming in one ear and a leaping little girl shouting with laughter and falling so hard against his legs that he nearly topples backwards, I figure it can't be far off.

"Seeing as how two of your three brothers are already here ..." he begins, then must have realized what I was trying to do-did I let slip a betraying sliver of smile?-and suffices to bark, "Nelyo!"

"Where is he?"

"He went to the roof-deck with Annawendë. Tell him that I need one of them down here right away." He jerks his head in the direction of the male apprentices, who are standing in a loose circle with goblets of wine in their hands, tossing stones. "Those goons are about as much help as-" Carnistir gives a sudden lurch in Macalaurë's arms and ends up halfway over his shoulder. "Run, Tyelkormo!" Macalaurë begs.

I pound up the narrow spiraling staircase that leads to the roof-deck that Atar built over the great room. As Macalaurë promised, Nelyo and Annawendë are up there, standing by the railing. I pause in the doorway, but they don't notice me. The wind cuts coldly across the rooftop, but they stand close in each other's arms and give no mind to that either.

When Nelyo got into trouble with that maiden in Tirion, Amil and Atar made up rules by which he had to abide when courting. Carnistir and I hid in Atar's armoire to witness it, and as far as I could tell, most of the rules were Amil's. There was to be no removal of clothing, she'd said. Not a single snap or a single tie was to be undone on either Nelyo or the maiden he was courting. He was to be respectful with the placement of his hands. "If you wouldn't touch me in such a manner, then it is not proper that you should likewise touch her." Kissing was permitted but not below the neck. "When you're tempted, remember that those are the same lips with which you kiss your baby brothers goodnight," she said. "That might give you pause."

Watching them now, they kiss with open-mouthed ardor, and it is doubtful that Nelyo would caress Amil's breast the way he does Annawendë's and I am sure that Amil wouldn't approve of Annawendë fidgeting with the ties on Nelyo's tunic either. I let the door slam shut to avoid having to announce my arrival, and they spring apart.

"Turko!" Nelyo cries, and I can see his eyes brighten with relief that I am not Amil, then cloud with suspicion. "What is the matter?"

"That little girl is chasing Carnistir and the other apprentices are drunk and are being goons and Macalaurë asked me to come tell you that he needed you to help," I say in a rush. "Or Annawendë."

They exchange slow glances and laugh. "I'll go," Annawendë offers, "if you want to-" She glances at me, and I know by the familiar nature of her offer that she is now courting him.

"Yes. I do. Just take Taryindë into another room. Keep her head over your shoulder and do not let her see Carnistir. She's crazy for him, and she'll fight you until she can get to him. One day, he'll be crazy for her too and he'll marry her, but for now, he's little and foolish and thinks her an orc."

They laugh again and kiss, pecking each other on the lips with their eyes open, then lingering, then closing their eyes and kissing harder, until Nelyo pulls away and twitches his head in my direction. "Annawendë ..."

"I know!" She tears her hands from him and dashes for the door, looking over her shoulder at him as she goes, smiling widely and colliding with the doorframe, wincing and flushing with embarrassment, and we hear her footsteps subsiding down the stairs.

Nelyo lifts me under my arms and sits me on the railing. The ground is three stories beneath us, but I am not afraid because his arms are around my waist and I know that he would dive over the railing himself before he'd let me fall. Telperion is waxing, and this far north, the light is faint and spreads over the land like silver gauze. The wind huffs again, pressing on my back like icy hands, and Nelyo cuddles me close before I can start shivering.

His red hair swirls around my face and his body warms me. I have been left here with him for a purpose, I realize; I can feel it in his rigid shoulders and in the silence made busy by his thoughts. At last, he caresses my cheek and tucks my hair behind my ear. He says, "You know I love you, Turko?" His fingers on my face leave little trails of warmth like the light that streams behind comets in the darkness.

I look into the perfect face of my brother. Why does my heart seize when he speaks his endearment, words I hear one hundred times a day? "Of course, Nelyo. I love you too."

"I know you do, little one." His arms tighten around me; my head is on his shoulder now. I hear him take a deep breath, like he does before he gets ready to duck underwater. "But also, I love Annawendë," he says. "I have asked her to court me tonight, and I suspect that, when the time is right, I will ask her to marry me."

He stands back to look at me, to read the expression on my face. I am torn between confusion and sadness that feels like a throbbing red wound opening inside me. Is he telling me that he is leaving? Tears burn my eyes.

"Do not cry, little one," he tells me, and I am lost again in his embrace. "Do you not see that the love I have for you and Macalaurë and little Carnistir rests in a different place in my heart than my love for Annawendë? The love of a woman is different than the love of kin, and a man needs both for his spirit to lie in contentment. You know this, Turko?"

I had come across Amil and Atar in the forest once, lying together in the soft grass of a clearing, their clothes scattered on the ground around them, and Amil bit her lips as if in pain and dug her nails into Atar's back, and I thought that he was hurting her and cried out and they sprang from the ground, seizing their clothes as I stood trembling. They dressed with a shamed haste I'd never seen them use before-we should not be abashed by our bodies, Atar says, for we were gifted with the pinnacle of physical perfection, and it is more an affront to Eru to be ashamed of this gift than to be comfortable in our nakedness-but they faced their backs to me now and tugged on their clothes. Once dressed, Atar held me at arm's length and wiped the tears from my face-he smelled different, richer somehow, like soil that has been turned in the spring-and explained that he had not been hurting Amil at all. "Each of us is destined to find a mate in our lives," he told me, "and when we do, we bond our bodies in marriage."

"Like the salmon? Like spawning?" I asked him because Nelyo had explained all about that last year during a lesson in the lore of nature.

Atar hesitated and thought for a moment, then said, "Yes and no. Yes, in that, like the salmon, such bonds may produce children. That is from where you and your brothers came."

"You too?" I asked in amazement because surely someone like Atar couldn't have such a humble beginning, the same beginning as a fish.

"Yes," he said with a wry smile, "me too. But it is not like the salmon, in that we do not bond only to produce children but also to strengthen the bonds between our spirits, for our people alone of all the living beings on Arda are capable of bonding our spirit to that of another. We are fortunate in that, for with such bonds, we are never alone."

Now, I am unsure of what to say to Nelyo, and he closes the uncomfortable, silent gap between us with more words. "This is years still from happening, Turko. It is not the way of our people to rush into marriage, and Annawendë and I are still several years from our majorities and so will likely have a long courtship and at least a yearlong betrothal. But, Turko," he says, and his tone changes until he is almost pleading with me, like it is I who is the bigger and more powerful of us, "I hate the look on your face when I mention marriage-even in jest-and I want you to understand that I will always love you and I will always be your older brother, even if I marry Annawendë and we have five children of our own, those children will get a special place in my heart that is different from the place I have given you. Never can anyone threaten your place in my life, Turko. I want you to understand that."

"You want to have babies with her?" I say, and my voice is so tiny next to his, and tears simmer in my throat. This I dwell on-the spawning salmon, not the bonding of spirits-because I cannot bear the thought of my brother's warm spirit tying itself to a single other, never mine to share again.

"Of course, I do, Turko. Of all the ambitions Atar has, I share but sparks of them. When I close my eyes and dream, I wish only for a small cottage near our home, with my wife and our children around me, a shelf for my books and a desk for writing, and a table to which I shall always welcome my little brothers."

"You will make a good father," I tell him, echoing the words Macalaurë spoke that gave him such joy, and collapse into his arms and sob against his shoulder.

~oOo~

When we return downstairs to the great room, he has dried my tears and they exist now only as a heavy ache behind my eyes. Dessert is being brought to the table-frozen juices, a treat we never get in Tirion where the weather is too warm-and Nelyo makes it a point to sit me at his right side, my accustomed place, even when Findekáno stares at us with naked envy. At his left is Annawendë, who holds the little daughter of the lord with the purple banner sleeping in her arms. Nelyo meets her eyes and they smile; I wonder, do they wish their first child to be a daughter or a son? I wait for pain to stab me deep within, but when it comes, it is only a low ache, like that which afflicts deep scars: more the memory of pain than an actual affliction.

We are given flutes of golden mead as sweet as candy and bitter pieces of chocolate molded into the shape of the star of our House. Even Carnistir eagerly consumes such treats, and before the conversation can rise again to din, Nelyo stands and addresses the group with an announcement.

"Long have I suffered with affections for my dear friend and fellow scholar, Annawendë, but tonight, she has soothed my heart, for she has given me her hand in courtship, and I have given mine, likewise, to her. I would like to call my kin and our friends to witness this, the first night of our love."

It is Atar who raises his glass first, standing opposite Nelyo with pride glowing in his eyes, and says, "Blessed be their love!" and we all raise our glasses and drink to the blessing, even me. My arm is not as heavy as I expect, and as I sip the sweet mead in toast of my brother, I meet his eyes and he winks at me, as though we share a secret.

Atar circles the table to kiss Annawendë on the cheek, an affection that, coming from her master, makes her blush and mumble her gratitude. Nelyo he crushes in an embrace and kisses on the mouth, and our guests, giddy first with wine and now with mead, laugh and applaud the obvious joy of one usually so collected.

Later, as we gather in the sitting room for tales and music, I sit in Macalaurë's lap as he tunes his harp and converses with the eldest son of the lord with the golden banner. "An announced courtship!" the lord's son whispers to my brother. "They must be serious!"

"Oh, they are. Maitimo has been dire since her arrival this spring." His voice is dark, as though announcing a grave injury, but his eyes dance and he laughs to lighten his words. "Now I have reason to pull my best white robes from hiding and press them, for I sense that I shall be standing at a wedding soon."

~oOo~

We are not long in the sitting room before the lord with the red banner bordered in green brings in a wooden cask filled with a light brownish liquid. Macalaurë is playing a spirited song and most of the young people are singing along, and the lord pours small glassfuls of the liquid and passes it around to the other lords and Atar. "Nerdanel?" he says to Amil, and she gets an appalled look on her face and says, "I think not!"

"Come now, you cannot be carrying another child so soon! I remember a day when you could out-drink all of us."

"Those days have passed," she says coolly, but a smile teases her lips, and she consents to sip from Atar's glass when he offers it, before grimacing and pushing the glass back into his hands. "It is just as awful as I remember it!"

Nelyo is offered a glass, which he accepts, as are the older sons of the lords and the apprentices, even Annawendë, which gives me a measure of relief because she would not be drinking something so potent if she expected to be carrying my brother's child anytime soon.

Atar pours another glass, and when Amil gives him an inquisitive look, he says, "For Macalaurë," to which Amil exclaims, "Oh, Fëanáro, I don't think so!"

"Why not? He will be forty years old in a few months time. And I find that such brew makes music not only more pleasurable to hear but also to play."

Macalaurë seizes the glass with eagerness, and I see him trying not to cringe as he sips from it.

Once, last year, while Nelyo was regaling the group with the tale of the time that Macalaurë nearly shot him while they were hunting-accidentally, of course, but leaving a puckered white scar on his hip-I sneaked a sip from his glass, and for an hour after that, my chest burned as though it was on fire and the room listed like one of my toy ships in the bathtub with Carnistir.

Macalaurë's music does become lighter and livelier as the volume of drink in his cup decreases. He is the quietest of us, and one might even believe him to be shy, were one to meet him for the first time, but with his harp in hand and at the center of everyone's attention, Macalaurë has a presence that none of us can mimic, except, perhaps, Atar. Within minutes, he has the entire room singing along with him, and one of the more ambitious daughters even strikes up a dance with one of Amil's apprentices. Nelyo is working on his second glass of the golden liquid, and he sits cross-legged on the floor and draws Carnistir, Findekáno, and me into his lap, bundling us together in his arms. Carnistir is laughing but Findekáno looks unnerved by all of the revelry, and I suppose that his stiff, proper family never celebrates this way. Nelyo is singing along with the music-it is rare when Nelyo sings, a shame, given that his voice is rich and beautiful-and Annawendë's higher voice joins his, and I am surprised that someone with such coarse features could be blessed with a voice so light.

The song ends, and one of the lords takes over, telling a funny tale about his son's first experience in the forge that makes the said son blush. Macalaurë kneels behind Nelyo and nestles his chin into his shoulder, and the two of them whisper in voices so low that even I cannot hear them, and we are passed to Annawendë so that Nelyo can stand and follow Macalaurë across the room to kneel beside Vorondil, who also endures their whispers and wears a silly grin on his face. Finally, Nelyo stands and announces that he will be singing a duet with Macalaurë in fifteen minutes, and the two of them run from the room.

Nelyo and Macalaurë's duets are famous, for they only occur after they have both had more than their share to drink. Last summer, they did a rousing round, their voices oscillating and twisting around the other's, called "The Rock and the Stone" about geological romance that made Atar laugh so hard that he fell out of his chair. (I, personally, was puzzled by most of the jokes.)

The lords continue telling tales, until Nelyo comes in-dressed in a plain tunic, trousers, and his hunting boots-and drags a chair to the front of the room and sits down. As if on command, Vorondil sits on the floor beside him and takes up Macalaurë's harp and begins plucking a bright ditty that comes with surprising ease to his strong smith's hands.

Nelyo begins to sing. His voice is not nearly as beautiful as Macalaurë's-he lacks our brother's extraordinary range and is constrained to the lower octaves-but at times, his voice swells into splendor that makes all of my senses liven, much as does the heady scent of roses or a shivering breeze on a hot day. Even for this song, a teasing tune written long ago to soothe the boredom of the long rides in the Outer Lands, his voice is graceful and proud.

He sings a bit lower than is usual for him and adopts a masculine swagger that is most unlike my gracious, noble brother.

By sweet Cuiviénen I awake, and in the first look that I take,
I see the stars, the waving trees, but no maidens quite as fair as she,
Lying sleeping by my hand, the fairest in this fairest land.
I say, "My love, I plead to thee to please, please, please, please marry me!"
And she consents, but from afar, comes the thundering hoofbeats of Nahar,
Bringing Oromë and his strong bequest to join him on a sacred quest,
To travel to Aman oversea, with this maiden who will marry me.
Yes, she said she would marry me!

Macalaurë enters at that moment, mincing with the shyness of a maiden, and everyone in the room roars with laughter when they see why, for he is dressed in pale blue robes cinched at the waist to simulate a gown, and his hair is done away from his face in the manner of a woman, held back with Amil's hair clips. His legs are bare beneath the robes, and he nances in a pair of our mother's slippers. Stuffed in the front of his robes-which have been left partially open to simulate the V-neckline of a gown-are two melons.

He bats his eyes at Nelyo and prances delicately over to his chair, turning shyly from the laughing audience and curtsying politely. Nelyo looks suitably intrigued and tries to seize Macalaurë and draw him closer, but Macalaurë skips out of reach and giggles teasingly. He eases closer, until Nelyo claps an arm around his waist and pinches his backside, making him shriek and melt into Nelyo like a lovestruck maiden. He sings next, in a high, wavering falsetto.

My dear, my love, please pardon me, but did I hear you say oversea?
Distance and death our love would withstand, but my body won't bear leaving land.
Splashing, churning swells and swills-the thought alone could make me ill!

Nelyo sings back, and they alternate verses from then on, at times, overlapping as though in an actual argument, Nelyo swaggering and Macalaurë arching his back to flaunt his melon-breasts and the audience laughing so hard that, at times, the words to the song became nearly incomprehensible. Nelyo sings, "My dear, true love, would you ignore a plea that comes from Valinor? A plea from the great Valar themselves, offering hope unto we lowly Elves?"

Macalaurë swats him with feminine indignation. "My fairest, good husband-to-be, don't you know that I get sick at sea? Besides the fear that we might drown, the Valar won't keep my suppers down!"

Nelyo sings, "My dearest betrothed, I can think of worse-" and Macalaurë interrupts him and pulls from his arms, trilling, "Then it's on you that I shall vomit first! If you think it so easy to bear, then see if you still find me fair!"

Nelyo falls to his knees and clutches Macalaurë around the waist. "My dear, my love, a few weeks at most, of sailing with King Finwë's host...."

Macalaurë huffs and flutters away. "If my illness is what pleases you, then maybe marriage makes me sick too!"

Macalaurë flips his hair and storms away-a bit awkwardly in our mother's slippers-and stands to the side with his arms crossed under his melons and his lips pushed out in a pout. Nelyo falls back into the chair, his masculine swagger gone and his hands hanging dejectedly between his knees.

Away I went, both sad and sorry, to have fallen in love with an Avari.
Yes, I fell in love with an Avari.

They wait for the laughter of their audience to die while Vorondil loyally plucks the harp. Macalaurë turns and slowly saunters in Nelyo's direction, swaying his hips and giving an absentminded twirl with every few steps. Nelyo straightens and begins the next verse.

But hope is fair and hearts stay strong, and I met a maiden before long,
Who loved the song of sea and coast and traveled with King Elwë's host.
I said, "My love, would you go along on a boat, a quest, a wedding bond?"

Macalaurë takes Nelyo's hand and gazes into his eyes.

My dear, what is it that thou asks of me? Do you ask if I will marry thee?
A Telerin maid, I love the sea, and I'm blessed with perfect loyalty.
There is just one little tiny thing: My first loyalty is to my King,
Blessed to rule by the divine. Before him I'd kneel most anytime!
I thought that I'd be straight with thee, and tell thee of my loyalty.
My perfect subject's loyalty.

Nelyo springs from his chair into a gleeful leap.

Loyalty? I could do worse! I never thought it'd be a curse,
Until King Elwë disappeared and from our path my betrothéd veered.
I should have known to be wary of
Her professéd loyal "subject's" love,
And how overlong she would abide, staring at her King's backside!
Now I am forlorn; my hope is gone, and without her, I'll be moving on,
And my leaden heart will never again be merry, for I fell in love with a Teleri.
Yes, I fell in love with a Teleri.

Now I abide in Aman fair, to live my days in lone despair,
Dreading the arrival of each tomorrow, until I held counsel with Prince Fëanáro,
And he said, "You have no reason to despair, for I can tell you where you erred!"
(Not rare from the son of our King, who believes he knows most everything.)
"Forget the Moriquendi, Telerin kind. What you need is a Noldorin mind!"
The inns of Tirion I began to prow, and it was happiness there that I found.
The maiden I knew I would wed; I knew she was mine when she said:

Macalaurë sings:

My dear, my love, I'll be your wife and make you happy all your life.
I have Noldorin mind, Noldorin might and know how to hold your hammer right.
And when to bed we do retire, I am not afraid to play with fire.
And I won't be scared, I won't be bored, when your wish is to unsheath your sword!

And Nelyo replies:

My wife, our marriage shall be blessed, for Noldorin hands are still the best.
And when I unsheath my scimitar, I'll let you win, when we spar.
And if I know a Noldorin maid's desire, then it's me who shall not fear the fire.
I vow, I shall not fear the fire.

Together, they join their voices in perfect harmony:

My dear, my love, please do not tarry!
The sooner we bond, the sooner we marry!
Now take my hand, take me to wed,
Take my heart, then take me to bed.
My dear, my love, please do not tarry!
For you are the one I wish to marry.
Yes, with Noldorin love, I wish to marry,
So you're the one that I shall marry.

Nelyo pulls Macalaurë onto his lap, tips him backwards, grabs one of the melons, and kisses him on the lips. Everyone in the room gives a shriek of laughter, even little Carnistir-who surely understood even fewer of the jokes than I-and Atar grabs one of Macalaurë's bare legs, making him scream and kick with delighted surprise, sending one of Amil's slippers careening across the room, and Atar says, "May my sons marry well and marry maidens with less hair on their legs!"

"And breasts that aren't crooked!" the lord with the purple banner chimes in-draining the last of his cup as he spoke-because the melon that Nelyo grabbed is drooping precariously.

Macalaurë stands up, swaying on his feet, and gives his melons a haughty heft with his good arm. "I think that I have fine legs. And breasts," he says indignantly. His voice sounds strange, like Carnistir's when he tries to talk with his thumb in his mouth. Macalaurë sways and Nelyo has to hold him around the waist to keep him from pitching into Atar's lap. They walk, holding each other, and collapse onto the floor beside us.

Carnistir scrambles onto Nelyo's lap and immediately plugs his thumb in his mouth and closes his eyes. I settle into Macalaurë's embrace-after he removes the melons and finishes fastening his robes-and his scent stings my nose, like the liquid that Atar pours over our wounds before bandaging them. Findekáno kneels and looks from Nelyo to Macalaurë and back again, his already tiny body clutching itself-as though afraid to touch any of the revelers that he seems not to recognize as his kin-until Annawendë, laughing, scoops him into her arms and cuddles with him next to Nelyo. I meet his wide, terrified eyes over the raveled legs of my brothers and Annawendë and try not to look too smug as I nuzzle into Macalaurë's shoulder and let the sound of laughter and revelry lull me to sleep.

I wake with a start the next morning, warmed by golden light through the windows. Findekáno kneels beside me on our bed, dressed already, and staring down at me.

"Tyelkormo?" he says in his tiny voice that annoys my head in the same way as whirling gnats. "We have lessons today?"

It is the second day of the week, and on these days, I meet Atar an hour before Laurelin's zenith for lessons in craft. Findekáno, I suppose, will be coming along with me. I sigh and tug my weary body from beneath the blankets. Someone has dressed me in my nightclothes, although I can't remember being tucked into bed much less who dressed me for it.

"We have lessons with Atar," I tell him. I don't mean for my voice to sound as cold as it does. "In craft."

"Craft?" I ignore the little squeak that comes from the direction of the bed and retrieve one of the sets of work clothes that Atar discarded on the floor yesterday. Findekáno, I notice with annoyance, is wearing a long, silky tunic over off-white trousers, clothes that would have been appropriate last night but will quickly be ruined in Atar's laboratory. "Don't you have anything else to wear?" I ask sharply, and his little body clenches self-consciously, and he stares down at his clothes.

"No."

I sigh again and go over to grab his hand and drag him from the bed. "I overslept," I tell him. "We don't have much time. Let's have breakfast."

I lead him by the hand to the kitchen, where someone has set out a basket of sliced bread and fruit. I gather two cloths full and shove one into his hands. "Here. We'll eat on the way to the laboratory."

Atar's laboratory in Formenos is part of the same building as the forge. The forge is dark—none of the apprentices are at work yet, although I can hear Annawendë and Vorondil discussing something behind the closed doors of one of the study rooms—and the shapes of the equipment are ominous in the dark. Findekáno cringes and bumps into me; with some annoyance, I consent to take his hand again. "Káno, stop being such a baby. There's nothing to fear in here," I tell him.

"It's cold," he says. "But usually it's hot."

I turn my head so that he won't see me roll my eyes, a bad habit I have learned that angers Atar. At the back of the forge is the door to the laboratory; I open it, fearing that Atar will be there already—the light through the windows suggests that we are several minutes late—but the laboratory is dark and empty and smells of dust and nine months of disuse.

The desks and tabletops are clean, all parchments and half-finished projects having been gathered before we left last summer. On the walls, Atar has pinned sketches that Nelyo and Macalaurë did of each other and the family members as part of an exercise last summer. Beside them are Atar's own sketches, and looking upon the latter, it is hard to believe that the figures on the parchment will not suddenly rise and step from the walls to greet us. Carnistir curls in my arms in the round chair in Atar's office. Amil ponders a piece of marble being coaxed into resembling Aulë. Nelyo sleeps across one of his books and Macalaurë smiles vaguely and plays his harp. At the bottom, almost unseen behind a pile of ledgers, are two sketches of Atar done by Nelyo and Macalaurë. I imagine that Atar put them at the bottom because they are still unfinished: They have not drawn his eyes.

I open the shutters and flood the laboratory with light, revealing the glass vials and small metal tools that Nelyo and Atar use for their studies. Dust glitters in the air. I pull out one of the workbenches and nod at it. "Here. Sit." Findekáno sits obediently, holding his arms close to his body and looking around with wary eyes, as though he fears harming or being harmed by something in the empty room.

I sit on the opposite end of the bench from him, forcing my muscles to sag into nonchalance. In reality, this room makes me nervous too, but not for anything inside the room but for the heavy lock on the door that keeps Atar's secret pursuits even from Amil. The sight of the graceless lock beneath the knob fills me with a feeling of cold dread.

Our people share selflessly all that we find. We do not bar our hearts much less our doors from our kindred, especially members of our own family. Amil says that Atar locks the laboratory at times because the experiments he does are dangerous and he does not wish for Carnistir or me to stumble in by mistake and be hurt, but at times, I hear nothing but his voice raised, as though in anger, speaking to Nelyo, and I creep away before I understand of what he speaks.

The light in the windows is definitely gold now. Atar is late.

"What kind of craft do you do here?" Findekáno asks.

"Mostly, Atar has me set jewelry and shape gemstones and do some simple engraving work," I tell him, rising to look out the window and to the house, which sits cold and silent like a sleeping beast. No Atar.

"Do you like it?"

"No, not really."

"But I thought you wanted to be a craftsman?"

I whirl to face him. He perches on the edge of the bench farthest from where I would be, had I remained sitting, his shoulders bowed in towards each other as though he wishes to fold himself in half. "Why is everything you say a question?" I snap. "Yes, I want to be a craftsman, but I do not wish for this dull work but to work in the forge, with my father. It's very different."

Findekáno looks away and says no more.

The laboratory door swings open, and Atar enters the room like a rush of wind. "Tyelkormo. Findekáno. I apologize for my tardiness," he says in a voice without a trace of regret. Behind him, Macalaurë shuffles, his arm bound to his body with the now-familiar strip of cloth, his eyes bleary and tired. "I was seeking Nelyo before I remembered that he is hunting with Verkaturo's sons today." Atar goes to his desk and begins turning a forgotten sapphire in his hands. I had shaped it last summer into an awkward facetted star; he holds it in the light now and watches the blue spangles drift across the walls. As quickly as he had lifted it, he tosses it away and turns back to us, his eyes skipping restlessly across my wrinkled work clothes and Findekáno's elegant raiment. "I want a healer to look at Macalaurë's shoulder. Your brother is hunting, and your mother suffers to see her sons in pain, so I must take him, and that means also that you must go with me. Now, all shall not be lost this day," he tells us, and he wanders now to study the sketches on the wall, brushing at a miniscule—or perhaps imagined—flaw on the portrait he'd drawn of Nelyo. "You each shall give your attention to Nimelië and ask her questions about her work so that you can tell me one important fact about healing on the way home. It is well that you learn something of it because you never know when you might need it in your travels." He tugs the portrait from the wall and discards it on the desk, perhaps to fix later. "So run to the house and get your cloaks. Nerdanel will have our horses ready for us by your return."

Ten minutes later, we are on the dirt road to Formenos, a half-hour ride from the house. Macalaurë—sharing a horse with Atar—looks more miserable with each step towards the city and scratches occasionally at the wound on his shoulder. Atar fires questions about natural lore at Findekáno and me—asking us the names of flowers and trees or having us identify the tracks of the animals that cross the trail—and I bark my answers back at him before Findekáno can even fumble the solutions in his mind. After a while, the questions become tedious and I think of not answering and forcing Findekáno to respond. I wish more that Macalaurë would sing for us, but his face is gray and tired, and Atar's hand on his waist is very firm, as though he fears that Macalaurë might tumble from the horse and injure his other shoulder.

The gates of Formenos are guarded, but unlike Tirion, the guards wear bows on their backs and carry short swords at their sides. At times in the past, Atar tells us—to ease the look of terror in Findekáno's face—beasts would come into the city in search of food, especially during very cold winters or droughts, making it necessary to guard the gates. I have heard of such—and more—from Macalaurë before, during the scary tales that he loves to tell Carnistir and me when Nelyo and our parents aren't around to hear, and I ask, "Did anyone die?" but Atar won't answer. Macalaurë gives me a guarded look, and I know that he is also thinking of the two children in his tales—one fair and one dark—who were killed when wolves jumped into their nursery late at night.

The guards greet Atar by name and nod at the rest of us as we pass. Formenos is a lower and darker city than Tirion. The houses are built from the dark stone that is native to the area. In front of each is a garden, but unlike the gardens of Tirion, they are not laden with delicate blossoms and soft, leafy fronds but tall hard trees and stiff-leafed shrubs decorated with strings of glowing gemstones. Most yards have fountains crafted to look like the waterfalls in the forests around the city—not the rigid, babbling fountains of home—and the sound of running water makes the air sparkle with music.

The healer is the sister of one of the lords, and we have visited her in her home before—many summers ago, when Amil was still carrying Carnistir—but never have I been to seek her counsel. Atar seems to have, however, judging from the familiar ease with which he passes her small cottage and continues to a second building beside it, fronted by a sign that reads, "Nimelië of the Dagger, Healer."

Atar helps Macalaurë to the ground and ties our horses to the fence. Before we even walk the path to ring the bell by the door, the door opens and Nimelië trots down the path to meet us. She is a small woman, quick and capable, wearing the ivory dress of healers. "Fëanáro," she says, and she takes his hand and puts the other to his cheek, but they neither kiss nor embrace. "You look well."

"As do you," he replies, and she smiles. "We have missed your company at the house. "

"Yes, I have been nearly as busy as you." She looks past him to Findekáno. "I know that cannot be your youngest."

"No, he is my brother-son, come to study with Nelyo and me for the summer. Carnistir is little still."

I secretly think that Carnistir isn't that much smaller than Findekáno but say nothing.

"Yes, well, I do not know what you feed those children of yours that make them grow so fast." She looks next to Macalaurë and me. "I am being horribly rude, failing to greet my patient, poor Macalaurë, and the baby that I helped bring into this world." She stoops to kiss my forehead. "Your eyes are still as blue as the day you were born, Tyelkormo. What beautiful children you have, Fëanáro. Now, please, if you would follow me; I hate to make you wait, but last year's mild spring must have inspired amorous thoughts, and we are in the midst of a baby boom here in Formenos. I am with one of our imminent mothers now."

"Tirion too," Atar tells her as well walk. "Both of my half-brothers are expecting sons in the winter."

"Little Arafinwë?" she says with incredulity. "Why, he was just a child the last I saw him at yours and Nerdanel's marriage ceremony! He was not much bigger than Maitimo! How amazing that he expects a son of his own. I suppose that Maitimo shall be next."

"I hope that he shall."

Nimelië leads us into the cottage, a small building with only a sitting room at the front and a consultation room at the back. The woman of whom Nimelië spoke waits in the front room, her belly a balloon in front of her—larger than I remember Amil being when she was pregnant with Carnistir—and she struggles to her feet when we enter.

"Fëanáro!" she says, and he motions her to stay seated, but she toddles over to him anyway. "Do not be silly, Fëanáro! Who would I be to return home to my husband and tell him that I stayed seated and did not greet our own high prince?" She kisses his cheek, necessitating a leaning stretch that is painful to watch. "And these are your sons?"

"My second eldest Macalaurë and my third, Tyelkormo. And this is my brother-son Findekáno, son of Nolofinwë, of Tirion. Maitimo hunts the forests with the sons of Verkaturo and little Carnistir has remained with my wife. And yours?"

"My first is at home with my husband. This is my second and third," she says, stroking her belly. "Twins."

"Twins! Ai! Your hands shall be kept busy! When is their begetting day?"

The woman grimaces. "Last week. That is why I seek Nimelië's wisdom this day, in hopes that she can prescribe a potion of some sort that can hurry them along. My back is dreadfully sore."

"I empathize, for Macalaurë was nearly two weeks late, and Nerdanel almost went mad from waiting when he decided to arrive right in the middle of one of my father's feasts. At least the midwife was close; she was eating her supper right across from me."

They laugh, and Macalaurë and I exchange puzzled glances. Atar does not speak as such with his people in Tirion—it is usually Nelyo or Amil that greet the people in the streets—and, although we knew that Macalaurë was the only one of Atar's sons born inside the walls of Tirion, we did not know that he was two weeks late and decided to be born in the middle of a feast. I cannot reconcile the image of my mother sitting at the table, straining in labor, while the festive merriment of our grandfather's feast carries on around her and the midwife ducks under the table to catch Macalaurë. I wonder if he was swaddled in a napkin and invited to partake in the festivities. At least it explains his affinity for food.

Atar bids farewell to the woman and wishes her and her family well, and we follow Nimelië into the consultation room in the back.

"I will be just long enough to recommend a relief for the poor woman's back. I will try not to keep you waiting. It would expedite things, Macalaurë, if you could remove your tunic and your bandages, and I will return to you shortly." She smiles curtly and leaves, closing the door behind her.

The room is small and lined with counters on three sides. At the back is a narrow cot, and Macalaurë sits on it, looking miserable, while Atar unwinds the bindings from his arm. "Remember, Tyelkormo, Findekáno," he says to us. "Ask questions. You don't get a day off to learn nothing."

Findekáno and I circle the room, standing on tiptoe to study the objects on the counters. There are rolls of bandages and many bottles of fluid labeled with words I have never read before. I open one and sniff it; it reminds me of the golden fluid that the adults drank last night and made Nelyo and Macalaurë act so silly. I think about taking a sip of it, but Atar is giving me a stern look, so I replace the cap and nudge it back into place. On one counter, we find a tray of tools that look a bit like the tools that Amil uses for her sculptures. I pick up a small knife and nearly touch the blade before remembering how angry Atar gets when we test the sharpness of implements with our fingers. I test it against the cloth of my tunic instead, and it slices easily through. I turn to Atar, who is undoing the laces in Macalaurë's tunic. "Atar, what's this for?"

Macalaurë's face sags with despair on seeing the knife. "Atar …" he says in a small voice that cannot possibly belong to my big, minstrel brother, and Atar cradles his head against his chest. "Relax, Macalaurë, you will be fine. You are not here to be put to torment." Over his shoulder, he gives me a sharp look, his eyes issuing a wordless command: Put it away. I do.

"Atar, I don't like it here," Macalaurë says.

"No one likes the ministrations of a healer, my beloved, but she will not intentionally hurt you. And if something does hurt, then you just squeeze my hand as hard as you can, right?"

Macalaurë smiles weakly. "Yes, then I can be the fool who separated his shoulder and crippled the greatest craftsman of the Noldor, all in one week."

Atar eases Macalaurë's tunic over his head—guiding his sore arm carefully out from the cloth—and smoothes his ruffled hair. "Nay, you will not cripple me. I held your mother's hand through four childbirths and went back to work the next day. Your mother always loved Nimelië, said she had gentle hands. Did you know that she attended at your birth, Tyelkormo?"

I hadn't. My birth is the most notorious of my brothers', for my mother had labored greatly bringing me into the world, to the point where it had been feared that I might have to be cut out of her, like foals are sometimes cut from mares. This was not spoken to me, but rather, something I'd overheard Atar telling Grandfather Finwë last year when they didn't know I could hear. Such procedures, Atar said—I could hear him forcing his voice to stay flat and unemotional and concluded that my birth must have been a terrifying ordeal for him—are not only very dangerous but would likely have meant that he and Amil would have no more children, and I was pained to think of never getting to be a big brother. Also, I am the only one born in Formenos (Nelyo was born by the river, Macalaurë in the palace, and Carnistir at our home in Tirion) and the only one born on my exact begetting day (Macalaurë was late; Nelyo and Carnistir were early). I think back to Nimlië's soft hands in Atar's and wonder that they were probably the first two hands to touch me.

Nimelië opens the door and, with a soft smile, asks Macalaurë and Atar to recount for her the accident. Findekáno and I stand to the side, leaning against the counters and ignoring the existence of the other, and I listen again to the story that has been swirling around in my brain since it happened, wondering if Macalaurë will betray me now and tell Atar that I had been riding without hands. He does not, and my relief is undercut by bizarre and bitter regret. Would he have told, would my guilt at seeing him sitting there—half-naked and trembling—be eased? When Macalaurë finishes his tale, Atar takes over, describing what he found upon examining Macalaurë's shoulder. "The wound was deep but not bleeding badly," he says in the same over-calm voice that I heard him use when describing my birth to Grandfather Finwë last year. "But when I pressed at his shoulder, I found that the bones had separated. I did my best to realign them properly, but I must confess to a bit of squeamishness, for my son was in a lot of pain, and I feared hurting him further. The shoulder has remained very stiff and sore since."

Nimelië pushes Macalaurë's hair aside and commences pressing on his shoulder, and at times, I see his hand tighten on Atar's and he bites his lip, but he does not cry out. "Have you been applying salve?" she asks, and Atar replies, "At least four times a day."

I make myself watch. I have been hunting with my older brothers, and I have seen blood and torn flesh on animals, but it is different when it is my brother. Yet, he would not be sitting here now but for me, so I make myself watch Nimelië prodding at the stitched slit on his shoulder, and I do not fool myself that his subsequent gasp is from anything other than pain. I wish that I could be little like Carnistir and excused for letting forth the wails that Macalaurë fancies himself too big and brave to utter. "Who stitched this? Your wife?" Nimelië asks.

"I did," Atar says, and Nimelië looks impressed.

"I should expect no less from the son of Míriel, yet this is excellent work."

My head snaps to look at Atar—even Macalaurë forgets his discomfort long enough to swivel in our father's direction—because no one outside our house ever mentions Atar's mother. Yet his reaction is nonchalant. "I've been given much practice at mending clothes, having four sons, but I found it entirely different and unpleasant to perform a similar action on the flesh of my own child."

Nimelië nods in sympathy. "It is always harder when it is flesh, and when it is one's own, I imagine the grief compounded." She walks around to Macalaurë's front and moves and stretches his arm into different positions. "Tell me when it—" she begins, moving his arm away from his body, and he yells, "Ai!" and she pats his arm and says, "That was abundantly clear, Macalaurë. I promise, this torture is nearly finished. You have done very well. I know it must hurt."

She finishes moving Macalaurë's arm and comes over to the counter, nudging Findekáno and I aside to gather several of the bottles from the counter—including the one with the pungent odor that I sniffed earlier—and a strip of cotton. This close, I can smell the clean scent of her dress and something delicate and soothing beneath it, like lavender. She cups my head in her hand as she passes, and her hands are indeed gentle.

"I'm going to give you balm for his wound, Fëanáro, that should be applied in the morning and before retiring in the evening. It will reduce the amount of scarring and should hasten healing. I'm going to administer the first dose now and also disinfect the wound again, since you have been long traveling and I hate to imagine what has gotten inside since then. As for his shoulder, the bones were correctly realigned, Fëanáro, so you need have no fears about that. The pain and stiffness comes because the fall tore some tissue attached to those bones, but there is nothing we can do but apply salve and gently exercise the shoulder and wait." She walks around to Macalaurë's back again, and he watches her from the side of his eye while trying to look unconcerned. She douses the cotton with the sharp-smelling liquid I had found earlier. "Now this might sting a bit, love, so hold your father's hand tightly," she says, and Macalaurë grips Atar's hand with both of his, and when Nimelië presses the cotton to his wound, he bites his lips and holds Atar's hand so tightly that the tendons in his arm stick out. A single tear slips down his cheek, and when Nimelië removes the cotton and begins gently rubbing his shoulder with balm, Atar leans over and kisses the tear away.

~oOo~

When Nimelië is finished, Atar helps Macalaurë dress while Findekáno follows Nimelië around the room, asking questions, as we are both supposed to be doing. I tell myself that I am waiting for him to finish, but I know that really I am waiting for Atar to fetch the balms from Nimelië so that I can climb into Macalaurë's lap and press my face into his neck.

"I'm sorry, Macalaurë," I whisper, inhaling the soft, powdery scent of his skin. I hug him, and I am very careful of his sore arm, but I feel two arms circle me in return, even though I know it must hurt him to do so.

"Why are you sorry, little one?" he asks me, and I sob, "For making you fall!"

"Shh." He strokes my hair. "That will be our secret, Tyelkormo, and it will go with us until the ending of Arda." His voice is gentle, forgiving, and it makes me cry harder. He kisses my ear and whispers, "Do not cry, little one, or you will give it away."

~oOo~

Atar quizzes us on the way home. "What did you learn?" he asks, and I let Findekáno speak first for once.

Findekáno tells Atar of the sheep's heart in a glass jar that Nimelië showed him—only is it really Findekáno speaking? His voice is bright and lively, not like the little cousin I know who spends most his time with his eyes on the ground. Nimelië had a device too, he tells Atar, that lets you hear your own heartbeat. "She said that if I were to put it on Amil's belly, then I could hear my little brother's heartbeat too," he says, and I figure that he has finished—it would be like Findekáno to describe objects without really having learned anything at all—but he goes on to say that Nimelië told him to listen for the two separate parts of the heartbeat; that was the two halves squeezing separately, pushing blood through the body. "That's why our veins move," Findekáno concludes. "It is the blood getting pushed through them."

Atar is nodding in that way that shows he is impressed. "So, Káno, tell me," he says, and maybe no one else notices that he uses Findekáno's epessë but me. Maybe I only notice because such casual familiarity burns me inside like hot tea swallowed before it has been given a chance to cool. He gives my cousin a sly, sidelong look, the kind of look he gives my brothers and me when he expects us to figure out a particularly crafty riddle. "Can we really break our hearts then?"

Findekáno snorts with derision. "No! Of course not! 'Heart' and 'spirit' are different matters entirely."

Atar nods. "Very good, Findekáno," he says, and the sincerity in his voice makes my little cousin beam.

I dread his next words. "Tyelkormo," he says. "What did you learn?"

I open my mouth. I trust that words, answers will come out; they always do. But there is nothing. I close it and open it again, but still, nothing. Atar is staring at me now.

"What did you learn, Turkafinwë?" he asks, and I wince at the use of my father-name. Still, I cannot answer. "What did you ask Nimelië?" I can hear his voice hovering on the brink of impatience; a single wrong word—or another second of silence—and he will be angry with me.

"What did you ask?" he demands again, and I lower my eyes and watch my pony's withers rising and falling with her gate and answer, "I asked nothing."

"Did you forget?" he asks, and I shake my head. "You have disappointed me," he tells me. His voice is cool, dismissive. "You have wasted a day of learning. Tomorrow, instead of your horsemanship lesson with your cousin, you will do extra hours in the library, reading on the lore of healing. I am very disappointed, Turkafinwë," he says again, and I realize that—even though my secret is safe between Macalaurë and me—punishment has found its way to me anyway.

I am not like my brothers; I do not like waking early in the morning. Nelyo would awaken every day at the Mingling of the Lights to go hunting or sit in the library and read if he could. Tyelkormo springs from bed with the first note of birdsong and plays by himself until he makes enough ruckus to awaken the rest of the house too. And little Carnistir starts wailing for breakfast not long after, then sits at the table and won't eat.

But I have a bad habit of being stricken with songs in the middle of the night. "Stricken" is the best word I can find to describe my songwriting process. Like a drop of poison, a song circles in my blood until it lodges in my brain, and then, there is nothing I can do but play as I am instructed and hope to fumble the right notes in the right order to dislodge it. Unfortunately, this is a many-hour process, and when my brothers are rising from their beds and stretching in the mingled light of morning, I am just slipping beneath my sheets and succumbing to the exhaustion that has been beckoning me for hours.

But then come the nights of dreams, and I lie just beneath the surface of sleep and listen to the music in my mind until a note slaps against the inside of my head like a gong ringing against my skull and I emerge from sleep with a gasp and spring in the direction of my harp before I can even rub the sleep from my eyes.

Such is the case this morning, when I spring from bed, getting tangled in the sheets and falling to the floor, bumping my good arm—the one I dislocated leaping after Tyelkormo is nearly healed but still aches after too much exertion—and seize a harp lying in the corner and begin playing, sitting on the cold stone floor, all before the Mingling of the Lights.

"Macalaurë!"

It is my brother's voice that shatters the song I have been weaving in the air before me, and awareness leaks into my mind in gentle trickles. The harp in my hand is exceptionally dusty—and also out of tune—and the bed I had stumbled from was too big to be my own. Also, I do not have red sheets. Well, I do—we all have red sheets; it is Atar's favorite color—but I never put them on my bed, finding that I sleep better on blue or cream. Memories of the night before are pouring into my head now: Of going to Nelyo's room with him, of drinking white wine and talking about maidens, of climbing into his bed because the air in Formenos is so cold at night and the hallway between our bedrooms such a wide expanse of icy floor … Then nothing but darkness, music, and dreams.

"What in Mandos are you doing?"

Nelyo sounds too sleepy to be angry, and I yank my hands from the harpstrings and push aside the music wavering in the air before me to peer at him, sitting up in what I assumed to be my bed upon erupting from dreams, blinking at me with anger in his eyes that is diminished by the rumpled locks of red hair jutting like spikes from his head.

"I—I don't quite know," I say. The song is lying dormant in my head now—a tree inside a seed—ready to spring forth again with the slightest sprinkle of encouragement. "I had a song …"

Nelyo sighs, flops back down, and turns on his belly to bury his face in his pillow. "Well, could you at least sing a little quieter?"

Sing? I didn't even realize that I was singing.

"Was I singing?" I ask him.

He groans. "Macalaurë …"

"I'm sorry, Nelyo. You know how these songs come upon me. I didn't even realize that I was singing." I set his neglected harp back into the corner where I found it and cross the stone floor, wincing at the cold that—moments before—had been inconsequential to my distracted feet. I consider going back to my own room, but the thought of lying between cold sheets still stretched taut from yesterday morning is almost painful, so I slide between Nelyo's red sheets instead. My side of the bed is still warm from my body, so I know that I haven't been playing long. Still, I shiver and I press against Nelyo who—like Atar—never seems to be cold.

"Macalaurë!" he gasps, and I realize that I have put the cold bottoms of my feet on his bare calves. My feet and his legs jerk away from each other simultaneously, and he tips his face in my direction, looking out from his pillow with one bright, gray eye, and I mumble, "Sorry. What happened to the fire?" I am shivering so hard that my voice shakes.

"It went out," he says, and we both laugh at the obviousness of his answer. He rolls onto his side, facing me, and wraps his arms around me.

He holds me for a minute, until I stop shivering, then takes his arms away and says, "That's enough. Go back to your own side. The first time I wake up with someone sleeping in my arms, it's not going to be you."

I roll back over to my own side. There had been a time when, in Formenos, Nelyo and I shared a bedroom—before Tyelkormo was even born, during those strange years when Atar mostly slept in his study—but as a late twenty-fifth begetting day present, Atar and Amil told Nelyo that he could have his own room, if he wanted it. I kept expecting him to decline the offer, to ask for a new pony or a new longbow instead, but he said nothing, and that night, we slept in separate beds for the first time since I could remember coming to Formenos, and I cried until I thought the tears would freeze on my cheeks.

"What happened to the song?" he asks, and his voice is slurring, growing sleepy again.

"It's in my head," I tell him.

"So should I expect you to go exploding out of bed again in another hour, wailing like a wraith?"

"No, it's there until I want it to come out again. Go to sleep," I instruct him and lean over and kiss his cheek.

"Eww …" He rubs his face on the pillow, but he is smiling and flops facedown again and, within ten seconds, is snoring gently.

~oOo~
 

It is the third day of the week, my least favorite day, because this is the day when—from waking until bedtime—we do nothing but physical pursuits. Swordfighting, archery, horsemanship … alone, I like each activity for a few hours, but strung together one after the other like beads on a leaden chain, I quickly grow wearied and wish for the cool peace of my music room. To make matters worse, the morning's song is still stuck in my brain like a corn hull between the teeth, a flickering annoyance that makes itself known with every thought and move.

Atar cooks us a lavish breakfast in preparation for the day's activities—eggs, hot bread, fruit salad, and bacon—and that is the only good thing about the third day of the week. My shallow sleep the night before has left me wearied but famished, and even after Nelyo and Atar have finished eating, I am still going, until there is nothing left in the bowls on the table and I am even willing to polish off the piece of bread that Carnistir rejected after dragging it through his orange juice. I open my mouth to compliment Atar on the meal but he holds up a hand—his wrists already encased in leather bracers—and says, "Don't bother, Macalaurë. Your enthusiasm speaks for itself."

Horsemanship is the first lesson for the day. Atar will instruct the little ones first, in the ring behind the barn, while Nelyo and I lean back on our elbows, sitting on the small hill beside the ring, and watch. Tyelkormo—who fancies himself a great athlete and in fact is not bad for a fourteen-year-old—has been working on a short course of medium jumps, logs and bits of brush that Atar had Nelyo drag into the ring last week. Findekáno and Carnistir work around the edges of the ring: Findekáno is taking low jumps and Carnistir is learning to post at a trot, although he prefers to bounce around haphazardly and does so whenever Atar is not looking. Atar walks like an acrobat along the top rail of the fence and shouts commands. "Findekáno, keep you heels down! Carnistir, you're supposed to be posting your trot! Use your knees, Tyelkormo! Use your knees! For the last time, Findekáno, heels down!" and Nelyo and I laugh quietly at their misfortune of being little and inexperienced and subject to Atar's beginning horsemanship lessons, as we had been only a few years ago.

"Macalaurë, I do not miss that at all," Nelyo says. "Do you think Atar realizes how mean he sounds?"

"Yeah, I think he does. He has to be. Otherwise, you and I never would have learned horsemanship at all."

Nelyo laughs and does not agree or disagree. He, of course, would have learned horsemanship even if Atar had been soft and gentle with us, but I likely would have skipped lessons to sit in my music room instead.

When the hour is past and each of the little ones have been on the verge of tears at least once, then Atar dismisses them from the ring to cool their horses and remove their tack. Nelyo stands and drags me by my good arm to my feet, and with Atar, we commence moving the logs and bits of brush to the sides of the ring.

Last summer, Atar decided that Nelyo and I should learn dressage. Before, he always dismissed such strict riding as a pompous artifact that the nobility had learned from the Valar, but then he saw how sloppy we were becoming on the trail and his outlook changed. I was becoming lackadaisical with my posture and missing easy shots when we were hunting; Nelyo plunged through the brush once without looking, collided with Atar's horse, and they both ended up in the mud. Since then, Nelyo and I do an hour of dressage and an hour of the hard riding in the field that makes our adrenaline surge and tempts us into bad habits. The little ones sit on the fence and watch us; Atar will quiz them when we are finished about what we have done well and what we have done wrong, and—having struggled for years in the forge beside my father—I could imagine no humiliation worse until my four-year-old brother informed me that my elbows stick out when I canter.

Dressage pains me, not only for the humiliation of being shouted at by our father in front of our little brothers and cousin, but because it looks so disgustingly simple but in fact is terrorizing in its difficulty. Atar has us warm up with figure eights and cloverleaves at various gaits and paces, changing leads and attempting to signal our mounts without betraying our intentions to Atar's keen eye, then stands in the center and has us ride in a large circle around him—in direct hundred-and-eighty-degree lines from each other, keeping pace with each other without moving our eyes from the place between our horses' ears where we have been told it is acceptable to look. "Sitting trot," Atar calls and, in the same breath, says, "Macalaurë, you're slumping."

I grit my teeth and force my back straighter, until my palomino's jostling gait feels like it is driving my spine up into my skull. I sneak a look at Nelyo and he looks tall and comfortable—if not a bit bored—and Atar yells, "Stop looking at your brother, Macalaurë! And do stop bouncing."

I don't see how it's possible not to bounce a bit at a sitting trot, but it must be because Nelyo looks like he could fall asleep in his saddle if we have to do one more circle around the ring. He isn't bouncing a bit. He might be drifting on our old swing in the forest behind the house on a warm afternoon.

"Macalaurë! Stop watching your brother!"

I force my eyes to look between my horse's ears until Atar calls, "Good enough. Bring them in," which gives me leave to slump again and slow to a walk, allowing my aching back a well-deserved reprieve.

Atar also holds the great ideal that Nelyo and I should learn to match each other's riding. The concept alone is tortuous. Nelyo is my closest brother and friend but there are many differences between us. I only grew past his shoulder last summer, when I had a growth spurt and he stayed remarkably static; his stallion is almost four hands bigger than my palomino mare and much more spirited. And Nelyo has Atar's graceful athleticism whereas I am awkward like our mother. He enjoys the rigor and discipline of our weekly dressage lessons; I glance at the hourglass Atar sat on one of the fence posts and dejection washes my spirit in gray: Less than half of the hour has passed and the remaining sand trickles so slowly that it is almost as though it intends to ire me. Beneath me, my mare senses my unease and grows shifty and skittish, making me draw the reins in tightly and earning me a reproachful glance from Atar.

Atar instructs us to ride around the ring, side by side—I am mercifully permitted to ride along the inside, where it will be easier to keep up with Nelyo's much larger horse—first at a walk, then at a posting trot. Nelyo posts naturally, an extension of his horse's gait, but I bumble and tend towards fits of nervous laughter. Nelyo and I used to make up dirty songs to absurd, bouncing melodies that I would invent on my harp, and the rhythm of a posting trot always makes such songs come back to me. To make matters worse, I know I must look like I am humping the horse's neck, and that makes me laugh harder. Nelyo is giving me stern sidelong glances and tightening the reins on his mount, but I am biting my lip to keep from laughing and trying to urge my mare faster, with little success. "Lengthen your strides, Macalaurë," Atar yells. "Lengthen your strides!" but he might as well have asked for a cupful of starlight for all of the success that I find.

Nelyo has his stallion reined in so tightly that he is practically prancing in place and even Nelyo's graceful posting is starting to look stilted. I am wishing even for the jarring discomfort of a sitting trot. Atar is still yelling about lengthening my strides, but my mare doesn't want to move any faster and there is little that I—a young Elf only a fraction of her weight—can do to persuade her.

"Bring them in!" Atar yells, and I hear irritation in his voice. "What is the matter with you, Macalaurë?" he asks in a low voice when I stop in front of him. "You need to lengthen your strides to keep up with your brother."

"I tried," I say lamely. "She didn't want to."

"You have to show her who is in charge."

Atar tells me this a lot. Nelyo tells me less but still tells me this too. Even Grandfather Finwë once, when I was first learning to canter and was stuck on an ancient pony that hated anything faster than a walk, told me this. Show her who is in charge. I would like one of them to explain to me exactly how I am supposed to do that because the image of myself sparring against the flying hooves of a rearing horse—even a small one, like my own—does not do much for my confidence as a rider.

Atar must detect this from my expression because he sighs and tells me to dismount and swings into the saddle in my stead. Immediately, my palomino stops all of the pawing and shifting in which she has been indulging, and when Atar sets out in a circle with Nelyo, she keeps pace with Nelyo's larger mount so well that it is as though she is following Atar's verbal instructions to me rather than the unseen tugs and nudges that he must be giving her.

Nelyo and Atar match each other stride for stride around the ring, exchanging pleased grins as they ride, and I feel sorry for Nelyo, always having to be stuck beside a rider as incompetent as me when he clearly enjoys these arduous lessons. Three times around the ring, they circle—in excess of that which was needed to prove their point—looking as do the two halves of a mirror. Of course, Nelyo always was more our father's son whereas I am more our mother's and—despite the fact that the hair spilling down Nelyo's back is red while Atar's is black—their shared natural elegance, quick smiles, and bright eyes leave no doubt that they are related, and even wearing common clothes and dusty boots, a stranger from another land would never question that they are the King's rightful heirs.

Atar reins in my palomino and slips from the saddle with the airy grace of a summer breeze and offers me a leg up. I plunk like a stone in the saddle in comparison, and my mare shifts beneath me and stomps as though she has had a greater weight than mine dumped onto her back.

The three turns around the ring, however, have lifted Atar's spirits, and he only makes us do a few more circles—more successful than my first attempt—before having us do serpentines and languid spirals to finish the lesson.

And more sitting trot. I wonder: Was I mad before when I sought to abandon the posting trot for the sitting trot? Never mind the obscene songs and the strange motions I tend to make against the neck of my horse; at least I didn't feel a bruise forming on my backside; at least I didn't feel as though my spine was being rammed into my aching head. When the hourglass drops its final grain of sand, I am relieved to swing out of the saddle and walk up the hill to the fields where we will practice the rougher, more relaxed riding used in hunting, where we don't have to post or sit a trot but can half-stand in the stirrups and avoid being jostled altogether. Atar's good humor also seems to have made him forget to ask for the bout of critiques from our little brothers that Nelyo and I are usually forced to endure, for which I am glad. Tyelkormo runs up to me and clings to my leg—he has been more affectionate than usual with me since the arrival of Findekáno, as though he is trying to prove that he doesn't need to war with our cousin for the affections of an older brother—and begs can he please, please, please ride my horse up to the field.

I remember being Tyelkormo's age, looking up at Nelyo and thinking I'd never be so big and so skilled (I did, eventually, become both, although not as young as Nelyo did) and looking past him to Atar, unable to fathom being grown up, a husband and a father, although now, in the dreams I don't wholly share even with Nelyo, I am both. I remember when Nelyo received his first horse for his twenty-fifth begetting day and, after he took her for a few turns around the ring, he stopped and asked Atar if I could ride with him, and Atar lifted me onto the horse's back behind my brother, and I clutched his waist and hid my face in his back whenever he went faster than a walk. Tyelkormo is much more confident than I was at his age; he will ride tall and fearless and alone; he would take the reins if I offered them, even though his feet don't even reach the stirrups yet.

I answer him: "I wish you would. Frankly, all of that sitting trot that Atar had us do made my ass hurt."

He laughs as I lift him into the saddle, and behind us, little Carnistir giggles too. Atar appears like an apparition beside us and scoops his youngest son—who shrieks with delighted terror—into his arms. "What's so funny, little one?" he asks, and Carnistir snuggles into his neck and says, "Macalaurë said that the sitting trot made his ass hurt," and I wait for Atar's reaction—he might be angry or he might laugh—and he gives me a look of reproach but his eye twinkles as he does, and I know that it was more for my brothers' benefit than my own.

~oOo~ 

Archery is scheduled at the hottest part of the day.

Of all of the activities we do on the third day of the week, archery is the least tedious for me. I am not bad at archery, and my mind can roam where it will during the easier exercises. Furthermore, most of the time, there is little running around; we stand in one place—either in the field or in the forest—lined up with our targets and aim and shoot for the red patches that are worth more points. I went with Atar to Tirion once and watched my grandfather's archers in their training; the targets at which they'd aimed were perfectly round with progressively smaller concentric circles, worth more points toward the middle, and Atar scoffed and said that such targets were hardly a replication of real life. "When do you use archery, Macalaurë?" he asked, before I could voice my puzzlement at his scorn, and expecting a trick question, I stammered, "F-for hunting?"

"Well, yes. And for what else, in our people's history, did we use archery?"

Nelyo and I, of course, have hours of historical lore every week with our father. Nelyo loves it and, with Atar, has written great deals on the various events that plagued our people before they arrived in Aman, but during such lessons, I usually find it more desirable to watch the pinpoints of dust dancing in the light through the window, weaving in a rhythm that quickly becomes music in my easily distracted mind.

So I stammered again: "Um … war?"

It was a vague answer, yet it satisfied Atar, and he said, "Macalaurë, do not fool yourself that archery was invented as anything but a means to bring death to another being without the danger of hand-to-hand combat. Yet I know of no prey—or foe—that looks as a convenient circle with its heart and head both planted at its direct center."

So came our targets, abortive blobs with red splotches of paint to simulate the vital centers and splotches of blue paint to simulate the places that had organs beneath the hide, placed seemingly at random to simulate the fact that—upon approaching a target in the field—it usually does not turn its left side to you, lift its foreleg, and wait patiently for you to aim for its heart. Atar has invented other activities too that hone our archery skills. From the ground and from trees, we shoot at partially obscured targets, or he tosses a ball into the air and we all shoot at it, earning points if an arrow with our uniquely-coloring fletching is found embedded upon the ball's landing. My personal favorite of his activities, however, involves him donning light armor and running among the trees while we shoot arrows at him that have had their points dulled and wrapped in paint-soaked strips of cloth. He who leaves the most marks of paint on Atar's armor wins the exercise. It is always Nelyo who wins, although Tyelkormo, last summer, came close enough to my numbers to make me ashamed and a bit nervous.

But now, we begin simply, for Findekáno has never even held a bow before arriving here with us. My father is not a patient man, and so Nelyo teaches Findekáno the rudiments of archery while Atar works with Tyelkormo, Carnistir, and me. Atar has hinted to me about pursuing "independent study" while he works with my little brothers, but I have not yet pleased him enough to earn that luxury. Even little Carnistir has a bow that Atar crafted to fit his small body, and he shoots tiny white-fletched arrows at a target four feet away, shrieking with delight whenever he approximates hitting a colored patch.

Tyelkormo is a very earnest archer. For as gushing and hyperactive as my little brother is during a normal day, nothing makes him fall into the dire depths of concentration like having a longbow placed in his hands. For Tyelkormo's begetting day last summer, Atar commissioned one of Oromë's own apprentices to make a gorgeous white ash longbow for him—never minding that such an extravagant piece of equipment would normally be gifted only to a fully grown and highly skilled hunter—and it is rare when, in the course of a day, I do not see it in Tyelkormo's hands at least once, if not aiming real arrows at targets then pretending to conquer great beasts in the courtyards and gardens that his wild imagination twists into deserts and jungles.

My own bow is a shortbow that belonged to Nelyo when he was my age and before that belonged to Amil, when she was young. But it is not a woman's bow; Atar made it for her in the image of his own—it was one of the first gifts he gave her—to take along on the journeys they'd taken together, before their friendship changed into the obsessive love that had borne them to marriage in the same forest they had often hiked and hunted together as children.

Atar puts three green-fletched arrows into Tyelkormo's quiver and instructs him to shoot them in quick succession, landing one in each of the three red patches on his target. Tyelkormo's brow furrows in concentration and his arm snaps back and grabs the first arrow, and before I can even register the first being drawn back, it is embedded in a red patch and the second is being set and loosed, then the third, and I hear my little brother let out a sigh of repressed breath as he considers his successful completion of the task.

Even Nelyo, who is kneeling beside Findekáno, has stopped talking and crouches with his mouth still open—in the middle of a word—to ogle our little brother. "Excellent, Tyelkormo," Atar says. Disbelief in Atar's voice is the highest compliment in Arda because it is Atar that always says that nothing undone is impossible.

"Macalaurë?" he says, and I hear three arrows rattle into my own quiver

I try to ponder the target in the same manner as my little brother, imagining my three blue-fletched arrows embedding themselves into the three red patches on the target, but at that moment, the morning's song that has been wiggling around in my brain plunks into my throat and whirls around, begging to be sung. I swallow hard and toss my arm back over my shoulder, grab the first arrow, and aim along the shaft as Atar taught me to do years ago. It sticks in the center of the first patch. The second flies after it as the harp melody makes itself known to me in the oscillation of the wind in the trees. It also lands on target. The third is in my grasp now, and my blood is drumming in my ears—or is it drums?—and I draw it back and aim with lazy confidence, watch it cut through the air to the third red patch, and watch it land on the line where red becomes white.

"Decent, Macalaurë," Atar says, but it is dutiful praise and praise that wouldn't even have been given had I been Nelyo. Were I Nelyo, I would be made to retrieve the arrows and try again because an arrow lodged a half-inch beneath the heart of a charging boar puts a person a half-inch closer to death. Atar is fond of sayings such as these. Yet he does not often use them with me, and his undeserved compliment hurts worse than would justifiable criticism.

Carnistir is given three white-fledged arrows next—laid at his feet because he does not yet have a quiver—and he aims them one-by-one at the target four feet away. The first lands in white; the second lands in blue; the third erupts from his bow with a muted doink and lands in the grass, just shy of the target. Atar scoops Carnistir into his arms and kisses him all over the face. "You are a formidable foe, Morofinwë Carnistir!" he says, while Carnistir giggles and yanks at his hair.

I asked Nelyo once: Did Atar treat me like that? He smiled. Of course he had. Atar had treated all of us like that when we were little. "If he didn't, Macalaurë," said Nelyo, "what kind of loyalty would you feel for him now?"

I consider this. My loyalty to Atar does not manifest itself overtly, as it does in Nelyo and Tyelkormo, but it is there, a rushing susurration beneath my heartbeat that makes me proud to display the customs that we do not share with the other Noldor, that makes me find the Star of Fëanáro more beautiful than any other family seal in Valinor. The pendant that Atar gave me to wear to the midnight picnic—shaped as the star of our House, with a fire opal shimmering at its center—I still have yet to remove. Even now, it presses between my collarbones, warmed between the noonday light and my skin, and I find myself touching it when I need confidence, like now, when I return to retrieve the spent arrows without being asked, pushing the song from my mind so that I may repeat the exercise in a way that will make my father proud.

~oOo~ 

After the midday meal, eaten from cloth sacks beneath a tree, is swordfighting.

Archery I like. Horsemanship I can tolerate. Swordfighting I despise.

Swordfighting was once essential to the survival of our people. Before our arrival in Aman, Oromë taught our people how to make and wield weapons of war, including the sword. Valarin swords were ornate creations, with coils of flowers and vines pouring down the blades, more for display than for fighting. It was my Grandfather Finwë who made the first sword of unadorned iron that he and the men who would one day be his lords had taken from the earth around Cuiviénen and pounded into blades with rocks clutched in their fists. The first sword was almost obscene in its functionality—to wound and kill—but it was light and sat balanced in the hand, and my grandfather and his lords took their ugly swords and began to dissect the art of fighting, compartmentalizing it into simple blocks and thrusts that they taught to the rest of the people.

With the advent of swords, fewer and fewer of their people went missing and more Orcs had their black blood spilled into the rivers. On the Great Journey, swords were used to cut away obstructions and foes alike, and it was with swords at their hips that my grandfather and the lords of the Noldor first stepped onto the verdant shores of Aman.

The Valar were horrified by the hideous, simple blades at their sides, dented from use and rusted with the black blood of their foes. There was no longer a need, they said, in soft, patronizing voices, to wield such atrocities. Their soft hands took the iron blades from the hands of the Noldor, and they drove through key points in the metal, securing the swords as trophies to the walls of the palace and the lords' homes, mementoes of hardships survived and passed and reminders that such implements were no longer needed. The forging of weapons of war was prohibited, except by consent of Manwë and then only for ceremonial purposes, and swordfighting was reduced from a skill of survival to a sport.

All of the well-bred Noldorin boys in Tirion are taught swordfighting. Grandfather Finwë even holds tournaments in the palace square and each year a champion is crowned the Lord of the Blade. But sport has reduced swordfighting to impotence. To forge a sword of steel—or even iron, as were the blades of old—is a crime in our land. We learn and master the sport of swordfighting with only harmless wooden swords. And an art that was once deadly in its mastery has waned to a controlled dance that involves never touching your partner. To even brush one's opponent with a wooden so-called sword is to be disqualified; winning occurs only when a threat would reasonably result in a touch or with the disarmament of one's opponent.

Being the sons of the High Prince of the Noldor, we study the sport of swordfighting. But there is something more in my family, something that we do only in Formenos or in the deepest clearings in the forest around our home in Tirion, where the light is so faint on the graceful steel swords that our father has given us that—but for the resolute cold across our palms—we might be able to convince ourselves that we still fight each other with wood.

I was still small and Tyelkormo was but a thought of my father's when Atar began returning from Tirion with the old iron swords kept on display in the palace. With each trip, he'd bring a new sword, mounted on a polished oak plaque with brass plate beneath that said things like "Sword of Finwë, King of the Noldor, Used to Slay Orcs at the River Sirion." If Grandfather Finwë noticed that his swords were missing, he gave no indication to Atar, and a closet in the forge quickly piled high with them. The Valar were clever when they'd mounted the swords, for they'd driven nails through the places that would weaken the blade the most. Atar once swung one of the swords at a small tree in the courtyard and the blade snapped in two where the nail had been driven. He held the two halves in his hand and bowed over them with such regret and reverence that I thought it like the dream I sometimes had where Atar came to me in the middle of the night, held me in his arms, and wept.

We didn't see much of Amil in those days. Atar said that she was weary and that we should not disturb her in her rest. Our house was quiet—without Amil, Atar didn't laugh and rarely spoke—and Atar fed Nelyo and me all of our meals, bathed us nightly, and even baked the bread and washed our clothes, tasks that we'd never seen done by anyone but our mother. But while Nelyo and I studied our books in the library, Atar would go to the forge and we'd hear the sound of ringing iron, and when I looked in the closet in the workshop, another of the swords was whole.

One by one, the iron swords were returned to Grandfather Finwë's palace, held aloft not by nails but cradled on brackets, the edges honed to deadly acuity. And Atar began experimenting with steel, and the designs he knew so well from repairing his father's swords he improved, making weapons that were lighter and easier to use than anything brought from the Outer Lands. With these, he would take Nelyo and me deep into the forest, and we fought each other in clearings as our grandfather had once fought with his lords, as though our lives would one day depend on our success. No longer was a mere threat of harm enough: Atar drove us to our backs on the hard ground; we bruised and bled from where he struck us; more than once, I wept and Nelyo held me and begged Atar to be gentler. "There may come a time when gentleness is a luxury," he told us. "Do not expect that we should be afforded paradise forever."

Before that, I'd never questioned that the peace of Aman would be ours forever. I asked Nelyo once—huddled in his bed to save me from the cold of Formenos, speaking in a whisper on a night where, perhaps, I'd had too much wine—if he thought Atar mad, and he whispered back that he too had always doubted the eternity of Aman. "I feel it in my spirit, Macalaurë," he said. "I feel it in the same way that I believe I would know that you're my brother, that Atar is my father and Amil my mother, even if I was taken from you at birth. My spirit knows what my body tries to explain and cannot comprehend. We live in Arda Marred, where nothing beautiful can last forever."

But swordfighting is not something that is easy on a body with a mind as distractible as mine. Atar has made tough leather armor for Nelyo and me, and we do not use sharpened blades, but at times, the tip of his sword has caught my arm and opened my flesh with sickening ease. Nelyo is expert with a blade; the sword in his hand might as well be an extension of his arm; many times I would have sworn that he would have beaten Atar, but always, he ends on his back with Atar's knee on his chest and sword at his throat.

Tyelkormo, Carnistir, and Findekáno are still learning with wooden practice swords. Atar and Nelyo instruct them while I sit to the side, laying out the leather armor we will don once the little ones have returned to the house to do their afternoon chores. Tyelkormo is excellent—not surprisingly—and fearlessly athletic, bouncing from trees and rolling across the ground to assault Nelyo at new angles. Carnistir—even at the tender age of four—also shows promise and fights like a whirlwind, descending mercilessly on his opponent, bludgeoning Atar's sword aside with relentless tenacity. Findekáno has begun with the rudimentary attacks and defenses, but now, Nelyo is working to "open his style," he says, and I can see that one day he too shall easily beat me.

I lean back in the grass and listen to the bold ringing of wood against wood and try to imagine the steps that connect each sound to the next. I see each of my brothers as they are: Nelyo's tall grace, Tyelkormo's tireless athleticism, Carnistir's flurried mettle. Findekáno I see with his arms close to his body—timid and reserved—now and again drawn into greatness, stretching and blocking in such a way that he might have been Nelyo in his youth. And Atar, of course, duels in such a way that it is hard to detect where one movement becomes another; everything seems to be a component of a single fluid motion, like leaping tongues of flame.

Their clothes whisper against their bodies, accenting the gentle soughing of the wind, and every now and then, someone yells or laughs, until all the sounds merge into a churning rhythm, and I hum a wordless melody that snakes between the beats of sound like rivulets curling between islands in a delta.

"Macalaurë?"

Nelyo stands over me. His feet are slightly spread; his skin is colored by a healthy flush but he has not yet exerted himself into a sweat. I realize that the little ones' voices have receded; Atar is standing in the clearing, watching me from the side of his eye with his steel sword tucked under his arm.

All of the music is gone from my mind, gone into dreams where I can find it later and put it into sounds that will quiver in the air and draw lines connecting my thoughts to those of my family. I sigh and sit up; Nelyo laughs and crouches beside me to pick grass seeds from my hair, and in the clearing, I see Atar smile too.

"Sorry," I say, and Nelyo helps me to my feet.

We dress in light leather armor over our clothes: bracers on our wrists; leather vests that we tie up each others' backs; thin, supple fingerless gloves that keep our hands from blistering. Except for bracers to support his wrists, Atar uses no armor: His hands are callused against any damage the hilt of a sword could cause and neither of us have ever overcome his defenses to even come close to his chest. Nelyo and I begin with slow swordplay that gradually increase in complexity—Nelyo's doing, not mine—and Atar gives us instructions as we work. "Don't watch your hand, Macalaurë," he says, which is hard for me to do after he caught me last time across the backs of my fingers with his blade. "Nelyo, move your feet. You're getting lazy," which I don't appreciate because the complexity increases faster than I can handle, and within thirty seconds, Nelyo has slipped past my parries and taps the point of his sword into the armor on the left side of my chest, a move that would have disqualified him in one of Grandfather Finwë's sterile tournaments but wins Atar's acclaim. "A wound to the heart," Atar says. "You're dead, Macalaurë."

Dying doesn't mean a reprieve, it means I have to fight Atar next, and he is not nearly as gentle as Nelyo. I can barely block all of his thrusts, much less return with any of my own, and not a minute passes before he lunges forward, catches the back of my leg with his boot, and flips me facedown on the ground. He kicks me lightly on the backside and pokes his sword into my lower back. "Kidney wound; non-fatal, but you'll be peeing blood for a month." That's Atar's idea of kindness.

I am winded already, and my sore shoulder has begun low, protesting throbs, and I am glad to lean against a tree while Atar explains about offensive tactics. Nelyo has color in his cheeks and he nods eagerly, understanding all this jibber-jabber about slipping beneath defenses and outsmarting one's opponent. Next, Nelyo and I spar with two-handed swords so heavy that my arms ache, then switch our swords to our left hands—which we both hate—and finished fighting with swords in both hands, which isn't as bad because we can use mainly our right hands until Atar catches on and has us toss the right-hand sword away and fight with our left again.

"Very well done, Nelyo, Macalaurë," he says when I have lost again for the fifth time. "We're going to try something new now." From a pocket in his trousers, he withdraws a strip of dark silk. "Part of defending against your opponent is being able to use all of your senses to predict his next action. Nelyo, you'll be first."

Atar ties the cloth around my brother's eyes. "I'm going to spar lightly with you," he explains, "and when you are comfortable, I'll start moving faster. Listen to my body in space. Sense where I am going before I get there. My father will tell you, were you to ask, that one of the greatest Noldorin warriors was captured by the Black Foe and managed to escape, but not before they blinded him. He was the only warrior who ever defeated my father in a sparring exercise, and this he did without ever having seen his face."

True to his word, Atar begins lightly, and my graceful brother is reduced to jerky, waving blocks that find success at random. When Nelyo settles into a rhythm, Atar begins to move faster until Nelyo, always the achiever, thrusts his sword toward Atar's chest. Atar leaps away and brings his sword against the back of Nelyo's neck. "Decapitated. Death. Instantly."

Nelyo takes the silk from his eyes and hands it back to Atar. "You can do better, Nelyo," Atar says. "Macalaurë?"

The silk is still warm from my brother's skin when Atar pulls it across my eyes, leaving me in darkness. "Ready, Macalaurë?" he asks, and although I am not, I nod. "Begin."

At first, I try to have my sword in as many places in as short a time as possible, but then I realize something: I can hear Atar's body moving in the space in front of me; I can hear the air parting and falling back into place to make room for him; I can hear his feet against the ground. His tunic rustles against his arm; the leather of his bracers creak softly. His sword cuts a whispering swatch through the air, and mine leaps up to meet it. We spar harder and faster, and every time his sword dives for my flesh, mine is there to meet it. He jumps behind me; I hear his feet leave the earth; I hear his body swish softly through the air beside me, and I turn before he lands, and we fight now facing the opposite direction but I defend as easily as if I was never forced to turn at all.

It is with desperate strength alone that he defeats me, shoving my sword aside to find my throat. Cold steel kisses my hot skin, and I gasp.

He draws the silk from my eyes. I see Nelyo behind him, his eyes wide with incredulity. Atar is smiling. "You're dead," he says. "But that, Macalaurë, was the best fight you've ever given me." He drops his sword at my feet, an act of deference I have only seen him give Nelyo on the few occasions where Nelyo has nearly defeated him, and kisses my forehead.

~oOo~

We were in Tirion once during the sword-fighting tournament that Grandfather Finwë holds each year in the palace square. Uncle Nolofinwë had called Atar to counsel and, since Amil wanted to commission a new pair of workboots, the whole family went and stayed for a few days with Grandfather Finwë in the palace.

Tyelkormo wanted to see the tournament and begged Atar for days to be allowed to go. Carnistir was only a few months old, and Amil was weary with caring for him and so turned to Atar with pleading eyes. "Make your son happy?" So Atar went.

Lord Laiquiwë of the House of the Silver Orchard competed that year and won. For as long as I can remember, there has been cordial animosity between many of the lords and my father, and Laiquiwë was particularly disliked. He was born ten years before Atar, but Atar was a precocious child, and their fathers had them study together for much of their childhoods. Like Atar, Laiquiwë studied the lore of nature; his particular love was horticulture, which Atar found boring but at which he still excelled. Grandfather Finwë once offered Atar a post as the chief caretaker of his gardens, and Atar declined but turned to Laiquiwë and offered him the place instead. So Laiquiwë became a lord of his own house and was forever indebted to my father. His favorite activity, whenever we attended suppers at his house, was to comment on the rarity of Nelyo's red hair. "A red-haired son, Fëanáro," he would often say. "Who would have thought that the weak red factors of your wife's hair would utterly overcome the strong black factors in your own?" Atar would always fume upon returning home that night. "What is he implying? That I am not Nelyo's father?" and Amil would shush him and hold him until he stopped shouting. "Don't be silly, love," she would say. "Anyone looking into Nelyo's face cannot doubt that you are his father."

After his easy triumph, Laiquiwë stood in the center of the courtyard, victorious, wooden sword in hand, and turned in circles and smiled at the crowd. When his eyes found Atar, his grin widened. "Our own Prince Fëanáro from the lands outside Tirion has decided to join us this day!" he crowed. "Why are you not competing, fair Prince?"

Atar grumbled something dismissive and a little obscene that made half of the people around us chuckle and half of them gasp.

"Perhaps you fear that I'd give you too much of a challenge?"

Atar laughed.

"Challenge me then, if you find it a laughable thought that the King's champion could defeat an unproven prince!"

He did not stay unproven for long. The fight was intense—the swords moving so fast that they were a blur and the sound of wood meeting wood was a rattle—but over in less than a minute, when Atar knocked the sword from Laiquiwë's hand. Laiquiwë stepped back, conceding defeat, but Atar followed through anyway and swung his sword hard enough into Laiquiwë's throat to leave a bruise. With that move, he also disqualified himself as the champion, and once more, Laiquiwë had his pride handed to him by my father.

We had three days left to stay in Tirion after that, and the lords of the Noldor took to following Atar around and begging him to compete the following year. "Imagine the pride to have one of our own Royal House win!" they said. "Imagine that one unproven bested the champion! We thought that impossible!"

"Nothing undone is impossible," Atar told them, gathering Tyelkormo in his arms and flitting away to pester the cobbler about Amil's boots so that we could leave early.

We return to the house after two hours of swordfighting, sticky beneath our armor. Atar has stopped in the forge to check the progress of his apprentices, so Nelyo and I continue alone. Nelyo peels away his clothes as we walk, until he is wearing only breeches—unlaced—over his underwear. His shoulders and chest are slick with sweat, and auburn tendrils of hair stick to his neck like leeches. I am getting hungry and my shoulder has begun to throb so hard that I can count my heartbeats by it. "Must you always be naked?" I ask Nelyo. "It is no wonder that you are always in trouble."

He stops and squints at the gate in front of the house, ignoring me. "Whose horse is that?"

While I also squint at the horse—a young, antsy bay tied to the gate—he shimmies out of his breeches.

"If we have guests, Nelyo, perhaps they do not wish to be greeted by you in your underwear."

"Ah, Macalaurë, it's not guests. I just recognized the colors on the horse. It's a messenger from Alqualondë."

I sigh. As though Atar didn't assign hours' worth of lessons yesterday—not to mention the ordeals of today—now I will have lessons for my tutor in Alqualondë to do as well. Even worse, I cannot complain of it but to Nelyo, for if Atar overhears, then he will remind me that I was offered an apprenticeship with him instead, and he would have remained sensitive to the amounts of lore I was being made to study, seeing as how he is the one who makes me study it. That we live in the same house and he could therefore be sensitive to my music lessons from Alqualondë never occurs to him, and I do not press my relative fortune by mentioning it.

Atar and Amil fought hard when I was offered the apprenticeship a few years ago. My tutor is the finest musician in Aman, and he wanted me to live and study with him fulltime in his home. Atar wanted me to complete a basic smith's apprenticeship first, claiming that I was too young to go to Alqualondë to live. (That he'd left home to study with Aulë when he was only twelve years old also never seems to occur to him either.) The ensuing battle was terrible. There were only three of us then, but we were kept awake most of the night, as Amil screamed and Atar broke things and they both swore to leave the other and take me with them. I cried so hard—blaming myself for the family's shared misery—that I regurgitated hot bile that scalded my throat and Nelyo sent Tyelkormo—the best of the three of us at sneaking around—to filch the bottle of whiskey that Atar keeps in his office and made me drink of it until I fell asleep.

The next morning, I was told of their decision. I was free to take the apprenticeship of my choosing but not to leave my father's home—a conundrum, I saw, a sly way of assuring that Atar would win the battle—but none of us anticipated my tutor suggesting studies by correspondence in its stead, until I'd be given permission to go to Alqualondë and study fulltime.

Nelyo and I go to our rooms to wash up and change our clothes. I tug a comb through my hair and splash most of the sweat from my face and chest and put on a clean tunic. Now, I am really hungry, and my stomach is rumbling ominously, like thunder. Nelyo and I meet again on the stairs—he is clean and vibrant and his hair hangs free and frames his face like an auburn curtain—and from the dining room, we can hear the sound of plates being set and Amil's voice curling up the stairs.

"I wish you would stay and dine with us, for my husband should like to know the news of Alqualondë."

Atar will want to know the news less than she or Nelyo. "It would be an honor, my Lady," I hear the messenger say, and his Telerin accent reminds me of the first birdsong in the morning, "to dine at the table of the High Prince of the Noldor."

Nelyo and I enter the dining room. The stone dust across the front of Amil's tunic and the way that her hair is tied in a knot behind her neck make clear that she was interrupted at her work. There is a pile of letters in the middle of the table; I recognize my tutor's seal among several others that I do not know. The messenger has the silvery-dark hair of the Teleri and bright gray eyes. He smiles at us at our entrance.

"May I present to you my sons? Nelyafinwë Maitimo—my eldest—and his brother Canafinwë Macalaurë," Amil says.

"Begging your pardon, my Lady, but Macalaurë needs no introduction. My master speaks of little else in Alqualondë." He stands and catches me in a hug that gives me a start. "Brother in song, it is good to meet you at last!"

Nelyo would return the embrace and probably take the boy's hands and lead him to a sitting room to discuss mutual acquaintances and their shared profession, but I am not Nelyo, and I barely manage, "You are a student of the school too then?"

"Yes. He sent me on this errand to bring you your next month's assignments. He played your spring composition for us on the harp. Magnificent."

I feel myself blushing. Nelyo is giving me sidelong glances, his lips tight with suppressed laughter. I glare at him as Amil leads the messenger and me to the sitting room to discuss music, and he laughs silently, although his face falls straight when she calls to him, "You will finish preparing supper by yourself then, Nelyo, dear?"

~oOo~

No Noldo has ever been apprenticed to one of the Telerin music schools. When I went to the audition, I was the only dark head in a sea of silver. For a Noldo, I am neither tall nor particularly strong, but I felt massive and cumbersome among the tiny Telerin folk, and my Noldorin accent sounded heavy beneath their lilting song of speech.

When the invitation came to audition, no one in my family thought much of it. Noldorin boys didn't go to Telerin music schools. Everyone pretended to be proud, but really, we all thought it was something set up by my Aunt Eärwen after the schoolmaster heard me sing at her and Uncle Arafinwë's wedding feast. He had praised my voice then and my skill with the harp—which I had been taught at a young age by Atar and had continued to study on my own since—but I figured it to be the dutiful praise expected by royalty and nothing more.

But then the invitation came. I too figured it to be one of Eärwen's devices. She was, after all, an old friend of Atar's and always trying to please him by pleasing us, his sons. But a kernel of hope formed deep inside me, beyond the places that I will acknowledge even to Nelyo, and I dreamt at night of being selected and praised beyond even the innately talented Telerin children who would audition.

Amil and Atar refused to allow me to go to Alqualondë alone, which was well because I likely wouldn't have gone at all but veered from the road and camped in the forest until it didn't look suspicious to return home. I would have pretended not to pass the audition, and no one would have been surprised. That way, I wouldn't have to be turned away in the end, and I could nurture that little dream-kernel inside of me and imagine that I might, in fact, have made it, had I stayed true to the road. Atar, at first, wanted to go, but I evaded his presence with the excuse of his having to teach his apprentices and Tyelkormo. Stay home, I told him, for you are too busy to bother with Telerin music schools. I didn't want to face his righteous disbelief when my name was not called at the end of the audition.

Amil offered next, but Tyelkormo was still little, and I told her that her place was with him. I didn't want her patronizing sympathy when my name wasn't called at the end of the audition either.

It was Nelyo that I took. It was a four-day ride to Alqualondë, and we laughed for the duration of it, and I was smiling upon arrival at the music school. Nelyo's presence I could bear because, when my name wasn't called at the end of the audition, I knew he'd take me in his arms and say nothing.

Even though I spoke of it not, my brother discerned that dream-kernel within me, and he alone knew the hope I held for this audition. Before I played, he said nothing but kissed my forehead and went to sit in the front row—a giant among the wisps of Teleri—with his eyes closed and hands clasped, in reverence of my music.

When it came time to call the names, I slipped my hand beneath his cloak and found his hand. He squeezed my fingers tight in the secret dark, as the first name was called, "Canafinwë Macalaurë, of the House of Fëanáro."

And I became the first Noldo to attend a Telerin music school.

The night upon our return, my parents fought. The next night, a messenger was sent to Alqualondë, and I became not only the first Noldo to attend a Telerin music school but also the first to do so largely by post.

Nelyo and I will go to Alqualondë for a month in the winter. Nelyo will study and then go to Taniquetil, to the libraries of Manwë, with the hopes of taking his loremaster's examinations in letters and history, as last winter, he'd had his name noted as a master in the lore of metals. At the same time, I will complete my practical lessons in dizzyingly long twelve-hour days in preparation for my first public recital. For now, however, I am busy with the new language of theory and composition, and such is the material that I send monthly to Alqualondë.

Amil has built a roaring fire in the sitting room, and as the messenger speaks of the other students and of the performances done in the city squares, a visceral giddiness makes me long for the ending of summer and then autumn, for the passing of my begetting day and the Winter Feast, so that Nelyo and I may journey to Alqualondë.

~oOo~ 

When supper is finished, the messenger bids farewell and I excuse myself to my bedroom.

The letter-packet is huge—wrapped in thin, brown parchment—and I sigh. "Canafinwë Macalaurë of the House of Fëanáro, Formenos," it reads, in looping blue script. It is sealed with my tutor's blue and green wax seal.

I sigh again and open the parchment. Inside are stacks of documents: copies of notes from the school's library, compositions to master for practical lessons this winter, and of course, page after page of assignments. I sit on my bed and take out the first assignment, a simple review of theory concepts from the last month, pick up a quill from my bedside table and begin working. Tomorrow, Atar has already promised a full morning of lore for Nelyo and me, and afternoons on the fourth day of the week are reserved for washing, so I figure on finishing as much of my music lesson as I can now. The light outside the window is deepening into silver, and my mind is beginning to come alive.

There is a light tapping on the door.

"Enter," I call, without looking up, figuring that it is Atar bringing my little brothers, fresh from their baths, to kiss me goodnight.

But it is Nelyo. "I won't stay long," he says upon seeing me busy at my work, but I beckon him over and say, "Nonsense. After all the nights I have kept you from your tasks?"

He laughs. "How true." He holds out a thin letter in my direction. "This is yours. It got mixed in with Atar's and Amil's messages."

"By the water of Ulmo, more assignm—" I start to say but stop when I see the handwriting on the envelope, which does not belong to my tutor or anyone I know. The letters are round and careful. "Macalaurë," it reads simply, "House of Fëanáro, Formenos." I turn it over to look at the seal and my heart gives a nervous squeeze. "Oh my," I gasp, and Nelyo laughs.

"I thought you might react as such. You must have done something right in the forest that night to have a maiden write first to you."

In all honesty, Vingarië and my single night in her company at the midnight feast has been something I wish to push from my thoughts. I am too busy in Formenos to have the luxury of lying around, dreaming of a maiden who might or might not still be interested in me when we return in autumn. I have meant to write to her—Atar is sending our first messenger next week to Tirion—but have found other ways to fill my time instead. Writing to her, I know, will give her a place in my mind where she cannot be ignored. I envision myself, watching the horizon day after day, awaiting the silhouette of a messenger against the light from the south. I imagine longing coloring all my songs for the rest of the summer, making my sorrows known to all. I imagine the weeks passing with no response and being left to return home under the assumption that she has found another or that, perhaps, she had succumbed to the foolish abandon caused by wine when she tolerated my kisses.

Nelyo turns to leave, but I seize his sleeve and hold him back. "No. Stay," I beg.

"Why, Macalaurë? Would you not want to be alone to read what she writes you?"

"No. What if she writes and tells me it was all a mistake?"

Nelyo turns and gives me a sad smile. "They don't write you for that, Macalaurë. For that, you would hear naught until autumn." But he clears aside my papers and sits at the bottom of my bed while I read.

Dearest Macalaurë,

I am defying the counsel of my mother and my older girl-cousins in writing to you, but I don't care. They all say that it is proper for you to write me first. I've never been to Formenos, so I'm not sure how long it takes to get there, but I should imagine that you've arrived by now and settled. My brothers tell me that your father keeps you and your brothers very busy, so I thought I should write first and let you know that I understand if you can't find the time to write me back.

I hope your passage went well. I've traveled plenty between Tirion and Alqualondë, but I've never been on a long journey nor have I been to the wildlands beyond Valinor. To think that you have done both, many, many times! I would love to hear upon your return the tales that you must certainly be able to tell after so many journeys to distant places.

I suppose I shouldn't tell you this either, but I think about you a lot since the night in the forest. I want you to know that I didn't regret at all kissing you on the first night we met. I also want you to know that I don't usually do that, but it seemed right with you at the time. I cannot believe that I am writing these things to you, but the messenger is getting ready to leave the music school in an hour, so I cannot tear this up and start again, for I have not the time. My brothers told my parents that I fancied you, and Atar was impressed that I won the affections of a Noldorin prince, but I can honestly say that I was beside you the whole night and it never once occurred to me that you are King Finwë's grandson. I don't mean this offensively but just that you are a very comfortable person to be around. Atar said also that he knows your brother Nelyafinwë from King Finwë's court and that he is very gracious and wise despite his youth. He looks forward to meeting you too.

I am not trying to scare you by making you think that you must meet my father! I should not have written that, but I cannot unwrite the ink on the page, so I shall have to clarify that my family does not mind that I fancy a Noldo, even though they have always thought that I would marry a Teler. I should not have written that either! I am not trying to imply that we are betrothed or should even consider betrothal or even courting for that matter, but just that I fancy you, even though I always assumed I would fall in love with a musician and I assumed that meant a Teler, not a Noldo. But I am fine with falling in love with a Noldo too.

I should stop writing. I should never try to write a letter in just a few minutes because I write silly things that I know I am going to regret the moment I hear the messenger pass the gate. But I shall post this to you anyway, quickly, before I change my mind.

Affectionately yours,

Vingarië.

I look up and Nelyo, at the bottom of my bed, is watching me with his face pinched with concern, despite his assurances that bad news does not come by post. Many emotions are churning inside of me, not least of all confusion and longing, but happiness swells beneath all of them and knocks them aside, and my head rolls back and I laugh with abandon. The worry is ironed from Nelyo's face as he, too, joins me in joyful laughter.

~oOo~ 

My dearest Vingarië,

I just got your letter tonight, and I'm answering it straightaway instead of doing my lessons, although Atar isn't sending a messenger until next week. Firstly, do not regret what you wrote to me! Your words made my heart sing, for I was making myself miserable, trying to forget you, for I could not imagine that you would wish to continue seeing me upon my return in autumn.

I myself am not as happy in Formenos as are my parents and my brothers. I miss my family, especially my Grandfather Finwë and Uncle Arafinwë, and I miss being able to go monthly or so to the music school to perform my compositions for my tutor. At this rate, I will have forgotten all that I have written! Also, I have a new grievance in that I have found affections for you, and you are in Tirion or Alqualondë whereas I am many leagues to the north in Formenos.

I also do not regret the affections we shared at the feast, although it is also unlike me. If I may be as honest as you, I had never even kissed a maiden before I kissed you. I hope that wasn't too obvious. I appreciate that you took the initiative to write to me first. If you do decide to continue our relationship upon my return, I wish that you would remain similarly forthright because I am very nervous when it comes to matters of the heart. My brother Nelyafinwë (we call him Maitimo, by the way, which is his mother-name) whom you called gracious seems to have gotten my share of courage when it comes to love, for he has courted many times and even once asked a maiden to marry him. (They melted their rings.) It would have been safer and better probably for you to fancy him—he is also a lot better looking than me and probably better at kissing too—but I am glad that you chose me instead.

I have a song in my mind right now that I would like to play for my recital this winter, but it has a flute part, and I was wondering: Would you honor me by accompanying me? I know this is really forthright to ask, given that I have just confessed to fancying you, but you are the only competent flutist that I know.

I want you to meet my family too. My father can be intimidating, but he is also very funny and kind when he wants to be and he knows the best jokes of anyone besides my Grandfather Mahtan. My mother is very sweet and generous. As for my brothers, you described Maitimo perfectly, but it will be many years before you meet him, until you are entirely sure that you are in love with me—maybe not even until we're married!—because maidens always look at him and forget all about me. I have two baby brothers, Tyelkormo and Carnistir, and they are both huge pains for the most part but can be cute enough when they want to be. I'm not very good with children. I always figured that I would have no children, but then again, I'm pretty sure my father said the same thing when he was young and you can see that he has four children already and he and my mother want more, as many as Eru will give them, so maybe I'll change too. Or maybe my next baby brother won't be so weird and annoying and will make me take a liking to children. But it doesn't seem likely; it seems more like we get stranger and stranger because Maitimo is just about perfect, I'm pretty normal but a little quirky, Tyelkormo is wholly annoying, and Carnistir is just about unbearable.

What about your brothers? Maitimo knows them and fancies them friends. He says that they're older than you. I'm sure they're probably protective of you too. I would like to meet them and your parents and hope that they find me respectable.

It is getting really late. Maitimo is staying in my room tonight, and he is asleep at the bottom of my bed and snoring, so I should probably wake him up and make him sleep normally; then, he'd probably stop making such a commotion. Also, I have lessons all morning tomorrow and washing to do in the afternoon, and if you have ever had to do the washing for two parents, three brothers, and little cousin—as well as yourself—then you would know how big of a job that can be, especially if your family is as good as getting their clothes dirty as mine seems to be.

So good night or good day, whatever it is when you read this. I eagerly await your reply, and I will try to send you part of our song with my next letter so that you can practice.

Yours,

Macalaurë

~oOo~ 

I lie beside Nelyo in the deep silver of night, and I try all of the tricks that he has taught me to fall asleep. I count by multiples of three and four, up and back to three hundred; I try to figure out all of the prime numbers; I time my breathing and try to perfect the five-second inhales and exhales that make Nelyo sleep so soundly. I name as many of the Unbegotten as I can for our history lesson tomorrow, but get to number eighty-eight and can remember no more.

Murmurs of life disrupt the silence every now and then. I hear Amil and Atar come up to bed, tripping up the stairs—Atar is laughing, and Amil is shushing him through her own mirth—but their voices fade when their bedroom door clicks shut. Tyelkormo gets up and goes to the bathroom. Carnistir cries out, and I hear Atar's voice swinging like a pendulum across the length of the room as he paces and sings him back to sleep. The fire is still burning and pops every now and then. Nelyo flops onto his back—his brow creased and his lips tight—and mumbles something incomprehensible in his sleep.

I poke myself in the lower belly. Sometimes, unless I have to go urgently, this is the only way I can tell if I have to go to the bathroom. There is a faint pressure beneath my fingers, and the fire has made the room warm enough to get out of bed, so I ease myself from the bed, step into my slippers, and enter the hallway.

The hall is chilly, and even through the fur lining on my slippers, I can feel the achingly cold stones beneath my feet. The cold at first intensifies my need to use the bathroom, but once I am standing there, I can only force out a few drops, not even enough to warrant emptying the toilet, and the cool air is unpleasant on my exposed skin. I pull my sleeping trousers firmly around my waist and tighten the drawstring until it bites against my middle.

I shuffle back to my bedroom and open the door but stop there, leaning against the doorframe. Whatever chimeras have disturbed Nelyo's dreams have passed, and he is lying again on his side, at the far right of my bed, wrapped in blankets to his ears. I contemplate the liquid comfort of satin sheets, warm beneath my blanket, tossing restlessly to the rhythm of the fire. Before I even realize I have made a decision, I am staring at my closed door, shivering slightly, in the chilly hallway.

I descend the steps, careful to be soundless. Amil and Atar extinguished all of the fires downstairs upon retiring hours ago, and the silvery light through the windows ices the fixtures of the room but lends no warmth. In the sitting room, Atar has discarded a worn wine-red cloak made of wool across the back of a chair, and shivering, I pull it around my shoulders. My music room is at the corner of the house, a small, cozy room that looks back towards the forest through glass doors that open onto a stone patio where a fountain plays. Atar built the fountain for me after learning that I am inspired by the laughter of water against stone; in the early days of summer, all ice has melted, even in Formenos, and the water bubbles merrily, and fingers of sound work their way into my brain, teasing awake the music sleeping within.

I light the small fireplace with a flint held in trembling hands. The wood is dry and catches fire quickly, but I do not even wait for the small room to heat before tossing away Atar's cloak and taking my harp into numb hands. My fingertips tingle as I apply them to the strings, playing simple scales to warm up my hands. The scales blend into chords; the chords break apart and wander where they will into the melody that has been teasing the dark depths of my brain since this morning. In my mind, I dance to the song of my own devising—with Vingarië snug in my arms, the length of my body against the length of hers—and also we play, the notes of my harp and her flute entwining in the air.

I do not know how long I play, but the silver light outside the glass doors mingles with a faint glow the color of golden mead, the beginnings of morning. Still, the fountain laughs and the fire mutters. The room is hot now, and I am damp with sweat beneath my woolen nightshirt; my eager fingers tremble now not with cold but with excitement, as I hasten to record the notes that I know I can never now forget but nonetheless want to see as black ink against virgin parchment.

I write until my hand is stiff and sore and the notes have poured across the parchment before me—many pages of it—and my head suddenly aches with exhaustion. I fall onto the old sofa at the back of the music room and ball Atar's cloak beneath my head as a pillow. Gravity pulls sleep into my eyes with the weight of a brick of blackened iron.

~oOo~

Hunger awakens me.

My stomach feels like it has grown so empty and shriveled that it has begun to consume itself. Perhaps it knows when my eyes open because it gives a loud, protesting growl like a neglected animal. I have pressed my face into the sofa cushions in my sleep, so I cup my sore, hungry belly and roll over to face the windows.

Golden light floods the floor, and I leap to my feet. It is nearly afternoon, and I was expected in the library for my lessons with Atar three hours ago! The room is in shambles—hastily scrawled parchment covers the floor; my harp leans against a bookshelf; I must have kicked my slippers across the room during the night. With the fire and my woolen nightclothes and Laurelin's warmth, the room shimmers with heat. The untended fire has spilled ash across the hearth, but I have no time to straighten any of it, and without even taking the time to put on my slippers, I douse the embers and run to the library in my nightclothes.

Nelyo and Atar look up when I bang through the door, and Nelyo stops in the middle of reciting the address that Oromë gave the Unbegotten Elves upon their first meeting at Cuiviénen, but it is Atar to whom I look first, reading his bright eyes as I might a piece of puzzling literature written in another language. Is he terribly angry? It is hard to tell, just as it is hard to tell the kind of tree from which a log came once it is consumed in flame. He is unusually meticulous, and upon noting this odd detail, I grow nervous. He black hair is swept neatly out of his eyes and braided; his face is marred by neither dust nor soot; his clothes are pressed and correctly fastened in all the right places; his sleeves are not shoved up above his elbows. His jaw is set and his eyebrow twitches upon my entrance, but he does not speak. Nelyo's gaze has fallen to study a closed book on the tabletop.

"Atar, I'm sorry!" I burst out before he can speak first. "I fell asleep in my music room, and I didn't—"

He holds up a hand that bears no jewelry but a thin, gold marriage ring and my teeth click together with a force that hurts my jaw. "Speak not, Macalaurë," he says. "Sit. You will get done what you will before the midday meal, then you will wash and dress for your chores this afternoon."

His voice is smooth and soft, and I stand for a minute in confusion, wondering if this is some kind of trick, if my due punishment is forthcoming in some awful and creative way that I cannot fathom. "Do you defy me?" he asks after I have stood there for a few long seconds, and I shake my head and take my seat beside Nelyo, feeling ridiculous in my nightclothes and dirtied by the sweat now dried cold on my skin and sour with the smell of fear.

"Nelyo?" Atar says. "Please continue."

Nelyo faultlessly continues Oromë's address at the precise word where he'd left off upon my entrance, and I take up my lesson where I stopped last time, reading an account about the sundering of the Teleri from their Noldorin and Vanyarin kin. It is boring, but I force my mind to focus on the dry march of words across the page, fearful of awaking Atar's anger if I give the appearance of distraction.

Nelyo finishes his recitation, and Atar launches into a series of questions. What did Oromë's speech mean to the Eldar? How did the Noldorin perception differ from that of the Vanyar? What would he hypothesize the Avarin perspective to be? Does he feel that the Valar have kept their promises to the Eldar? Nelyo answers with a brisk confidence that pleases Atar and they drift into a casual conversation that I envy. The only conversations Atar and I have of late revolve around my lessons: What I should be learning and what I am doing wrong. I try to read extra-fast in hopes of impressing him with my diligence, but the words slip through my brain like water through spread fingers, leaving only a damp residue of meaning behind. Nelyo and Atar's conversation drifts onto a project they have been doing together, and Nelyo begins eagerly telling him of a trial substance that he has made that seems to have the hardness of diamond without the brittleness, derived from some experiments Atar had done last year. "I made a piece day-before-last," he says. "Its properties are excellent, but the color leaves room for desire. It is the ugliest white shade, like dirty milk."

"I'd like to see it, anyway, if you don't mind," Atar says, and Nelyo stands to retrieve it from his room.

Atar picks up the history book, turns to a page at random, and begins reading.

I stood once at the edge of the sea, here in the north, with the same feeling as I have now. The water lapped my toes, and it was like ice; I was filled with cold fear at the thought of stepping forward into the waves. The cold wouldn't kill me, but it would hurt, I knew, until I became accustomed to the agony. That is how I feel now, with Atar across from me, trying to decide if I should say anything about my lateness.

I take a deep breath. "Atar, I didn't mean to be late."

It was less spoken than whispered. Atar looks up from the book and places his fingers against my lips. "Hush, Macalaurë."

"You are not angry?" I whisper.

"Shh. No."

"How?"

His finger is still against my lips. He smiles. "Feeling defiant today, are we?"

"Atar, I just don't see how you could forgive me for being three hours late, then arriving in my nightclothes and barefoot—"

He pushes back his chair with a rude squawk against the stone floor that makes me cringe. He walks around the table and, taking my hand in both of his, kneels beside my chair. It feels strange to be looking down on him, to see his bright eyes tipped upward to meet mine. I am conscious as always of the way his hands warm mine, flesh that never feels cold until it knows his touch.

"Am I that awful to you, Macalaurë?"

I have seen him pick fights with Grandfather Finwë and with Amil, and always, he opens with dangerous rhetorical stabs such as this. Do I disappoint you that much as a son? Is marriage with me so completely unbearable? Once, a few weeks after Carnistir was born, when both he and Amil were edgy with exhaustion, she was cold and distant during supper—barely picking at that which he had worked all afternoon to make for us—and he asked her, "Are you that unhappy living with us, Nerdanel?" and she stood up, threw her napkin at him, and ran from the room. We could hear her crying as she pounded down the hall and up the stairs, and my brothers and I sat in silence, our appetites destroyed, until Atar shouted at us, "I worked all afternoon so that the three of you can sit there like a bunch of ungrateful slobs?" and pushed back his chair so hard that it fell over, as he stood to go after Amil.

I wonder: Was this one of those questions now? Would he attack my answer like he attacked Amil that day, as she sought refuge in their bedroom, and they screamed at each other for hours, until we heard her beg in a voice devoid of all strength, "Please, Fëanáro, leave me …"

"N-no, Atar," I stammer. "But I—"

"Do you think that I was never thirty-nine years old and wearied by all of the lore and lessons I was being made to learn?"

Could I think that? My father who drank of knowledge with the relish of sipping a fine wine? He must see my answer in my eyes—although I dread giving voice to it—because the hard fire in his eyes dims and softens, and his hands tighten on mine. "Being the eldest son of the King is a gift and a curse, Macalaurë. My father always expected that I would follow him to the court, that I would lead our people as he had so proudly done. But my heart lay in other places." His eyes become distant, as though he is looking back at that time, at the tiny image of an unsatisfied youth, a single memory among many more overwhelming in their importance.

"But Grandfather was still proud of you, Atar."

"Of course he was. And do you not think that I am proud of you?"

Breath sucks into my chest with surprise. "But my brothers … Nelyo with his lore and Tyelkormo is excellent at the lessons in sport … even little Carnistir makes you prouder than I do."

"You tell me that the sound of water inspires you, so I build you a fountain. You receive an invitation to an audition and the desire in your eyes takes my breath, so I send you to Alqualondë. I was given a baby son with a voice greater than that of the Valar, so I put a harp in his hands. Do you think I am not proud of you, Macalaurë?" His hand rises to the star at my throat. "The opal you wear was gifted to me by Aulë when I finished my apprenticeship with him and passed my master's examinations. Opals of this brilliance are found only in the Outer Lands; he made none for us in Valinor, and this is the only one of its kind to exist in our land. Likewise, the metal setting, if you'll notice, is not silver. It is brighter and stronger than even the finest silver, for it is mithril, and it too comes only from the Outer Lands. Aulë gave me a piece of it, and with it, I made two things: the pendant which you now wear and your mother's betrothal ring."

"But Atar," I say, "I never saw you wear this."

He smiles weakly. "Treasures can make us into fools, Macalaurë. Rather would I have kept it hidden and safe than chance that it should become lost or broken from being worn. But to you I gifted it without qualm, for your treasures you share freely with all. Never has one asked you for a song and had you decline. Your music puts joy into hearts that have known only sorrow.

"Your baby brother was tormented by nightmares last night, and thrice he awakened and I walked with him, trying to soothe fears more powerful even than the love with which I comfort him. As I walked the third time, and he wept against my shoulder, I heard the faint sound of music. He heard it too, and he stopped crying to listen, and within only three bars, his fear was gone. It was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard.

"You know, Macalaurë, that I doubt all but that which I can see and touch, that which makes itself known to my mind and senses, yet each night, before I fall asleep, I speak aloud the names of my four sons and send them to Eru, for if Eru does care for our people as we are told by the Valar, then these are the names I wish him to remember first when deciding who in this world is most worthy of his unquestioning love."

My eyes sting, and only when Atar raises his fingertips to my cheek do I realize that I am crying.

"Do not cry, Macalaurë, my love. It is I who should be grieved, for if you did not know the love I have for you, then that is my failing alone and none of yours." With his thumbs, he gently closes my eyes and kisses the tears from my lashes, and the burning behind my eyelids and the tight soreness in my throat fade as nightmares upon the first light of morning.

"Amil?"

Yavanna is just beginning to come alive beneath my hands. Her body curves as she looks over her shoulder at the flowering vines pouring from her basket and taking root in the earth, and she is just beginning to wear the look of serene peace that should belong to the creator of all plant and animal life on earth. If I take my eyes from her marble face, though, I will lose concentration on that singular piece of cheek that is too rounded, too soft. I hate to admit it, but it is momentarily a dilemma: Do I turn and acknowledge my child? Or do I seize the inspiration that has evaded me until this day, this very moment in time, and perhaps might never deign to grace me again?

I sigh and turn. Macalaurë stands in the doorway, his hand resting on the frame, his fingers curling and uncurling nervously. "Amil, I'm sorry," he says. Macalaurë, I suppose, understands the fleeting gift that is inspiration better than his brothers, although he is also blessed with the ability to tuck the songs that come upon him into a corner of his memory for later use, a gift I do not have but envy.

I force myself to smile. "No mind, Macalaurë. What is it?"

"Well, Findekáno …" He looks down at the floor and begins twisting one of his braids between his fingers. Today is washing day, and Macalaurë is supposed to be doing the week's washing with the help of his brother Tyelkormo and his cousin Findekáno. His hair is bedraggled and damp; his gray tunic is frumpy and speckled with water. I wait for him to continue, and finally, he looks up with eyes like pools of water and says, "Can Findekáno have a lesson with you instead of doing the washing?"

"Who will help you then, Macalaurë? You and Tyelkormo cannot finish it all alone."

"Maybe Nelyo?"

"Nelyo is gone into town with your father. And before you name Carnistir," I say quickly, "then he is too little and I just put him down for a nap besides."

"Oh. Well …"

"What is the matter, Macalaurë?"

He sighs. "Well, it is just that Findekáno doesn't know how to do the washing."

"Doesn't know?"

"Yes, I mean, I guess we take it for granted because it is easy, but he doesn't know the right combinations of soaps or when to use hot or cold water—"

"You cannot teach him, Macalaurë?"

Like a careless foot upon a twig, my question snaps the frail composure that my second son has maintained. His voice rises; his slender fingers clench into frustrated fists. "I've been trying, but Amil, we haven't gotten a bit done yet! All he does is get in the way! Tyelkormo is getting annoyed and he said something to Findekáno that made him cry …" He trails off and half-turns back to the doorway. "No mind. You are busy. We will carry on."

I am tugged again between my second son and the lump of silky green-veined marble behind me. I turn and allow my eyes to drift over Yavanna's face. She looks wrong—her cheeks are too rounded and cherubic to give her the look of serenity I had tried to capture with my hands—but I no longer know how to fix her. I reach back to untie my apron. "Macalaurë, wait. I will help you."

I follow him and find the back garden in disarray.

Our family accumulates intimidating volumes of washing each week. Not only do our sheer numbers alone make it a formidable task but the kind of work we do results in soils that are baffling to clean. Fëanáro's forge tunics stopped coming clean years ago and are now permanently dingy; Nelyo acquires ink spots in alarming volumes; Tyelkormo could grow vegetables on some of his clothes by the amount of dirt and mud caked on them. And Carnistir presents laundry dilemmas beyond even my many years of experience. Last week, he climbed into Fëanáro's workshop through an open window and dumped an entire bucket of blue paint over his head. I have been picking blue paint chips out of his hair since.

Macalaurë has filled the washtubs and started sorting the clothes into piles, but they have since been strewn about the yard. I pick up a pair of my husband's trousers and find a muddy footprint roughly the size of our third son's boot smeared onto the seat. Currently, Tyelkormo is leaping at a tree branch just beyond the reach of his outstretched fingertips, and I see one of his older brother's underwear ensnared among the nascent blossoms. Findekáno is sitting with his back against one of the washtubs and sobbing.

Tyelkormo gives a monstrous lunge and closes his fist on the underwear. For a moment, it holds his weight, and he dangles from the tree branch, his slender little body twisting gently. Then there is a loud ripping noise and he lands hard on his backside beneath the tree, and I have two little ones in tears.

I nudge Macalaurë in the direction of his brother while I go to Findekáno. Upon taking his tense, trembling body into my arms, he immediately sobs, "But I don't know how, Aunt Nerdanel!" in that tiny voice that annoys me and awakens my urge to mother him at the same time.

"Hush, hush," I say, stroking his silky hair. "No one is asking you to do anything."

Evening is slowly sapping the gold light from the afternoon. It is growing late. Soon, Fëanáro and Nelyo will ride through the gate, weary from a long morning of studying and an afternoon out riding, and Macalaurë and I will need to heat up the supper while they wash up. Fëanáro will be in no mood to hear of another afternoon wasted because of the shortcomings of his brother-son.

How can a child know so little? I wonder, as I hold Findekáno and try to soothe his tears. Across the garden, Macalaurë has found much greater success with his little brother, and Tyelkormo is already running around again—his bruised backside quickly forgotten—and plunging through Macalaurë's neatly sorted piles of laundry in pursuit of a moth that flutters across the grass.

When Finwë told me that Findekáno lacked the practical education of my sons, I figured that he would need a bit more coaching in craft, perhaps a few lessons in the more intricate of chores, such as the cooking tasks that are appointed to him and Tyelkormo. I assumed that he would know how to sweep out the kitchen, that he would be capable of setting a table for supper, that he could do the washing. I never figured that each simple task I would appoint to him would be answered with his wide, clueless stare. "But Aunt Nerdanel, I don't know how."

Because it was my idea that he should come along with us, Fëanáro does nothing to help me in the instruction of his brother-son in such tasks. He sits with him for lore lessons; he holds his hand and guides him in forming his letters, just as he did our sons; he explains with his usual meticulous precision about setting gemstones and chiseling designs on jewelry, but when it comes time for chores, his eyes go to me and his eyebrows twitch upward. You wanted him along are his unspoken words.

There is no time for explanation now. Macalaurë and I hasten to finish the washing and hand the clean clothes to the young ones to be hung and dried, and I wonder, in an irksome little voice that I try hard to suppress, why it is considered virtuous for a child of royal blood to grow up inept in all practical matters.

~oOo~

When Fëanáro expects to be away with Nelyo for an afternoon, he cooks supper the night before and leaves it in the root cellar to be reheated the next day.

He does so because Macalaurë—who is easily distracted and more apt to sketch musical passages in a spill of flour than he is to pay attention to what might be boiling on the stove—is a notoriously terrible cook. In my years of traveling, both alone and with Fëanáro, necessity taught me to cook, but Fëanáro refuses to have me do so now, saying that with a husband and two nearly-grown sons, there is no reason why I should have to do their duty for them. So Macalaurë and I haul pots and cauldrons of cooked supper up from the cellar and I place it over the stove to reheat, and within just a few minutes, the enticing aromas of a supper that should have taken hours to prepare are filling the kitchen.

The front door slams, and I hear Fëanáro and Nelyo laughing over something, a joke only the two of them would understand, likely delved from the depths of books into which I and my other sons do not venture. Their heavy footsteps bring them into the kitchen in a swirl of light cloaks, still in their riding boots, their windblown hair in disarray around faces colored by the brisk air. Nelyo beams when he sees me, and I kiss his cool cheeks and smooth his unruly hair. "Really, Fëanáro, Nelyafinwë. Must you wear your boots in the house?"

They cast identical looks over their right shoulders at the trail of dirt they have left across the clean kitchen floor. Fëanáro shrugs. "No mind. Carnistir is cleaning the floors tomorrow anyway as part of his punishment."

I sigh. Carnistir bit his father on the ear last week, hard enough to make him bleed. Still, scrubbing the floors seems a bit much for a child only four years old. Sensing the protests I am about to make, Fëanáro steps close to me and draws me into an embrace. His cheek presses against mine; like Nelyo's, the brisk evening air has cooled his skin, but beneath, I can feel the burning in his flesh that is never quenched nor subsides. He smells of the outdoors, of fresh winds and the infant leaves of spring. His breathe is warm in my ear as he whispers, "Now what kind of greeting is that, Nerdanel, to your husband who loves you more with every beat of his heart, to chide him for the mud he tracked upon the floor in his eagerness to see you?"

I slip my arms beneath his cloak and circle his narrow waist, seeking the feel of his body beneath two frustrating layers of tunics. I prepare a smart-aleck reply to his excuse, but as my lips open to speak, he kisses me and slips his tongue into my mouth.

My feet take a step back and my arms jerk his body harder against mine, appalled at his forthrightness when Nelyo is only a few paces away, peering into a pot of stew and sampling it with his fingers, even as a tingle of pleasure starts in my mouth and travels down the length of my body. He knocks my arms from his waist and steps away, teasing me with the intensity of his stare as he widens the space between us.

"Atar!" Carnistir crashes into the backs of his legs, and the spell between us is broken. The feeling I get in my body when I know that I am desired by him—the feeling that wine flows through my veins instead of blood, that I am a perfect image upon a tapestry and not the imperfect rock of a woman who does not deserve his lust—flops aside to make way for my real body, the awkward one with hips and waist and breasts too soft from bearing and nursing four children, the weary one. Fëanáro twists to lift Carnistir into his arms—still rumpled from his nap, with sleepy pink warmth in his cheeks—before he can claw his way up Fëanáro's cloak. It was Macalaurë whom I'd sent to awaken his littlest brother, and he comes into the room now and surprises me by going right to his father to kiss him hello.

"Greetings, Atar," he says, his voice, even in mere speech, as beautiful as a song. Once, my husband and our second son seemed destined to always miss each other in their attempts to find the relationship that Fëanáro established so easily with Macalaurë's brothers. Like arrows between camps, each time one reached out, it only wounded the other. But at last, it seems, the arrows have collided in midair, hurting neither party and resulting in a truce after thirty-nine years of conflict.

"How do you fare, Macalaurë?" Fëanáro asks, and I stand tense for a moment, wondering if their newfound camaraderie will entail Macalaurë telling his father about his cousin's continued ineptitude. But Macalaurë suffices to say, "I am well," and ducks free of Fëanáro's one-armed embrace to explore a tray of lumpy brown hors d'oeuvres that Nelyo has just removed from the oven. I have no idea what they are, only that Fëanáro left them with instructions to bake them for fifteen minutes. Knowing Fëanáro's tastes, I was afraid to even sniff at one.

"What about you, little one?" Fëanáro says to Carnistir. "How do you fare on this lovely day?"

Carnistir bares his teeth and prepares to bite Fëanáro on the neck, but Fëanáro quickly says, "What did I say about biting?" and Carnistir pauses with his lips skinned back from his teeth like a rabid dog and his eyes crinkled into a pout.

"But Atar, I love you. I won't make blood come this time, I promise."

"How about a kiss instead? Kisses don't hurt."

Macalaurë pops one of the brown lumps into his mouth, even though it is still so hot that his face pinches with the heat and he has to bounce it between his teeth to keep from burning his mouth. "These are good, Atar? What are they?" he asks around the lump of hot food rolling around in his mouth.

Carnistir pecks Fëanáro on the lips, then bites into one of his braids when he turns to acknowledge Macalaurë. "They're snails," he says, setting Carnistir on the floor to help Nelyo remove them from the baking sheet. "A Telerin delicacy."

Macalaurë retches and spits the half-chewed snail onto the floor. Carnistir scrambles over to it, and before I can say, "Ah no, Carnistir, don't!" pops it into his mouth and chews with a contemplative look on his face.

"Maybe we've found the secret to getting him to eat," Fëanáro says, scraping the snails from the sheet and into a big ceramic bowl. "Maybe we have to half-chew his food for him."

"This is good, Atar," Carnistir tells him earnestly, chomping the snail in his back teeth. "They taste better cooked."

"Have you eaten them raw?" Fëanáro asks casually, without looking at Carnistir.

"Yes, Turko told me he'd give me a gold necklace if I ate one. It was slimy except for the shell. That was crunchy, like eating a bug."

Macalaurë gags so hard that I have to pat him on the back. "Carnistir, please," he moans.

"He never gave me the gold necklace either."

"Well, we'll have to ask him about that, won't we?" With a towel, he lifts the bowl of snails and starts toward the dining room. "Is the table set?" he asks me, to which I can only nod and pat poor Macalaurë harder on the back.

~oOo~ 

After supper, Fëanáro and the children play handball in the back garden, while I watch them from the lounge chair that Fëanáro built for me after Carnistir was born, so that I could be outside with them without growing weary. My long day is nipping at my heels, bidding me to sleep, but I like too much the image of my husband playing games with our sons and his brother-son in the fading light of evening to slip voluntarily into sleep.

Macalaurë and Nelyo play against Fëanáro, Tyelkormo, and Findekáno. Carnistir, who is too little to understand all of the rules, is allowed to play for both teams as long as he doesn't bite. If he bites, he knows he will have to sit on the lounge with me. Fëanáro and Nelyo are quick and jovial as they play, making deliberate mistakes to give the little ones an advantage. Macalaurë plays only because his brother does, but he is more confident than he was last summer, and when he scores his first point, there is a look of naked shock beneath his smile. Tyelkormo is intense, taking seriously the small nuances of the game and throwing a fit whenever someone strays even slightly outside of the rules. Findekáno is hesitant—reminding me a lot of Macalaurë at his age—but so obviously happy to be running around in the grass with his cousins that my spirit sings with joy for him.

When Nelyo and Macalaurë were still little—long before Tyelkormo was conceived—I'd played with them, teaming up with Macalaurë against Fëanáro and Nelyo. It was after one of these games, early one summer, and after tucking our exhausted sons into their bed, that we retired to our own bedroom and peeled the sweat-soaked clothes from each other, laid in our bed beneath the stars, and tasted the salt of the other's body, and I pushed Fëanáro deep inside me and vowed never to let him go.

Not knowing that horrors sat on our threshold and watched our love with hungry, jealous eyes; not knowing that I would not touch him in love again until we begot Tyelkormo, nearly two decades later.

Sensing my thoughts, Fëanáro meets my eyes across the garden, taking his eye from the ball so that Tyelkormo can roll it between his feet and score. Don't … His voice is inside me, in the place where only my deepest hopes and fears live.

I close my eyes.

"Amil?"

Telperion has deepened into night. Nelyo is wiping the sweat from his face with a handkerchief and laughing with Macalaurë. Before me stands my little Tyelkormo and my brother-son. "Findekáno and I made up a poem for lessons with Atar. May we speak it for you?" Tyelkormo asks. In the dim light of evening, their eyes might be gray, like the rest of ours.

"Of course, my loves." I lift myself onto my elbow and try to fortify my voice against the lingering traces of sleep still foggy in my throat. They exchange glances and Tyelkormo begins. Fëanáro drifts behind them and sits behind me on the lounge, cradling my head against his chest.

Tyelkormo speaks with a bold voice, doing the dialogue in made-up voices like Nelyo does when reading stories to them. He relishes the attention, bending his voice toward our laughter. Findekáno is a bit more timid, but weeks with his cousin have taught him to at least impersonate boldness. I make sure to laugh just as loudly for his lines as I do for Tyelkormo's.

~oOo~ 

Fëanáro bathes our children and tucks them into bed after the game, allowing me to retreat again to my workshop.

Telperion's silver light casts Yavanna's face in a delicate frost, the faint light settling only on the deepest curves, bringing my errors harshly to my attention. I open all of the drapes and sit on a workbench across the room from the statue, done now in stark monochromes of silver and shadow, all distractions of green marble and golden light removed. My fingers bury themselves in my hair and tug in frustration: I can see the existence of errors but only in a broad, general sense. My keen perceptions from earlier gone, I cannot isolate the points within the statue's features where I have erred.

In frustration, I blame the lack of light and, standing so abruptly that the workbench is knocked backwards with a strident bark, circle the room and tear the drapes from the window, allowing a bit of extra light to come through each window.

Still, it is not enough.

I close my eyes and ruminate upon the memory of the statue, playing my inner eye over each grain of each feature, but the mistakes will not reveal themselves to me.

I imagine myself throwing a drape over the statue and hiding it from view—perhaps forever—flawed and unfinished.

Hands come to rest on my shoulders. So intent was I upon the image of the drape going over the statue, falling to fill her imperfect curves, blanketing the worst of my shame, that I did not feel Fëanáro approach. My shoulders twitch, but I restrain myself from jumping in alarm or crying out, and his warm hands cup me where my neck meets my shoulders, working at the stiff, sore muscles of my upper back with his thumbs, coaxing from my body tension that I hadn't even realized was there. He works his hands up my neck and into my hair, and I lean into his touch. My eyes have fallen closed again, but even the warm bliss of his hands cannot distract me from the image impressed behind them.

"I wish that you would sleep in bed with me and not sitting on your workbench," he says in my ear.

"You know that's not it, Fëanáro."

Of course he knows. I can feel his thoughts beside mine in a swirl of heat. He sees the flawed statue just as I do. Only he perceives the error that I cannot. Gently, I prod into his mind, wishing to find even a shred of a clue, but he is preoccupied with the touch of my skin beneath his hands and distracted by trying to push my tunic from my shoulders to massage the bare flesh beneath. His hands flit to my chest and loosen the laces on my tunic. Cloth slips from my shoulders, but I stop it from falling beneath my breasts, and I feel his hands hesitate before cupping my shoulders and resuming their blissful work on my tired muscles. I know where he wants such pleasing touches to lead, but I am wearied by the shame of having my imperfect sculpture revealed before his critical eyes, as I might be to have my naked body scrutinized while in disgusting disarray.

This also he perceives. He kisses my hair and arranges my tunic back over my shoulders, although the front still hangs open. I half-turn to contemplate him—wondering why he has so quickly abandoned his desire—but he sits beside me and covers my eyes with his hand. His lips he places against mine but it is less a kiss than simple and pure contact, flesh against flesh

Go back. I hear his words less than I sense them in the feeling of his breath against my mouth and the movement of his lips—and the gentle meandering of his thoughts into mine.

I feel my eyebrows scrape against his palm as they are raised in confusion. "Go b—" I begin, but in that moment—as he deepens the contact between our lips into a kiss—the memory flies into my brain and shatters the image of the imperfect statue before me.

Amil?

I hear Macalaurë's voice, but here in the place of memory, I need not acknowledge him, and my sight focuses upon a sliver of cheek that is too rounded, imperfect. My fingers caress it in memory, marking the places where the chisel will gently slice away stone, where I will sand it to blend with the rest of the statue. I lay the length of my finger over the imperfection; without it, the statue is perfect.

I gasp, knock Fëanáro's hands from my eyes, and fly from the workbench. In my mind now is Yavanna's perfect peace as I remember it from childhood, when she would stand in Aulë's workshop to survey Fëanáro's work and mine. "You have taught them well," she'd said to Aulë, her face calm and resigned to the fact that we'd torn the earth in order to acquire the stones with which we sculpted. I asked her once how she could bear the differences between her and Aulë, and she told me that love made any odds surmountable, all the while wearing the perfect look of peace that I approach now with steady, excited nips of my chisel as Telperion deepens into night.

I stand back to admire the changes and turn to ask Fëanáro, but he is gone. I am aware of a tugging ache in my shoulder, as though I have bricks tied to my arms, and I turn to the windows, from which I've torn the drapes, and see the silvery trees gilded by the first blushes of morning. I brush the dust from my tunic and trousers and discover also that I never tightened the laces that Fëanáro opened hours earlier. My skin is cold beneath; only my hands, which have been busy at task for the last several hours, retain any warmth. With weariness rolling like a leaden ball around my head, I leave the workshop and climb the stairs to the second floor to make the very long trek down the hallway to our bedroom suite.

Fëanáro sits in the rocker in the front room, holding Carnistir in his arms. Neither stirs as I softly close the door behind me. In this rocker, he used to hold Carnistir as a newborn, feeding him from a bottle and rocking him to sleep many times throughout the day and night; often, I would find them as such then, sleeping deeply even as Fëanáro's feet still pushed against the floor to keep the chair rocking. The Carnistir of now is much bigger and sleeps with one of Fëanáro's braids tucked between his lips, but Fëanáro cradles him like an infant, and his feet still push against the floor.

Carnistir sleeps willingly with neither his brothers nor with me, claiming that our presence disrupts his dreams, but with Fëanáro he raises no protest. Our youngest son is bizarre, and I feel a tickle of guilt that it is my doing, for I refused to nurse him after the tiny teeth with which he was born drew drops of blood from the tender skin of my breast. The healer remarked that it is rare but not unknown for babies to be born with teeth and assured me that both parents can feed a child from a bottle just as successfully as a mother can nurse him at her own bosom.

Still, there are times when, upon awaking him, he screams and recoils from me. "You left us! You left! Don't come back!" he screamed once, and I ran from the room in tears, for how could he remember my absence during that first year after his birth when none of his brothers had their own memories of that age?

My littlest one mumbles now in his sleep, and his father's braid falls from his mouth. Fëanáro twitches and awakens. He sees me leaning against the closed door and smiles. My love … He stands and, without shifting Carnistir, carries him to his cot, lays him down, and draws the blanket over his small, sleeping body. He comes to me next, and I sag into his arms, and as though he knows my weariness as heavily in his bones as it is in mine, he lifts me and carries me into our bedroom.

Our bed is raised on a dais and encased in one-way glass so that we lie always beneath the stars, as did our ancestors upon their awakening. He carries me up the three steps and places me atop the blankets and, with much-practiced hands, undresses me before standing to undress himself. The early morning light twines his raven hair with silver and gold; like the statue, the hollows of his body are pooled with shadow; the planes of his alabaster skin are gilded with the faint gold of morning. I expect him to lie atop me and coax me with kisses into making love—and I would submit now to him, to feel my weariness washed away by waves of pleasure—but he pulls back the blankets instead and lies beside me, taking me into his arms and kissing my lips gently before guiding my head to his chest.

I push my face against the silken warmth of his skin with my ear over his heart, listening to his heartbeat, a sound eternal until the world's ending. I think sometimes of pendulums, drawn back to swing in cycles that will last for days, years, ages. But with each swing, a bit of height is shaved from the cycle—less than the width of a hair split a million times—but those shavings accumulate like snowflakes upon the ground until the pendulum stops. Not our heartbeats, I think. These are eternal, destined to continue until the ending of the world. How? I think, as I drift off to sleep with Fëanáro's hands warm against my back. What makes us so different from the pendulum?

I awaken with only the coolness of silk against my skin. I stretch my arms out to either side, reaching for Fëanáro, but he is gone. I hear the quick, chirpy voice of our third son, then hear Fëanáro say, "Shh, Amil is sleeping still."

Tyelkormo, the hasty riser, I think with a smile, rubbing at my gritty, sleepy eyes and blinking at the faint golden light that pours into the room. I named him such because I perceived his father's temper within him—even in the womb, he kicked harder than Nelyo and Macalaurë, as though he resented me for confining him inside me, away from the blue skies under which he had been begotten and that he would one day love—and knew that he'd spring quickly to his feet to answer an argument, often without thinking first. But also, he loves the mornings best, and with the exception of his father, who requires little sleep and often awakens before the Mingling of the Lights to start early in the forge, is usually the first to rise in the morning.

He sits at my vanity table while Fëanáro combs his golden hair and braids it away from his face. "But Atar, you promised!" he says in a strident, insulted voice, causing Fëanáro to clap his hand over Tyelkormo's mouth and say, "What did I tell you about waking your mother?"

But the damage has been done, and in the front room, Carnistir gives a choked sob that escalates into a wail. Fëanáro, whose fingers are tangled in Tyelkormo's hair, gives a loud growling sigh and starts to stand, but I call to him: "I'm awake, Fëanáro. I'll get him."

I tug on my clothes from last night, still pooled on the floor beside the bed. As I open the bedroom door and go into the sitting room to lift Carnistir from his cot, I hear Fëanáro say, "I'm halfway tempted, Tyelkormo, to—" but I close the door behind myself and hear no more.

Carnistir's face momentarily smoothes upon seeing me, then wrinkles into sobs again. "Where's Atar?" he cries, as I lift him into my arms.

My heart squeezes so hard that it almost hurts. "Atar is with Tyelkormo right now, so Amil will have to do."

As though he felt the squeeze and knew himself to be the cause, he settles against my shoulder and pops a strand of my hair into his mouth. "That's good, Amil. I love you too." Surprised by the sudden cessation of his tears, I say the first words to cross my mind: "Thank you." I hold him close, relishing the drowsy warmth of first awakening, knowing that in a few years' time, he will be too heavy for me to carry and will rather run after his brothers than be held by his mother. Of course, Fëanáro and I will be working to conceive another baby by then, but he too will eventually grow, as will his brothers that follow, and like the swinging pendulum, the years of the children will end for us and moments such as these will fade to memories, always just beyond the reaches of our fingertips.

Sometimes, I succumb to such dire musings in Fëanáro's presence, but he only laughs. "How can you laugh?" I ask him. "Will you not miss holding our babies in your arms?"

"Of course I will," he says. "But equally I shall love holding our grandchildren."

I push back into the bedroom with Carnistir curled in my arms. Fëanáro is nearly finished with Tyelkormo's hair, and it rests now against the back of his neck, completely restrained from his face. Such is not the preference of our third son to wear his hair in such a fashion—usually it flies around his face in a golden cloud, gathering at least one hundred tangles by the day's end—and I start slightly upon seeing him. Carnistir, too, stirs in my arms and reaches out a hand in the direction of his brother. "Turko, Turko, you look weird."

"Hush, Carnistir!" I say. "Do not say such things to your brother."

He actually looks grown up and much older than fourteen. Fëanáro similarly wears his hair off his face—although he prefers to restrain it with bits of rag he has lying about the forge, irritating me with the nonchalance that he allows his perfect looks to become slovenly—for safety reasons in the forge. I gasp with realization, just as Tyelkormo says, "Amil! Atar is taking me to the forge today!"

My thoughts are jumbled, fighting their way first to my voice. "But, Fëanáro …" I swallow. But what? Working with his father in the forge has been all that Tyelkormo has talked about since I first carried him in to watch his father work, just after his first begetting day. Nelyo and Macalaurë never showed such motivation for their father's work, and I know that Fëanáro has honed his third son's interests in hopes that he will take an apprenticeship with him, then move on to finish his studies and master's exams with Aulë. These things I cannot argue with Fëanáro, but another thought plunks into the midst of my noisy mind. "But today is your day with Macalaurë," I say at last.

Fëanáro does not look up from securing the clips in Tyelkormo's hair. "I have released him."

"What?!"

"It is just as you heard, Nerdanel: I have released Macalaurë from his studies in the forge." He snaps the final clip into place and looks up to meet my gaze with his over-bright gray eyes. I search his stare for sparks of anger; I push into his thoughts in an attempt to detect whether he had an argument with our second son that would have led to such drastic actions. Perhaps while I was working last night? Such was my state that I wouldn't have heard shouting would it have occurred right behind me in my own workshop. I remember the sincerity of Macalaurë's kiss and greeting to his father—the only son whom I have ever believed favored me—and doubt that anything so extreme could have happened before then. If it had, then surely Macalaurë wouldn't have approached his father so readily? Macalaurë has always shied from Fëanáro in anger in the same way that a horse shies from an open flame.

I detect nothing from Fëanáro, only bemusement that I would delve into the secret depths of his head before I would ask him out loud how he came to dismiss his second son from craft studies when even Nelyo continues to be required to do at least one day a week with his father in the forge. "Why?" I screech, and Carnistir wiggles in my arms.

"Naaahh!" he says, reaching for the floor and kicking, but I clasp him tighter to my chest.

"Why not? Macalaurë is never going to be a smith; if he steps into a forge with the intent of crafting something of his own volition ever again, then I will be surprised. He is going to be a musician. He is already a brilliant composer and his voice—"

"Fëanáro, we've known since Macalaurë was still in my womb that he had musical gifts, yet you choose now to acknowledge them?"

"Why not now? Perhaps I thought that Macalaurë would grow to love my work, if only for the time we spend together every week, as Nelyo does, even if he didn't intend to pursue my trade. It is clear that he does not, and as I have three other sons who still may, then I see not why I should waste my time and his on something that makes neither of us happy."

"So it's over … just like that?"

"Yes. We have decided to take an evening a week instead and read and critique each other's poetry."

I nearly laugh out loud at the thought of timid, sweet Macalaurë criticizing his father's work but do not for the look on Fëanáro's face. I sigh. "You think he will do that?" I say.

"He already has. Why do you think I left your workshop last night? You know how much I love to watch you at your work." He lifts Tyelkormo from my vanity bench and sits down in his stead, holding him in his lap. "Do you know what it's like, Nerdanel, to have your child despise—actually despise—being with you?"

There is a cold lump in my chest. Carnistir squeals and kicks me hard in the stomach, slipping from my grasp and to the ground, where he runs, trips up the dais stairs, and hides beneath our bed.

"He does not—" I start to say, but Fëanáro interrupts me.

"When Macalaurë fell and hurt his shoulder, that was the first time since he was a small child that I felt he was grateful for something I did. It took the most pain he's ever known"—for an insane moment, I think Fëanáro might weep, but that is impossible; his tears are rarer than the gemstones he treasures—"for him to be grateful for me. I think about my mother sometimes"—another insane moment! Fëanáro never speaks of his mother, even to me—"and I wonder: Were I to depart, would they miss me? You would, I know, for we are of the same spirit, and part of you would die with me. Nelyo would miss me and so would my little ones." He squeezes Tyelkormo tighter and kisses the crown of his head. "But Macalaurë? I sometimes thought that he would weep only tears of duty, and that grieved me, Nerdanel, more than you could know.

"When I was young, I used to dread my stepmother's presence. So often I wanted to be home with my father, for my begetting days, for the feasts and festivals of our people, but I knew that I would have to sit across from my stepmother, and that I dreaded. And so I left. I never wanted Macalaurë to come to that point; I never wanted him to run to Alqualondë because he dreaded my presence in his life."

I am aghast. "Fëanáro, he would never—"

"Now he will not. I will let him go where his spirit guides him and not where I would wish him to go. Besides," he cradles Tyelkormo in his arms—an arm beneath his shoulders and an arm beneath his knees—and kisses his face until he giggles, "now I have little Tyelkormo to teach, and he wants to learn all that I know."

Tyelkormo wrests his arms free and, laughing, circles Fëanáro's neck and kisses him through his laughter.

~oOo~ 

Normally, lessons on the fourth day of the week require the three little ones to sit with me in my studio while I teach them the gentler arts of painting and sculpture. Tyelkormo, however, will come on the fifth day with Macalaurë and Nelyo now, I suppose. My lessons always did make him fitful and restless; for a child of his activity level, the delicate precision of a chisel and brush provide little romance when compared to the hammers and fires of the forge. Now, he can sit with his older brothers, pretending to paint while really working at their books under the table when my back is turned.

Findekáno and Carnistir will meet me after breakfast at their appointed time in the studio. Carnistir is too little to do any real crafting, but I let him play with paint pots and lumps of clay and attempt rudimentary projects. Findekáno's work was awkward upon his first arrival, but I have seen great improvement in the ensuing weeks, and I have no doubt that with continued practice, he will exceed even the prodigious norm that the diligence of our people has established. Since Fëanáro intends to focus his efforts upon Tyelkormo, I decide to do the same for Findekáno, for he is the only one who seems to enjoy my lessons.

My apprentices are working on projects of their own, but always, I start the day with a review of their progress and gentle critiques of their unfinished works. When I turn, Carnistir and Findekáno have arrived and seated themselves at the usual worktable and watch me with wide eyes.

"Carnistir," I say and set out a piece of parchment and a handful of brushes in front of him. I will have only a few hours before Fëanáro comes to collect him for his punishment. "Will you paint something for me?"

Carnistir, I have learned—unlike his brothers—does not pursue art for the pleasure of creation but rather only to please others. What exactly our youngest son does enjoy remains a mystery to me. But at my request, his dark eyes turn to mine, and he waits and listens with rare peace.

"I would like you to paint a person for me," I instruct. He does not ask, but I sense the question behind his lips: Who? "You may paint anyone you like. Anyone who inspires you."

Perhaps, if I know who inspires him, then I shall be able to detect what inspires him as well. Although I already have a good idea of whom he shall attempt to paint.

"Any color?" he asks.

"You may use any colors that you wish," I tell him, setting before him my entire array of paints, and his dark gray eyes brighten as do storm clouds backlit by lightning.

I turn next to Findekáno. His blue eyes watch the floor, but skip upwards every few seconds, watching me warily. "Findekáno," I say, "I think you are ready to attempt your first work in stone."

His head snaps up, and he contemplates me with wide, apprehensive eyes. Until now, I have instructed him only in paints and clay, and I know that he looks at the works of his uncle and his cousins that I have displayed around the room and feels inferior. "But Aunt Nerdanel—" he begins.

"Shh." I touch his lips and he flinches into silence. "You must learn to work with all materials. Some very successful stone sculptors could not make a rock out of clay; it is all about finding the material that speaks to you, through which Aulë guides your hands."

At the mention of Aulë's name, his head snaps up again, and uncertainty boils in his eyes. The names of the Valar are not often mentioned in our house, only as one might speak of a neighbor or acquaintance. Yet, I know the traditions of Tirion, for they are the same as the traditions of my father's house. I know that Findekáno has knelt many times beside his parents to thank the Valar for the blessings we have been given. I know that he believes that his home, his comfort, his very inspiration derives from them.

My husband—his uncle—does not share that view.

"Come with me," I say, and I hold my hand out to him. He places his small, warm hand in mine and slips from the bench. To the back of the room, I lead him, to where I have placed a block of limestone—gray like the wings of doves—a soft material that is easy for beginners to use. I place his hands against it. "Close your eyes, Findekáno," I tell him in a low voice. "Touch the stone; let it speak to you."

"It is limestone," he tells me, but it was lore lessons with Nelyo and not the stone that told him that. He pinches his eyes shut and slides his hand over the stone. "It is not pretty, but it could be," he tells me next, and this is closer to that which I wish him to hear.

"Would you like to try making a statue?"

His eyes open and regard me nervously. "What kind of statue?"

"How about an animal? Do you think the stone would wish to be carved as an animal?"

"It might …" He takes his hands from it and stares at the floor. "But Aunt Nerdanel, I don't know how."

"That is the point of lessons, dear. I shall teach you how."

I show him the hammers and chisels, and on a scrap piece of limestone, show him how to make a basic shape in the rock. Next, I show him how to carve the more delicate details and smooth them with sandpaper. "See? It is not hard."

"It is not hard for you." His eyes are brimming with doubt.

"Well, no one expects for your work to be as good as mine. Not yet. I want only for you to get used to the materials and tools, Findekáno."

He touches the stone again. "Who taught you, Aunt Nerdanel?"

"Well, my father is a metalsmith, like your uncle, and my mother dallied in sculpture. They both taught me, Findekáno."

"Oh." His head hangs.

"Why, dear? Why do you want to know?"

"I thought Lord Aulë taught you."

An idea comes to me, but it creeps through my mind with guarded care. "Well, I did take an apprenticeship with Aulë, as did your uncle, to learn all forms of craftsmanship," I say carefully. "Such is a prestigious appointment." My next words sit like a lump of food beneath my tongue, but I cannot quite form them into the question I wish to ask him. "Findekáno," I say softly, after many moments have passed. I speak so that Carnistir, working across the room, cannot hear me, although his hand has stopped painting and I can feel his dark eyes on my back, as though he intuitively knows that something is transpiring that I fear his father discovering. "Would you like to pray to Aulë before we begin?"

The words come out in a hasty whisper, but relief transforms Findekáno's face. "May we—" He stops before finishing his question, before putting it into the air for all ears to perceive. I have never told him of Fëanáro's beliefs about the Valar's proper place in our lives, but perhaps his father has or perhaps, to stave off a conflict, Nelyo mercifully implied that the creed of our house strayed from that of their shared grandfather and should not be mentioned in Fëanáro's presence. Either way, the relief in Findekáno's eyes is dimmed by his apprehension, as he whispers to me, "I think it might help."

I leave him to wait by the door for me while I tell my apprentices that I will be taking my brother-son out for a few minutes. To Carnistir, I say, "Listen to the apprentices, love, and finish your painting," and leave him with a kiss atop his satin-black hair.

Findekáno and I walk the long hallways of our home and leave the house through the kitchen. Outside, the air rings with sound from the forge; from the open door to Macalaurë's music room, I hear him crafting a composition of overwhelming beauty, stopping every now and then to growl and begin again, turning a note just slightly to make it more beautiful than the first time. Birds trill and flutter through the air, filled with the joy of nascent summer, and the first bees buzz between just-opened blossoms on the plants in Fëanáro's vegetable garden.

Past all of this we walk, to the sculpture garden that Fëanáro built as a surprise to me after Carnistir was born. He selected my favorite works and placed them among the spills of flowers and singing fountains, without realizing that he'd selected only the Valar from a collection that included many more of animals and trees and kinsmen, leaving only the Valar outside to be weathered by the rain and soiled by birds.

Aulë is at the garden's center—where most would place Manwë, perhaps, but not Fëanáro—standing tall upon a fountain that burbles gently around his feet and is lit from beneath by glowing stones encased within rubies, making it look as though he stands upon the flames of a forge. It is one of my early works—from the time before Fëanáro and I were been married—rough and beautiful, like Aulë himself. Within my garden, the sounds of Fëanáro's forge do not penetrate, and my spirit lies easily within me as I sink to my knees, calm and nostalgic, and Findekáno kneels beside me.

I take Findekáno's hand in mine. "My Lord Aulë," I whisper, "I bring to you this day a new student in your lore of craft. Before you, we place his hands and ask you to guide them. Before you, we unstop his ears and ask you to teach them the song of metal and stone. Before you, we unbind his eyes and ask you to impart unto him your wisdom and sight, to let him better perceive the shape of Arda and place within it ever-greater beauty. With humble gratitude, we thank you for your gifts."

Findekáno's small voice speaks next—echoing mine—and he is no longer timid but speaks with practiced confidence. "My Lord Aulë," he says, "I come to you this day, newborn in your lore of craft. Before you, I place my hands and ask you to guide them. Before you, I unstop my ears and ask you to teach me the song of metal and stone. Before you, I unbind my eyes and ask you to impart unto me your wisdom and sight, to let me better perceive the shape of Arda and place within it ever-greater beauty. With humble gratitude, I thank you for your gifts."

For many minutes, we kneel in silence. My palms grow warm as though by the touch of another, and I long to fill them with tools, to bend the will of stone to the will of my hands. Beside me, Findekáno's eyes rove from side to side behind closed eyelids, as though he is busily watching an inspired transformation, then open slowly. "Thank you, Aunt Nerdanel," he says, and he leans forward to kiss the base of the statue through water bubbling around it like flames. He lifts his face and dries his lips with the backs of his fingers. "I feel inspired now."

As a young girl, a day at work did not begin without a prayer to Aulë, slightly modified from that which I've just spoken as an initiation for a new craftsman. When Fëanáro first came to learn from my father—after years of maintaining an apprenticeship through correspondence alone—my father found it odd that Fëanáro, ordinarily so prompt and meticulous, was always late for the morning prayer. It was I—knowing that Fëanáro did nothing unintentionally—who asked, and it was I who first learned that the man who would soon be my husband did not pray.

I do not think on it now, but push myself from the ground and stick my hand in Findekáno's direction until I feel him take it. This was the first prayer to Aulë since my marriage, when Fëanáro had coaxed from me the bitter truth that my hands—not Aulë's—were responsible for the beauty that I'd given the world and that my mind—not Aulë's—had kindled its inspiration. Fëanáro had wished not even to have our marriage and our children blessed by Varda and only did so out of respect for our parents. We'd spoken our marriage vows not before Manwë and Varda—as is tradition for Noldorin royalty—but beneath the witness of Eru alone.

Findekáno stares up at me as though he knows the turmoil in my mind. "Let us go, Findekáno," I say to him, "before our inspiration leaves us."

We walk from the garden, slower and more solemn than we entered. The statues of the Valar watch us pass from their alcoves of water and leaves, and I wonder: Is it like Fëanáro says? If they brought us here in friendship, is it wrong of us to worship them?

The last section of the garden is an ivy-covered dome that houses the statue of Yavanna that I crafted after Nelyo was born, inspired by the act of giving life to a being that would never have existed but for the acts of my body. Fëanáro crafted the dome with several openings through which light can spill, illuminating the statue from all sides. It is possible to leave without passing through it, but always it has been one of my favorite parts of the garden, and I steer Findekáno in its direction. Upon entering, my eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim, verdant light, but after adjusting, I freeze, startled, facing Nelyo.

"Amil!" He holds a book in his hands and sits on the ground in a patch of light that sets his hair afire like red gold. His silver eyes are wide, and in that moment, I know that he has heard us.

"Nelyo." My heart is hammering, but I make my voice sound calm. "You come here?"

"It is the only quiet place on the property to read."

"So it is." I am at once aware of the stillness. Fëanáro's hammers do not ring here; Macalaurë's songs do not pass through the ivy. Even the birds are still and silent, as though in awe of their creator.

I will leave if you—"

"No. No, Nelyo, please, stay."

My voice pleads, even though I struggle to keep it level, and I know that my awareness of his overhearing our prayer is plainer than his father's letters in the book on his lap. I tighten my hand on Findekáno's and resume walking. No longer can I trust my voice to say farewell to my son.

"Amil?" His voice is behind me now. I do not turn, but I pause in the exit of the dome and tilt my head in his direction. "I will not tell."

~oOo~ 

Findekáno sets to task immediately upon our return. Hands that were nervous now take the tools with eager confidence, and I hear the gentle nips of hammer against chisel as he shapes the stone with great concentration.

My own inspiration is buried beneath guilt. I sit at the worktable, across from Carnistir, meaning to check his progress, but my intentions drown in confusion and I sit with my head in my hands, unable to think of anything beyond my own churning thoughts.

If they brought us here in friendship, then it is not right to worship them.

Friends ask not friends to kneel before them; such is requested only between master and slave.

"Amil? I am finished."

Carnistir is standing on the bench and poking his parchment in my direction, beaming at me with his stubby baby's teeth. I make myself smile and watch my hand extend to take from him the parchment.

"Carnistir, it is—"

My praise withers in my throat.

"I ran out of yellow," he tells me, "but I asked Tyelpwë for more."

There are three empty, yellow-crusted paint pots scattered in front of him on the table. It is no wonder because his parchment is caked in yellow—varying shades of yellow—but all yellow nonetheless. There are no discernable figures anywhere. Just yellow.

"Carnistir—" Again, my words lie impotently in my brain and won't fall into my throat. He pouts and sits down hard on the bench. "You hate it," he says.

"No! No, I don't hate it! But Carnistir, I asked you to paint for me a person."

"I did, Amil! I painted Grandfather Finwë!"

When he mentions it, I suddenly perceive, among the swirls of varied yellows, a gentle peace in the brushstrokes, in the colors themselves. Such is Finwë's gift: Sitting with him is like being washed in a warm bath. Speaking aloud my troubles to him, I always feel like, upon entering his ears, they die forever. Even Fëanáro's unquenchable fire is stayed within his father's embrace, something that I am becoming increasingly unable to do as my body wearies ever further.

Thinking on this, my body is suddenly overwhelmed with weariness, and I desire nothing more than to fall back on the bench and sleep through Laurelin's hours. Instead, I hold out my arms to my youngest son and let him crawl across the table and settle into my lap. "I see now, Carnistir," I whisper, "and he is beautiful."

~oOo~ 

Telperion frosts the land in silver when I crawl into bed for the night.

Fëanáro has built a fire in the fireplace, but our satin bed sheets are like ice against my skin without Fëanáro in bed beside me to warm them. He is in the front room still with Carnstir, singing softly to him in hopes of easing him past the nightmares and into sleep, and I was too tired to wait for him before pulling from my body clothes that felt like they were made of lead and replacing them with my lightest nightgown. Fëanáro's voice drifts into our bedroom, and even if it does not lull our son, it lulls me. Fëanáro's voice is beautiful, although he rarely sings, and I feel sleep's hand pass over my eyes.

The silence awakens me. Fëanáro has stopped singing and stands by his armoire, his back turned to me, dressing for bed. I watch the firelight play across his black hair and give his skin a fiery blush that makes my heart race with desire for him. But then I think of our many arguments about the Valar—friends do not bow down before each other, Nerdanel; you cannot reconcile friendship with servitude—and guilt about the nostalgic joy I felt while praying this afternoon cools my blood and makes me turn my back to him.

The mattress barely shifts as he gets into bed beside me. "I didn't mean to wake you," he says, his voice less in words than in thought, and I say, "You did not."

He moves my hair and kisses the back of my neck. Strong arms circle my waist and draw our bodies together, his belly against my back. The place of his kiss tingles, and I find myself counting the days since we've last made love and think with regret that tonight shall add another to the growing chain and make it a week.

In the bond of bodies, our spirits bind also, and I dread what he might learn of me this night. His hand brushes my breast—incidental contact—but my nipples go rigid with his touch, and I have to squeeze my knees together to keep from rolling onto my back and pulling him on top of me.

He senses my desire and kisses the back of my neck once more, making the hairs on my arms stand up, moving his lips in a line of tiny kisses like a string of pearls, ending at the soft skin of my throat. I want to turn to him but do not, fearing what will be revealed when our spirits enter the fuller union of our marriage. My body aches. What do you plan to do? Forsake him evermore? Forsake the children still waiting to be begotten, all for a single mistake?

Fëanáro bites me where my neck meets my shoulder, hard enough to draw a bruise beneath my skin. "Ai!" I cry out. I try to writhe free of his arms, but they are tight around me now. "That hurts, Fëanáro!" and he turns the bite into a kiss, soothing the sore, tender flesh with his lips, drawing his tongue across the marks left by his teeth, relaxing his arms and moving his hands across my belly and my thighs. I clench the sheets hard in my fists, as though keeping myself anchored, keeping myself from turning to him.

"Why do you resist me?" he asks in a voice soft and unlike my husband. He moves his hand to cup my breast, his thumb finding the erect nipple that betrays my desire for him and moving in a slow circular caress. I push his hand away. "I am tired, Fëanáro. Please leave me."

"You are not. It has been six nights since we last lay together. Your desire is as hot as mine." His hand that I cast away has moved lower and eases my nightgown up from around my knees, moving beneath to spread my flesh and touch me in the secret places only he knows. My teeth clamp hard onto my lower lip and I taste my own blood but do not cry out. His fingers slide against me in a slow rhythm, his skin burning with that which I deny him. "I can feel your desire for me, Nerdanel," he whispers. "Turn to me. Please. I ache for your touch.

"Why do you resist me?

"Why do you hide from me?

"I love you. I want you. Please."

I am on the verge of climax, grinding my teeth together to keep from crying out, trying to will my hands to push his away before he coaxes from me this greatest of pleasures, this pleasure I will not be able to bear without taking him inside of me, but my hands are futile, clutching the sheets and digging into the mattress. I can feel his arousal against the backs of my thighs; I can feel him throbbing with a desire for that which he gives me but I will not return.

"Do not forsake me. What have I done for you to forsake me?"

Flesh cannot resist forever. Like the reflexive drawing away of a limb burned by hot iron, my body flowers into ecstasy, releasing itself from the torment that he has placed upon me. My hips jerk against him, and at last, my hands find his, pushing them into my flesh until it almost hurts, and his name rises from my throat in gratitude and anger, "Fëanáro!" for forcing upon me this agonizing pleasure. And though our bodies are not joined, I know suddenly that he is aware of my betrayal of the beliefs I have professed to share, and I turn to him in anger and meet his wide gray eyes with me own. His face is smooth and startled by that which has been suddenly revealed to him, and no longer is he my husband—the father of four sons—but the virgin boy I bedded fifty years ago.

His lips part as though to speak, but I slam mine into his first, in a crushing, painful kiss. He moans beneath my lips with a mixture of pain and desire, and his hands push his clothes from his body until he is naked beneath me, rising next to try to tug my nightgown over my head. I straddle him and seize his wrists before his hands touch me and slam them into the headboard, spreading blue bruises across the backs of the beautiful hands that I love.

"Nerdanel … ai …" he whispers, the voice of the young boy who once drove his fist into an oaken door and broke the bones in his knuckles, so angry was he over the imminent marriage of his father. I pin his hands to the headboard with the same disregard he showed when he touched me and revealed to himself this secret which now pains both of us. My desire for him is as sharp as pain, my desire to complete the bond and peer into his spirit as he has peered into mine, and I hold both of his wrists over his head with one hand—preventing him from caressing me or undressing me, as he wishes—and take him into hand with the other, making him moan now with undisclosed pleasure as I raise my hips over his and guide him inside of me.

The ecstasy he sparked is swelling, swelling like the sea beneath a storm, and I bear my body hard onto his, and we both cry out in unison. "No, Nerdanel, it's too fast," he gasps, and I clap my hand over his mouth because I don't want the slow, thoughtful lovemaking he prefers—a gradual escalation to the frantic passion we both crave yet fight to restrain—progressing through climax after climax, each more intense than the next. I want to take his body as he took mine, to force pleasure upon him, to reveal the fire of his spirit as he revealed mine. His eyes are squeezed shut; my hand muffles his protests; he fights to regain control, but I pin his body beneath mine until his back arches and his hips thrust as though in convulsion, and he screams his pleasure into the palm of my hand. His spirit opens in front of me, like staring into a chasm and into the white-hot center of the earth, and climax tears my body too, and I collapse against him and can no longer resist taking him into my arms and pressing the lengths of our body to each other, both of us fumbling to remove the sweat-soaked nightgown that bars flesh from flesh.

"Why?" he asks, and I take his hands in mine and grieve the marks I left upon them: the bruises along the backs of his hands, the blackened rings around his wrists where I pinned him, the scratches on the insides of his arms where he fought to no avail. I have no answer, so I kiss his lips and taste blood—mine or his? maybe both?—and we embrace and slowly caress each other with the gentle love of a husband and wife.

It does not take him long to become aroused again, but our lovemaking this time is exceedingly slow and tender, the careful exertions of bodies already abused and weary. Time drifts along without us, and we bask in the oneness of body and spirit, and as the night edges into morning, he releases again inside of me and retracts only to fall against my breast while I push his damp hair from his face. His breathing is hard, his muscles weak and trembling, and I wonder how a woman as simple as I can drive a man as powerful as Fëanáro to exhaustion when day after day of sleepless travel or labor can not even make his eyes droop with drowsiness.

Are you disappointed in me?

In the light of our blended spirits, we do not need words to speak. His earlier brilliance has dimmed, and he lies on the edge of sleep, and our colors merge as our bodies did, his white light swirling against my dimmer rose-colored glow.

In love like that which I feel for you, there is no room for disappointment.

But, Fëanáro, I cannot reconcile friendship with servitude —

Hush. Let me lie in your arms and love me.

"I do," I whisper, and I feel his lips draw into a smile against my breast.

I am sitting beneath the trees in my uncle's garden when the crying starts.

It is a peaceful day, midsummer now, and the clouds overhead have cleared the way for blue, marred only by tender wisps of clouds cobwebbed across the sky. For the last week, it has rained, and we have been cooped indoors to study, except for a disastrous foray that Uncle Fëanáro orchestrated to teach us to shoot in the rain that resulted in Cousin Macalaurë slipping in a patch of mud and tumbling down a hill, then getting into an argument with Uncle Fëanáro about the worth of such an activity in the first place. "Were you starving or otherwise need to hunt in the rain—" Uncle Fëanáro began, and Macalaurë interrupted him—a foolishly brave act that made the rest of us gasp and fall into silence—"When do we starve? And when do we ever need to hunt in the rain?"

So Macalaurë was punished and made to fetch the horses from the pasture every day in the rain for the week after. But today it is clear and beautiful again, and Laurelin's warmth has dried the ground, making it suitable to sit outside, beneath Uncle Fëanáro's pear tree, and study.

But for the sudden sound of crying that interrupts the peace of the day and frightens even the songbirds from the trees in a rattle of wings.

My first thought is that it must be Macalaurë. He is the most sorrowful of the brothers, and I have seen tears slipping from beneath his closed eyes as he plays sad songs on his harp. But I have never heard him sob—except when he hurt his shoulder, but that was different—and his tears fall as silently as spring showers, and the only voice given his melancholia is through his songs.

I consider ignoring it and turning back to my lore, but the sobs are growing ragged with hysteria. I sigh, mark my page, and close my book. I have fallen in love with historical lore, thanks to Cousin Maitimo, who makes it more than a simple recounting of events and into a story. The names of old that I had learned from my tutors at home become characters, real beings with passions and personalities, and I feel their dilemmas as keenly as though they were my own. I like to imagine myself a character in their stories, making decisions that will be carefully recorded into Uncle Fëanáro's history texts.

The breeze across my skin is warm and the day is fragrant with the burgeoning life of summer, and I resent rising from this comfortable piece of earth beneath the pear tree. It's probably just Carnistir, I tell myself, but even as the thought slips through my brain, I know that it is not. Carnistir cries a lot, true—he is still a baby, after all—but he does not cry alone but rather seeks his father or his mother or Maitimo to hold him in their arms and soothe whatever ails him.

This person cries not for the love and attention of others but alone, away from the house, where only the Valar can perceive his agony.

I set my book aside and rise to my feet. I have removed my shoes and take my time putting them back on lest the crying cease and allow me to return to my grassy spot and my book. It does not, and it grows louder as I tighten the laces—loud enough that I could no longer in good conscience ignore it, even if I had wanted to—and words are added to the sobs, but I cannot understand them through the tears.

Uncle Fëanáro's garden is long paths of fruit trees with shrubs and flowers planted beneath. Maitimo brought Tyelkormo and me here for our lore lessons during our first weeks in Formenos, and I have found no place on the property where I can read with greater peace. I start down the path towards the pond at the center, following the sobs until they grow so loud that I know that the person must be just beyond the next stand of trees, at the pond.

Sure enough, a figure is facedown, at the edge of the water, angry fists beating into the earth, sobbing into the grass. I take a step forward and fall back with a gasp, for the person's hair is a deep honey-gold, bound back from his face but beginning to pull free and spill into the water. It is Tyelkormo.

He is crying so hard that he does not hear me approach, and so I am afforded several moments to calm my heart that has taken off in a flurry of racing beats like the feet of a startled rabbit and think of what I should do. Tyelkormo wears his forge clothes—the dingy gray attire that is almost a uniform for my uncle during the day—and they are dirtied by his labors and twisted about his body in disarray. Laurelin passed her zenith two hours ago, when we paused for a midday meal, for which Uncle Fëanáro and Tyelkormo were allegedly too busy to participate, and by my reckoning, he should be with my uncle still, for two more hours at the least. Certainly not sobbing in the garden. Even odder, he still wears his forge boots that he and Uncle Fëanáro went Formenos to have made last month and which he is not allowed to wear outside of the workshops.

Tyelkormo has been busy in the last two months, since being appointed to learn smithcraft from my uncle, too busy even to spend much time teasing me. His half-day lesson in the forge blossomed into a full day, then into two. When he is not swinging hammers beside his father, then he is busy at his books, memorizing the compositions of alloys and learning the properties of different metals. He has grown quiet in these last months and introspective. My cousin who once raced about the garden now sits in thought for much of the time and goes early to bed each night. Weariness, Uncle Fëanáro says, is typical of new apprentices, but I notice how carefully he watches Tyelkormo retreat up the stairs early each evening. At night, Tyelkormo's sleep is restless and tormented, and many times I have awakened in Telperion's depths to see him sitting on the window seat and staring into the night.

Tyelkormo has brought home a few of his nascent creations, and only then does he resemble the cousin with whom I rode to Formenos. Then, he is boastful and proud, his hands closing over the flaws in his work, and he will let no one else touch that which he crafts. Last week, he brought home a set of throwing knives, crafted crudely from an ugly black steel and—for the first time ever—put something of his creation into my hands and bade me to try throwing them at the target that his father put up on a tree. Knife-throwing is a new skill that Uncle Fëanáro is having us learn—sandwiching it between archery and swordfighting on our already full third days—and one which I enjoy. I enjoy finding the balance of the knife in my hand, honing in on the target, and lofting the knife towards it, giving it just enough of a flick with my wrist to turn it to the precise angle to embed itself into the wood. I took Tyelkormo's knives reluctantly though and aimed at the target, sensing a trap, as an animal senses danger. The knife didn't want to balance in my hand; finally, I threw it as best as I could, trying to compensate for its awkward feel in my hand, and watched it sail past the target and into the grass.

Tyelkormo laughed, but Uncle Fëanáro came up then from the forge and took the next knife from the leather pack and took aim himself. This time, the knife hit the target, but only the edge, and Uncle Fëanáro walked forward to retrieve both of our spent knives, saying, "These are not balanced, Tyelkormo. Tomorrow, you shall forge them anew."

I wonder if I should approach him now or leave him to think his tears—and shame—went unwitnessed. The wrath of my third cousin can be great, and I hesitate, ready to turn and creep back to my tree to fetch my book and carry on my studies in the house, but just then, a mighty sob erupts from his chest, and beneath it, at last, I understand his words: "I hate myself."

I stop and turn to consider him again. His clothes are filthy, much dirtier than even Macalaurë used to get when he worked in the forge with Uncle Fëanáro, and there is a rip in one sleeve. He has shifted, burying his face in one arm and leaving the other thrown away from his body, its underside turned skyward and revealing an angry, puckered burn on the base of his palm. My breathe catches in my throat, slightly sickened by the sight of flesh left exposed by flame, and I wonder why he isn't with his father, having the burn cleaned and bandaged instead of lying in the garden, sobbing, alone.

I walk carefully towards him. He does not look up at my footsteps; so deep is his misery that he neither hears nor feels my approach. He pounds his fists again against the earth, striking his burn this time and screaming with an agony that has nothing to do with the turmoil in his spirit. I stop a few feet away from his miserable form. "Tyelkormo?" I say.

He looks up at me. His blue eyes are shot through with red and his face is made puffy by his tears. Bits of grass and leaf are caught in his hair, which is pulling free from its braids and haphazardly framing his face. Tears soak his face, and snot makes his upper lip glisten. His lips tremble even as his sobs die, and he seems, for a moment, not to recognize me. "Tyelkormo?" I say again, softer this time. "Are you well?"

"Findekáno. Leave me." He hiccups and buries his face in his arms once more. His shoulders shake but pride subdues his sobs.

"But you arm, Tyelkormo? Your arm is hurt."

He speaks into the grass, his voice hiccupping so hard that I can barely understand his words. "Do not mind that. Leave me."

My ears hear his words but a sense deeper than my ears can reach hums with the opposite perception: Don't go.

I kneel on the grass beside him. He raises his face and looks at me incredulously. "I told you to leave. Why would you want to stay?" I expect anger, but there is wonder in his voice.

"You hurt yourself." I put my hand on his arm and coax it from beneath his body. I am shocked by the feel of his skin beneath my hand: It is icy cold, the first time in as long as I can remember that I have ever touched one of my uncle's sons and not felt as though the heat beneath their skin might burn my hand. Lying in our double bed at night, sometimes Tyelkormo becomes so warm that I have to kick aside the blankets and shiver in the cold night air or feel as though my body is mad with fever. But his flesh now is as frigid as the marble of my aunt's statues, and it takes none of the warmth from my own hand but remains stubbornly cold beneath my palm.

I avoid recoiling from the touch of his cold skin and turn over his hand to look at his palm. Up close, the burn is even more hideous, an angry red that reminds me of uncooked meat. I can smell the heat that made it, and my nose wrinkles with distaste. He sees the wound and begins crying again. "Maybe I should get Uncle—"

"No! No, please, please, no, it doesn't hurt," he says, but he screams when I touch his wrist and tears his arm away from me. His face has fallen into my shoulder; I can feel his tears soaking the light tunic that I wear.

"What happened, Tyelkormo?" I ask, and my arm is around his shoulders, holding him like it is the most natural thing in the world, like all of the harsh words and cold emotions between us mean naught. I raise his face and wipe his tears with the cuff of my sleeve, and he pulls from me and dries his face with the soiled front of his tunic. I do not bother stopping him; even with streaks of soot across his cheeks, he looks no worse. He is breathing hard—gasping for air, as though I have saved him from drowning—and his chest hitches but no new tears spill.

In a rush of words, he tells me. He was working in the forge, making a dagger, when he noticed that a squirrel had gotten into the forge. The heat and flames terrified it, Tyelkormo says, and its terror made work unbearable. "No one else noticed," he says. "Or maybe no one else cared, but all I could hear was its terror." He stabbed the dagger back into the hot coals and went after the squirrel, trying to coax it from the forge with a handful of almonds from his pocket. "Carnistir likes them," he says, "and won't cry if I feed them to him. So I had a whole pocketful." So intent was he on saving the squirrel that he failed to notice the apprentices who also worked in the forge. He hadn't heard Annawendë call, "Hot iron on the floor," until he backed into her, and turning to apologize, drove his hand right into the white hot tip of the knife she'd been crafting. "She reached out to grab me"—he is sobbing again, and I find my hand being squeezed in his uninjured one—"and the sword fell from her hand and bounced and hit her leg and—" Tears are coursing down his face, and I know not what to do, so I embrace him and find his grateful arms locked around my neck in return. "She screamed, Káno, she screamed so loud, and my father came running and Vorondil caught Annawendë because she fell, and my father dragged me outside, and I'm banned. I know it. I can't go back."

"Tyelkormo, he'll change his mind. He'll let you back."

"No, no, Káno, you don't understand."

He is sobbing so hard that I barely understand his next words.

"I hate it there. I never want to go back."

~oOo~ 

I lead him from the garden and back to the house, to our shared bedroom, with my arm across his back, holding him up.

How strange it feels to be the one to lead Tyelkormo. I am in the place reserved for Maitimo and Uncle Fëanáro, only I am small and weak and his weight is a burden on my arm. No mind; I would carry him if I had to, for despite the cold words that have passed between us, they lie now only in memory, and his pain stabs my spirit with an urgency I cannot ignore. With a cold hand, he clutches the front of my tunic; his tear-stained face tips forward, curtained by his hair. I lead him as I might lead one blindfolded, cautioning him to steps and footfalls.

The house buzzes with activity. We enter through the kitchen and I see Macalaurë flash by at the end of the corridor, followed by Vorondil. I can hear my aunt and uncle in converse with Annawendë, who is assuring them that it is not as bad as it looks; in fact, it barely hurts at all. Her voice is tight like a spring wound too many times, and the pain in her voice shimmers just beneath. We creep to the stairs, passing out of sight just as Aunt Nerdanel's apprentices enter the foyer, speaking in hushed voices between themselves that Maitimo has been sent to town on Uncle Fëanáro's fastest horse for the healer. "How bad is it?" one of them asks. The other answers in a low voice: "Macalaurë told me that it is third degree at the center," and I hasten Tyelkormo to our room.

I sit beside him on our bed, but his backside no sooner touches the unmade quilt and he is on his feet again, heading for the corner and the armoire that we share. I watch silently as he shoves my clothes aside and begins tearing long-sleeved tunics and traveling cloaks from the hangers. He unties and removes his forge boots—fumbling the laces with his burned hand—and throws them hard enough at the walls to leave a mark. He is crying no longer, but I sense that he stands on the edge of hysteria with the same tremulous anticipation as he might stand on the edge of a cliff and contemplate the fall. In the place of his forge boots, he tugs on his traveling boots and ties them with trembling fingers—not tightly enough, I think; he'll blister—kneeling amid a pile of clothes removed from the armoire. He spreads his heavy cloak across the bed, gathers the clothes, and drops them in the middle of it, rolling them into a ball and shoving them into his hunter's pack.

"Tyelkormo?"

He whirls, and his hair flies about his face in a cloud. His eyes—although sapphire blue like mine, not the fiery steel of my uncle's—make me think of Uncle Fëanáro.

"What are you doing?" My voice is small beneath the roar in my head that screams of madness.

"I am running away," he says, and were there not still lines on his face where his tears have cut swaths through the soot on his cheeks, then I might believe his earlier hysterics part of a bizarre dream. Even as his fingers tremble and even as he ties his hunter's pack with casual disregard for his injured hand, his voice is rational.

"But your hand—"

"Why do you care for me, Findekáno?" His voice stabs at me like an accusation. "I have given you nothing but torment."

"We are both the grandsons of Finwë. Are we not?"

His eyes flicker to mine. "We are." As though bothered by the implication of those two words, he turns quickly back to his task, retrieving two waterskins and a hunting knife from the chest at the bottom of our bed. His longbow leans against the wall, and he takes that as well, stuffing his three steel-tipped arrows into his belt in lieu of a quiver.

"But you are too young. It is dangerous."

"Then let me die and go to Mandos, and may my spirit be given next to a father whom I shall not grieve."

"But Fëanáro will always be your father, even were you reborn, for your spirit shall remain the same."

Tyelkormo laughs. "Please do not burden me now with philosophies, Findekáno! Would I want that, I would bring along Nelyo."

He seems to think of something then, and his lip trembles.

"Your father will miss you! And your mother and your brothers too! Do not go, Tyelkormo."

He shrugs his hunter's pack onto his shoulders. "I am resolute, Findekáno."

"Then let me go with you."

There is a moment where both of us are stunned into silence. Then my heart begins hammering hard, waiting for his rejection that I dread is coming. He watches me like a wolf, appraising whether he who approaches is friend or foe, and quickly lowers his eyes. "You jest."

"I do not."

He turns from me and shifts the pack on his shoulders. "Quickly then. Atar will be seeking me soon."

~oOo~ 

I am ready quickly, for I work unhindered by an injured hand. As I wrap my own hunter's pack, he says nothing and stares at the floor, while I wait for him to speak and say that he has reconsidered and will be leaving alone. But the pronouncement never comes, and we ease from our bedroom, checking the hallway and listening. "They are all downstairs," Tyelkormo tells me in a low voice. "Quickly." He takes my hand and leads me down the hall, away from the stairs.

"But—"

"Shh." He stops at Macalaurë's room, listens for a moment, and opens the door. "It would be wise for you also to have a bow," he tells me, and we step into Macalaurë's room and he quietly shuts the door behind us.

I have only been in my second-eldest cousin's room a few times, usually while being carried on Maitimo's hip on the way to the bath or bed. His room is done in blues and grays and reminds me of the time we'd stayed in the palace in Alqualondë for Uncle Arafinwë's wedding. His room has none of the somber beauty of the Noldor—no velvet drapes, no heavy crystal paperweights—and it looks bigger than it really is, as though the walls are insubstantial. All of his windows are open, and long white curtains billow into the room, pointing accusing fingers at us, the trespassers. Tyelkormo's familiarity with his second-eldest brother's bedroom doesn't appear to be much better than mine, and he stands for a long moment, looking about the room for that which we seek, and finding it not, silently crosses the floor to rummage through the trunk at the bottom of the bed.

A bird flies in through the window and perches on the footrest of Macalaurë's bed. It twitters at us, imploring, and Tyelkormo whistles back. It hops across the blue velvet bedspread, chirping all the while, and Tyelkormo whistles again. It turns and cocks it head to look first at him, then me, then spreads its wings and flutters back out the window.

"Here," Tyelkormo whispers, drawing from the trunk the shortbow that Macalaurë uses during archery practice. It is much too big for me—it belonged first to my aunt and now my nearly-grown cousin—and I can barely draw back the bowstring, but I say nothing and take it and the three blue-fletched arrows that Tyelkormo hands me.

As we exit the room, I turn back and ponder this place that I barely know, belonging to a cousin who is still practically a stranger to me, lost as he is in his music and the complex social world that he navigates with Maitimo. Heaviness settles onto my chest, and I consider what we are doing. Would Tyelkormo have his way, he would never have us found. He would never see his parents or his brothers again; nor will I see mine, I realize with a start. I wonder: Where are we going? We can hardly wander until the ending of the world; our journeys must take us somewhere, eventually. I envision a cottage in the trees, living alongside this cousin who I've always assumed hated me, growing into adulthood with no one but Tyelkormo for company and counsel. Of course, Uncle Fëanáro is an excellent tracker and will likely have no trouble at all deciphering Tyelkormo's elementary attempts at hiding our tracks, but if we are successful—

Tyelkormo pulls me into the hall, and we creep on soft feet down the stairs, where I can still hear my aunt and uncle giving comfort to the injured Annawendë. Tyelkormo's hand is as tight as a manacle on my wrist, only his flesh is no longer cold but burns.

We duck through the front door and are free of the house.

The gardens—which normally bustle as people hustle between the workshops and the air of which rings with the sounds of the forge—are quiet. We steal across the lawn towards the road and our freedom, the rocky hills and dizzying bluffs of the northern lands. Tyelkormo gestures for me to wait at the base of a tree while he leaps into its branches with the deftness of a cat to survey the lands around us. He slips back to the ground after only a few seconds and seizes my hand. "Maitimo rides hard from the east with the healer," he says. "We must hurry."

The rich grass of the lawn grows sparse as we run, and the house is behind us. I can hear the sound of hoofbeats as Maitimo thunders down the road; Tyelkormo pulls me behind a rock and wraps us both with his cloak.

"Shh," he says. He is holding his breath, but I can feel his heart hammering against my back. I scarcely realize that I have held my own breath until I hear my uncle greeting Maitimo and the healer and realize that my chest aches for air. I take a careful, shallow breath, and when we hear the front door close, Tyelkormo stands and tugs me to my feet.

Whack.

A dark shape springs from behind the rock and hits Tyelkormo in the back of the head with a long piece of wood. The dark shape lands on the ground between us and tries to smack me in the knees, but I jump back and nearly fall on a loose stone. "Dead, beast!" it screams and only then do I realize that it is Carnistir.

Tyelkormo seizes his little brother and clamps his good hand over his mouth. "Shh! Carnistir!" We all fall back behind the rock—Carnistir is waving his practice sword, his shrieks muffled by Tyelkormo's hand—and listen for any sounds from the house, but nothing comes.

Carnistir's shrieks are spiraling into hysteria, and he is gnashing at Tyelkormo's hand with his teeth. "Carnistir! Stop!" Tyelkormo says in a frantic whisper-shout. Carnistir is pummeling his brother's ribs with his elbows. "Ai! Stop!"

"Carnistir." I reach out and stroke his raven hair back from his forehead as I have seen my uncle and Maitimo do. He falls into silence mid-shriek, and his dark eyes roll in my direction. He says something that—muffled though it is by Tyelkormo's hand—sounds like "Káno."

Tyelkormo drops his hand from Carnistir's mouth, and Carnistir wriggles free and plunges into my lap to lie in my arms, as limp as an empty potato sack. "Káno," he says again, nuzzling my neck and popping his thumb into his mouth. "Blue blue Káno."

"Carnistir, look," Tyelkormo reasons. "Káno and I are taking a walk together, so why don't you let us go and take yourself back to the house. Maybe Atar needs your help."

"You're not taking a walk," says Carnistir. "You're lying."

"No, really, Carnistir—"

"You're running away."

The placid baby in my arms changes in that instance to the weepy, runny-nosed brat to whom I am better accustomed. "Don't go don't go don't go," he sobs. He is clinging to me but reaching also for Tyelkormo. "I love you, Turko, don't go!"

"Quiet, Carnistir!" Tyelkormo says, but Carnistir starts wailing, "Aaahhh!"

Tyelkormo is shooting nervous looks at the house, but no one has emerged, and I imagine that they are all still too preoccupied with Annawendë to pay much mind to Carnistir's cries. "I'll write to you," Tyelkormo says in what is meant to be a reassuring tone, but it has the opposite effect, and Carnistir stops crying for a moment to take a deep breath and lets loose with a shriek like none I have ever heard before.

Tyelkormo lurches across the space between us, and Carnistir is sandwiched between us, his face pressed into my chest, muffling his screams, while Tyelkormo's arms circle both of us and hold us in a weird family embrace.

"What if I told you that you could go along with us?" he asks in panicked haste.

The screams turn to sobs and then into whimpers and Carnistir twists his head around and manages to loosen himself enough to look up at us. "Really?"

"Yes." Tyelkormo looks weary suddenly. "If you promise to be good and listen to what I tell you to do, then you may come along."

Carnistir's small, reddened face fractures into a huge grin. We stand and head back in the direction of the road, Carnistir trotting gleefully between us, waving his wooden sword and whooping, despite the fact that Tyelkormo repeatedly hushes him. "But he has no extra clothes!" I hiss to Tyelkormo. "No cloak! No boots!"

Tyelkormo gives me a reproachful stare. "I will mind that, Findekáno."

"But—"

"I am the elder and it was my idea so listen when I tell you that I will mind that!"

My teeth click shut, and I say no more.

We reach the road, more a dirt trail that bisects the land between my uncle's house and the town. To the east lies the town, near enough now that we can see the guards pacing in front of the gates. To the west is the house, but only the peak of the roof is visible above the hills that separate my uncle's estate from the township proper. We start north of the road, heading across a beige-colored meadow towards the black hills in the distance, keeping our cloaks wrapped tightly about us to keep from being spotted by the guards. Tyelkormo carries Carnistir and wraps him also in the cloak. We make haste, and soon, a hill lies between the guards and us, and Tyelkormo sets Carnistir back on his feet with a sigh of relief.

~oOo~ 

For hours we walk. I start counting the paces, but quickly grow tired of it. The lights mingle and Carnistir begins to whimper. "I'm hungry, Turko," he whines.

In our haste to leave the house, we brought not a single morsel of food, not even a bit of dried fruit or a crust of bread.

"My feet hurt. I'm cold."

Big, fat tears are sliding down my youngest cousin's face. Tyelkormo sighs in frustration. "We'll make camp, Carnistir, and I'll find us some supper."

We have no tent, no bedrolls, so we find a grove of trees and I gather some dried leaves and make beds while Tyelkormo readies his bow and sets off in search of game.

Carnistir is huddled beneath one of the trees, shivering. Goosebumps dot his chubby, bare arms. Laurelin's light is fading quickly, and I can feel the heat of the day draining, running from the day like water from an unstoppered bathtub. I wear a medium-heavy cloak myself, and already, the chill is starting to settle on my arms and shoulders. I unroll my hunter's pack and remove my heavy cloak.

In the burgeoning cold, its heavy fur-lined warmth beckons me like a mother's embrace. But Carnistir is whimpering now and shaking so hard that I can see his little body moving even from where I stand, in stark, pale relief against the dark tree.

I take the cloak to him and wrap it around his shoulders.

"Káno," he says, his pale lips trembling as I rub his arms to warm them, "I want to go home."

~oOo~ 

We sleep that night on a bed of dry leaves with Carnistir between us, wearing our heaviest clothes and huddling together with our heavy and medium cloaks piled atop us like blankets. Carnistir weeps for a long time before falling asleep, until Tyelkormo turns his back in frustration, leaving me to cradle him in my arms and stroke his satiny dark hair.

"Hush, baby," I tell him. "All is well."

"Atar," he whimpers. "I want Atar."

I suddenly want my own father as well. I want to sit on his lap that seems so wide and secure with his arms around me. I want to listen to him talking with Grandfather Finwë or bantering with Uncle Arafinwë. My face burns, and I realize that I am weeping too, though silently.

Carnistir wriggles an arm from the blankets and touches my tears before placing his dampened fingers in his mouth.

I imagine that Uncle Fëanáro must surely have discovered that we are missing by now. I imagine that he and Nelyo and Macalaurë are riding around the estate and the town, even as we lie here, calling for us, growing increasingly worried as the light falls from the day. I imagine that Aunt Nerdanel must be nearly hysterical by now. I suddenly feel very guilty.

~oOo~ 

A scream punctures the night and shatters the fragile sleep I managed to find after hours of restless wakefulness. It escalates until it fills my head, until even the sounds of the night are drowned by it, and I can think of nothing else but to hold my hands over my ears and roll in the direction of silence.

It is Carnistir, I realize, as wakefulness takes hold. He lies still between us, but he has kicked the covers away and his little body arches rigidly over our bed, his muscles so tight that he body convulses to escape the pain he inflicts upon himself. He screams again—another wordless keening—and his tiny hands dig at the ground as though it is rising up to attack him, and at last, he shouts at the chimeras in his dreams with words: "No, no, no! Leave him, please! Leave him …" and his body sags back to the ground, and he begins to sob. "Please …"

Tyelkormo reaches first for his little brother, embracing him and jostling him awake. "Carnistir! Wake up! It was only a dream." I hear fear in his voice, a black leech that drains away the shameless pride that has brought us here.

Carnistir writhes awake and, upon seeing Tyelkormo, begins screaming again. "Atar! Atar! ATAAAAAR!"

"No, Carnistir, Atar isn't here. Just me and Káno, remember? But you're well, all is well, little one."

The soft words do little to ease the terror in my little cousin's face. He throws back his head and screams again and again for his father, until even Tyelkormo's eyes shimmer with tears, and Carnistir sobs with desperation, "Atar, Atar, we have to save Nelyo."

Fear clutches my heart in its fist and squeezes. "What did he say?" I bark to Tyelkormo.

"He has vivid nightmares," Tyelkormo explains, brusquely stroking his brother's hair, "but his dreams, they make no sense. He dreams of things that are not possible in this world."

"They have him, Atar, please, save him. Help me save him." With his eyes pinched shut, Carnistir might be praying to the Valar, not invoking the help of his absent father in dispelling his delusional nightmares. Tyelkormo strokes his back and holds his little brother close, but it is not enough to coax him back to sleep.

"Only our father knows how to—" Tyelkormo begins but doesn't finish. Instead, he looks away and stands up, holding Carnistir close to his body as he paces the forest floor, barefoot and seemingly unbothered by the cold, trying to soothe our youngest companion back to sleep.

I huddle beneath the heavy cloaks we use as blankets. The words I want to say are formed on my tongue, but spilling them into the cold night air for Tyelkormo's scrutiny suddenly requires the same effort as lifting a heavy weight. "Tyelkormo," I begin, but when his blue eyes—bright in the near dark—meet mine, I have to look down at the leaves before speaking further. "Maybe we should go home?"

I don't mean for it to come out as a question. I mean for it to be authoritative and confident, like my cousin Maitimo when he gives us our carefully prepared lore lectures every week, the kind of voice that even someone like Tyelkormo cannot resist obeying. I want it to be the kind of voice that will make him set Carnistir aside and gather our belongings, bidding me to do the same so that we can return home this very night and be snug in our beds by morning. Instead, he shifts Carnistir to his hip and contemplates me. "Are you mad?" he asks in a voice with not even a drop of the acquiescence that I'd imagined. "What do you wish us to do? March into the house and announce to Atar that we just decided to spend a night camping in the wild? Without telling anyone? Do you expect that he will order Nelyo to draw us a hot bath, put on a kettle of tea, and get Macalaurë from sleep to serenade us with a song?"

"Well, I do not think that we should stay here."

"Here? Meaning this exact place? That is well: We shall move to the next grove of trees. Just because you wish it so." His voice shakes beneath the sarcasm. He moves as if to roll up our cloaks, and I can see that his hands are trembling.

"That is not what I mean. I do not think we should have run away."

"Fine time to think of it now, Findekáno."

"We have no food. It is cold. And Carnistir …" Carnistir has quieted to grievous moans into Tyelkormo's shoulder, accented every minute or so by a hiccup of a sob and the occasional whimper, "Atar …"

"And should we go home? Do you even know the wrath of my father in anger? We will wish for starvation in the wilds before that."

He lays Carnistir back on the bed and cringes. His hand, I see—which he has made a point not to make a point out of—is angry-red, and the skin is beginning to peel away from the burn in dark strips. I am sickened just to look at it and have to lie down to calm my spinning head.

Carnistir crawls to me with tears still pouring down his face and pushes his head against my chest. "Blue, blue," he says, as though in prayer or invocation. "Blue."

I wrap my heavy cloak around us and pretend not to watch as Tyelkormo lies down again on his half of the bed, alone, with his head lowered to hide the tears in his eyes.

~oOo~ 

I must have slept because, when I awaken, it is the Mingling of the Lights. My naked ears are cold and sore, and as I raise my hands to rub warmth back into them, something wriggles beneath the blanket, and I remember Carnistir.

He has submerged himself completely beneath the cloaks that I share with him, his face pressed into my belly. He rises now and puts his little hands on either side of my face, cupping my ears. "In the cold under the stars, may night's chill depart," he says, and my ears flush into immediate warmth, as though all of the warm blood in my body has been sent to beat through them. Carnistir falls back against my chest, and puzzled, I ask him, "Where did you learn such a thing?"

"I know it," he says.

"But how, little one? It is like magic you perform."

"I know it," he repeats in the same enigmatic and nonchalant tone.

There is a rustle of leaves behind us, and Carnistir leaps to his feet to hug his brother, even as I am beginning to ponder how he had even known that my ears were cold.

"Turko! Turko! Did you bring breakfast?"

I rise slowly, wondering how much anger Tyelkormo retains after our confrontation last night, but he gives me a glance of neither friend nor foe and goes to sit away from the bed, beneath a tree, with his back to me. "There was no game. You'll have to eat berries," he says coldly to Carnistir, and his head hangs and his hair spills over his face. His good hand rises to rub his forehead; the injured hand, I see, is hidden beneath his cloak.

"Tyelkormo?" I call.

He stands quickly, leaving his hurt hand beneath his cloak, and says, "Now that everyone's awake, we must be moving on. There is rain on the clouds today."

As we roll our belongings into our cloaks, I notice an odor like meat that has been left to fester in the heat of the day. I grimace and lean closer to Tyelkormo, trying to discern the source of the reek, and my nose lowers and lowers until it is nearly pressed to his injured hand, and the smell of dying flesh is strong enough to make me gag.

"Tyelkormo! Your hand!"

It is red still, but the worst of the burned flesh is dying, creating the odor I detected. Yellow mucus has seeped over most of the burn. Tyelkormo quickly tucks it away again, and I hear his breath hiss between his teeth as the hand brushes his cloak.

"It is fine," he says. "The worst of the dying flesh has fallen away."

As I watch him gather his belongings, I realize that it wasn't lack of game that leaves us with a cold, meager breakfast but his inability to use his injured hand. Everything he does one-handed, trying to look nonchalant, but I watch his cloak unroll three times before he finally manages to shove it into his hunter's pack. Cold dread tickles my stomach and I grip my shortbow tighter, thinking suddenly of the beasts that Cousin Macalaurë professes run free in these lands.

We stop to snack on berries, but even after we have cleared the bushes, hunger still clenches my stomach in its insistent fist. After another half-hour of walking, Carnistir begins crying again, and I carry him in both my arms, bent backwards by his weight, while he sobs on my shoulder.

"Carnistir, for Manwë's sake!" Tyelkormo snaps after another half-hour of walking while listening to Carnistir's cries, and I jump to his defense: "He is hungry! It is no fault of his."

"I suppose it is mine then? My fault that there was no game?"

I ignore him and keep walking. Carnistir cries harder.

By midday, the rain that Tyelkormo saw on the clouds begins to fall in fat, slow drops. Thunder grumbles in the distance, sounding eerily like the rumbles in our empty bellies. Tyelkormo has been pale and silent for the last few hours; Carnistir's weeping has subsided, and he sleeps in my aching arms with the weight of a bag of rocks. Tyelkormo has us stop so that he can climb a tree in slow, one-handed grasps to search for shelter from the imminent storm. After many minutes, he lowers himself to the ground and says, "There is a cave in the hillside, not far to the west."

The cave is deep and dark, and we enter it just as the storm breaks over our heads, drenching the brown land and illuminating it in blue flashes of lightning. Tyelkormo thought to gather some dried branches as we'd walked, and in a matter of minutes, he has a roaring fire built in the center of the cave. The firelight flickers orange on the wide walls, and we can see that the cave drops deeper into the hillside behind us, tapering into a long tunnel that we could crawl on hands and knees were it not littered with pieces of sharp rock. Warm and out of the rain, everyone's mood improves—despite our hunger and our weariness—and swallowing my nausea, I am permitted to examine Tyelkormo's hand.

"It hurts quite badly," he admits, and I can see why, for the burn is deeper than it first looked and has destroyed much of the tissue on the base of his palm. Knowing not what else to do, I soak one of my extra tunics with rainwater and bring it back to dab at the angry wound. At first, Tyelkormo cries out and jerks his hand away, but I persist, and soon, much of the dark, reeking flesh has been cleaned away and, wiping tears from his eyes, even Tyelkormo must admit that it feels better.

"Perhaps I can draw my bow now," he says, and the shame in his eyes tells me that he knew all along that I discerned the real reason for our inadequate breakfast. "As soon as this rain subsides a bit, I'll gather my hunting gear and at least attempt it. Carnistir, I know is hungry. Right, Carnistir?"

We turn to acknowledge our little companion, but he is gone.

"Carnistir? Come now, this is not a good time to play the shadow game," Tyelkormo calls. There is no answer. "Carnistir? Carnistir? Carnistir!"

I hear panic rise into his voice, and we both leap to our feet to peer out into the rain—falling now so heavily that it looks as though watery curtains are being hung from the clouds—when a voice answers behind us, "Turko?"

We both whirl and see Carnistir, trousers torn and knees bloodied, crawling from the back of the cave with something in his arms. "Turko?" he says again. "I found puppies."

"Puppies?" We both step closer to see what he holds in his arms, but it is only Tyelkormo's hunter's pack. From the back of the cave comes a faint yipping, and two grayish puppies bumble into the circle of light created by our fire.

"See?" Carnistir says, and his face has broken into a wide grin. "Puppies!"

"By Eru!" Tyelkormo gasps. "Carnistir, those are wolves." He flies to the cloaks and extra clothes that I had unpacked. "Eru, help us, we need to get out of here." His hands are shaking as he tries to re-roll my bundles; I hasten to help him. "I don't want to be here when the mother gets back."

"Will she be able to track us?" I ask.

"Hopefully not in the rain. Carnistir!" he shouts. "Put that down and help us!"

"I want to carry it."

"Fine! You can carry it when we leave! But come and help us now."

I imagine that I hear growling in the mouth of the cave, but when I turn, I see Carnistir against a silver backdrop of falling rain, clutching Tyelkormo's hunter's pack to his chest, and nothing else. My cloaks are poorly rolled, but I shove them into my hunter's pack anyway and, without bothering to fasten it completely, Tyelkormo and I leap to our feet. "Come on, Carnistir!" Tyelkormo says, his impatience quavering in his voice, as he seizes his little brother by the arm and drags him from the cave. "Now is not the time to dawdle!"

We are soaked within a matter of seconds, but I silently thank Manwë for the storm, for the heavy rains should erase our tracks and our scents before the mother returns. We splash through the mud, my heartbeat like drums in my ears, unconcerned now about our hunger and injury. The soil beneath our feet is slipping away in a brisk course of water. I stumble once, but Tyelkormo seizes my arm and drags me to my feet, and we don't even loose a step. There is a bluff, barely visible as a gray mass through the rain, and Tyelkormo shouts at us to follow him in that direction, where we can hopefully find new shelter from the rain.

In that instant, the rain stops. A few straggling drops plunk onto our bare, soaked heads and there is a final crack of thunder, but when we look up, blue skies are beginning to break through. Tyelkormo stops to wipe the rainwater from his eyes and survey the lands around us. To the south, Laurelin's light is gold on the horizon. Around us are soaring cliffs and bluffs of dove-colored stone, dotted in places with caves like the one from which we have just emerged. The ground is rocky and little grows, and even the trees are nearly bare of leaves. To the north, there is a gap between two high cliffs, and Tyelkormo motions us in that direction. "This way!" he calls.

I take a step and hear my feet squelch in the mud. Two other sounds answer it: the bray of Oromë's hunting horn echoes off of the cliffs around us, and from the pack that Carnistir still clutches in his arms, comes a flurry of angry yelps.

And, behind us, low growling.

Atar and I are banned from the room while Nimelië examines the burn on Annawendë's leg, and the sudden inactivity is enough to drive me mad. For the last few hours, my worries have been kept at bay through the power of distraction, by first retrieving the supplies Amil shouted at me, then riding hard to Formenos to retrieve Nimelië—when it became clear that Annawendë's injuries were beyond Atar and Amil's skill—then the ride home with Nimelië on the back of my horse, shouting questions in my ear about Annawendë's condition—all of those things kept the nagging voices in my head at the level of a tolerable buzz. But now, with the heavy door shut firmly between us, dulling the sound of Nimelië's voice to incomprehensible rumbles, I am left alone with my thoughts, and I pace the hallway, twisting my hands against each other, listening for any sound or clue beyond the closed door.

"Maitimo," says Atar. "Nelyo. Please, sit down."

His face is creased with worry, but he sits on the floor across from the door, his hands hanging clenched between his bent knees.

"I cannot, Atar," I mutter, running my hands through my hair, tangled from the hard ride to and from Formenos. "I feel that I will go mad if I try to sit still."

"You will not go mad," he tells me. "But you are wearing a trench into my floor, and after I just had your brother polish it too." He is trying to make me laugh, and I force my lips to twitch into a smile to please him, but he is not fooled. "Nelyo." He pats the floor beside him. "Sit."

It is less a request than a command, so I make my legs lower my body to sit beside him. His arm circles my shoulders—and even though my heart is beating heavily in my chest and my muscles hum with tension—there is some vestigial sense of relief in the touch of a parent that I crave, and I am relieved to lean against him.

"Now Nelyo," he says, and he is tucking my hair behind my ears and working at the worst knots with quick, capable fingers, "you have two craftsmen for parents: surely you realize that no one can work in the forge without occasionally getting burned? It is a part of the profession."

"Yes, but she might be badly injured or scarred—"

"No. I have seen far worse." I am surprised by the gentleness of his hands; Tyelkormo always complains that Atar yanks his head when he detangles his hair. "I have had far worse. Our people heal quickly. Look at your brother: dislocating his shoulder and, scarcely a week later, riding about as though nothing even happened. And, believe me, Nimelië dispenses more tonics to erase scars here in Formenos than Varda has stars in the sky."

I look at Atar's hands, as alabaster and unscarred as fresh marble. Many times have his hands held mine; many times in my childhood did I hug his bare legs; many times, on journeys, have we bathed beside one another in the river, and never have I seen a scar on my father's body. I have seen his competent, slender hands slip while working; I have seen him mark his body with hot steel or the blade of a knife, but the marks linger for no longer than a few days before fading like snow with the winds of spring, as though the fire within him is no match for any fire that can be conjured in the world outside.

"I should hate to see the two of you when you are married," Atar teases, "when Annawendë goes into labor with your first child."

"Atar, you are ambitious. I haven't even asked for her hand in marriage, yet you already have us begetting your grandchildren!"

"Ambitious, some might say. Your mother might say that I am impatient. I think both might be a little true." His arm tightens around my shoulder, and I am relieved to press against him, as though fear is like water, and osmosis might pass it from me to him, who is much abler at managing such dark emotions.

It is not that I fear for the life of the woman I have just begun to love, nothing so drastic. The burn is on her leg, and although it is bad, it is not deep enough to pose any serious threat to her health. Even the pain I know she must feel is not at the root of my anxiety—for although it frustrates me to know that there is naught I can do to subdue her agony—she is tough and forced a smile when I entered her chamber; her hands in mine were firm and warm; there weren't even glimmers of tears in her eyes.

It's the scars.

In the animal world, our people have long been wise to the fact that offspring are occasionally born with deformities that set them apart from the rest of their kin. Once, while hunting with my grandfather, on one of the rare days when he had been able to remove himself from Tirion, he'd slain a deer not old enough or large enough to be considered proper game, and when I'd raised immediate protest, he led me to the corpse and showed me that the poor creature had three eyes: two normal eyes in the usual place at the sides of the head and a third, perverse orb—not fully formed—slightly off-center in its forehead. Its foreleg, too, was twisted and crippled, the bones warped like flimsy wood left in the rain. "It is a greater mercy that it died by the accuracy of my arrow," Grandfather Finwë told me, "then by slow starvation when its poor leg finally broke." We did not take the meat—as though the beast had been somehow poisoned by its deformity—but set fire to the corpse while Grandfather knelt in a prayer of apology to Yavanna.

Our people are blessed to arrive always in the world as we were intended, with all of our parts functional and in the right places. There are those of us gifted with greater or lesser beauty, but ugliness is never born among the Quendi, and grace comes easily even to the least fair among us.

When Macalaurë was very young and I first became stricken with an insatiable hunger for knowledge, we figured out how to pick the lock to Atar's secret letters and books, those that Amil bade him to hide lest we find them and be afraid. Most numerous of the letters came from people who—like my grandfathers—had made the Great Journey to Valinor, and not a few among them discussed Orcs. Orcs were fictional beings, I'd thought, for that is what Atar called my brother and me when we frustrated him with sloppy or careless behavior. "What are you? An Orc?" he would ask when we left our room a mess or ate our food too fast or let gas escape in the presence of company. The word alone chilled my spirit: hard syllables never meant to be spoken by a voice as beautiful as our father's, like the dull sound of a hammer falling upon flesh. I imagined great, snorting pig-like beings that had abandoned all of the grace of our people for lascivious self-fulfillment.

But upon coaxing open the lock with one of Amil's hairpins, I sat on the floor of Atar's study, dimmed by the drapes we had drawn, with my heart hammering in my chest as I read accounts of people—friends, family even, of the writers—who had gone into the wilds and never come back. And the few times, later on the journey, that those people had been met again in the north, bearing unspeakable scars and mutilations, having been subjected to pain so intense that even their spirits were made twisted and hideous. There were drawings too, done by the journeyers and improved by my father, of grotesque beings that resembled Elves only in the rudimentary sense of having arms, legs, and versions of faces: teeth torn out and replaced my fangs made from shards of bone, skin burned until it healed black, bones broken until the body had no choice but to heal in a diminished state, twisted like the tehtar we placed above our letters. There were words too that I had never heard before, but whose sound alone made me nauseous: maiming, rape, torture. With trembling hands, we replaced the letter and the ledgers, and I made Macalaurë swear to tell no one of our trespass.

It was I who'd betrayed us, when night after night, I awoke, screaming into my pillow, imagining dark hands closing upon me and dragging me to the secret places underground where Elves were made into Orcs. With the draperies drawn and our room dark, shadows became menaces that would draw blades and flame across my flesh; the tangled, sweat-soaked bedclothes became shackles to hold me to my fate. Macalaurë watched me from his bed across the room, his wide eyes like lamps in the silver darkness, until the screams stopped and he would run to me. Hand-in-cold-hand we went, night after night, to sleep in bed between our parents, until Atar became suspicious and sat us both in his lap—we were still so small that we could each occupy a leg, and looking up into his face was like staring into the face of a god—and asked us of what we dreamt that frightened us so. "I will not be angry," he told us, and it was I who betrayed the pact I'd made with my brother, as I wept and told him of our intrusion into his locked cabinet and our subsequent reading of Orcs.

True to his word, he was not angry, but Amil gave him a look of disgust and his face melted into apology like I had never before. Our fears he dismissed as a part of a past long lost for our people and said little more but tucked us both against him—strange, considering that Macalaurë usually slept with Amil while I slept with Atar—and Amil gave him a final sharp look before rolling to face away from us.

My father devotes his life to adding beauty to an already bountiful world, so his research on Orcs puzzled me, for Orcs represent a perversion of beauty and goodness into evil. Amil, too, seemed confused by this bizarre fascination, although she said nothing. It wasn't until I was much older—only a few years younger than I am now and long permitted to read the materials in that locked cabinet—that I gathered the courage to ask him why he collected such nauseating information.

"Your grandmother had a sister. Did I ever tell you that?" His gray eyes were distant, looking over a faraway and long lost world.

"Grandmother Istarnië?" I asked, but he shook his head.

"Grandmother Míriel." My heart leapt, for Atar does not often speak of his dead mother. "She had a sister; both, of course, were born in the Outer Lands near the end of the Great Journey. She wasn't very old when she and her sister strayed too far from the group. She was saved, but her sister was taken."

My heart was beating, I could feel that, but it felt as though my blood was drained and cold water pushed through my veins. "What happened to her?" I asked in a voice that sounded like it might belong to someone else. The stories, the diagrams—I saw the many paintings and sculptures that Atar had made of his mother and tried to imagine knives and flame being taken to that flawless flesh and felt ill.

"No one knows that, Maitimo. No one but the servants of Melkor." That name he spit like a wad of phlegm. "So you have blood in Angband. I suppose you never reckoned that."

I never did. But Angband was an ocean away; Orcs were an ocean away. The stain of Melkor's evil, I thought, never touched Valinor, so I pushed such thoughts and fears into the same realm as I shoved the tales of wraiths and fell spirits that Macalaurë so liked to tell by the fire on a cold night. I detached the drawings and letters in my father's secret trove from the emotions I had felt upon first reading them. I even added my own thoughts to several of his writings. History was reduced to words on a page; the people who had endured such fear and torment were made into clusters of letters. There was no need to fear that which existed now only in ink. About the great battles of the Valar I read, yet I feared neither bow nor sword—and so it seemed rather ridiculous to fear orcs. Flame sketched upon a page does not burn and knives forged by pen alone have not the power to sever flesh.

As my interest in history and the lore of letters deepened, I begged my father to take me to meet Rúmil, he who created the first form of writing that Atar later improved as the Tengwar we use today. Atar went to visit him at least once annually, usually while we were in Formenos, for Rúmil lived a half-day's ride west of Formenos. "You were born with the blood of the he who improved such scripts, little one," he used to tease me when I was small and begged to go along. "Isn't that enough?"

Rúmil had been born beside Cuiviénen, one of the first children begotten of the Unbegotten, and my brain was filled with questions for him. It wasn't until I was older—after Atar told me the story of Míriel's lost sister—that he at last consented to have me along. "But I must first send message to Rúmil," he said, "and earn his approval."

Approve he did, and Atar and I set out before the Mingling of the Lights, riding hard west so that we might arrive before Laurelin waxed fully. Rúmil's cottage was a tiny, square building made of stone, leagues apart from any other people. He did not come out to greet us or take our horses, and Atar and I pastured them ourselves, while I watched Atar for clues as to whether he found this strange. As we left the pasture for the house, he seized my arm. "I should tell you that Rúmil is … not like us," and I grinned—knowing well the eccentricities of genius—and eagerly tugged his hand, "Come, Atar, you've made me wait long enough."

And so he followed my lead, and we went to the door, and he did not knock but pulled a string beside the door. Through a slit in the door, a note slid out. "Does he know?" it read, and Atar glanced at me—and I felt a tiny shiver of dread—then wrote beneath it, "No, but he is strong," and the door opened.

The walls were papered with parchments, upon which were written the great speeches of the Valar and songs of old, some done in Rúmil's Sarati—fading, browned, and cracking at the edges—and the newer written in the Fëanárian Tengwar. The cottage was a single room, and it was lit only by the glow of flickering flames, for all of the windows had been papered over by manuscripts, some of them curving in designs so intricate that it was hard to believe that the pictures—of Tirion, of Taniquetil, all of Valinor—were constructed of thousands of tiny letters. In the corner was an ascetic and uncomfortable-looking single bed; at the center of the room stood a wide worktable upon which a half-finished parchment rested and a handful of ragged quills. Rúmil stood behind the door, and as he closed it behind us, I saw that his unbraided hair was left to fall and hide his face, and ever he watched the floor. Into my hand, he slipped a note. "Welcome, Maitimo," it read. "Son of Fëanáro." His fingers pressing mine were cool, and when he stooped to kiss my hand, there was something odd about the feeling of his lips against my skin that made the hair on my arms stand on end.

Atar pressed another note into Rúmil's hand. "He is strong. Raise your face to us and see how beautiful is my son." Rúmil made a noise in his throat that sounded like an animal whimpering and brushed the hair away from his face.

"Your words did not do him justice," said the note that Rúmil passed to my father while I stared, my graceful manners forgotten as my heartbeat filled my ears with a dreadful roar. "It shall never be fair to call anything beautiful ever after, for when one as your son bears such a name, never again shall that claim be matched."

To me, he passed another note: "I can neither hear nor speak, but I welcome your questions, Maitimo, and if your curiosity is half that of your father, then we shall have many hours of pleasant discourse."

He wore heavy, dark clothes that covered all of his skin from throat to ankle, and leather boots covered his feet. The sleeves of his tunic reached nearly to his knuckles, and I could see why, for scars crossed his face and what I could see of his hands. But it was his mouth and the sides of his head that awakened in me the conflicting urges to both stare and turn away. His lips were soft and did not pucker outward but caved inward in the same way that cloth will bow loosely between two tent posts. Atar passed him a note that made him laugh—a sound like rocks rattling against each other—and when his mouth opened, I saw that he had neither teeth nor tongue. His hair hung flatly against the sides of his head—too flat, I observed—and when he turned to put on a pot of tea, I realized it was because his ears had been removed and the flesh beneath them gouged out, and stomach acid burned the back of my throat. He had a large stature, almost as tall as my father and broader in the shoulders, and the hands that lifted the iron teapot were strong and competent, but I knew I was looking upon the early stages of an Orc.

He and Atar wrote back and forth to each other all day—long into Telperion's hours—but I found little to say, my curiosity quashed. He offered us supper, but I found that I could not eat, for the realization that the horrors of Angband had been brought to Valinor.

We left too late to make it but halfway home before night fell completely. Normally, we would have ridden onward, but out of mercy to me, Atar suggested that we stop and sleep beneath the stars. It was a warm night for the north, and we built a fire only to heat up the stew that Atar had brought, although I only sipped mine and could barely swallow. Even the aroma of the wine he'd brought—one of my favorite vintages—smelled too sweet, like rotting flesh, and at last, I offered it to him, feeling shamed that it should be wasted: "I cannot taste this tonight."

I turned away to lie on my bedroll, away from the fire and away from Atar and the temptation that he presented, bidding me to ask what had happened to deform Rúmil so brutally. I heard the grass rustle as Atar followed me, and he held my head in his lap like he used to when I was little, and silent tears poured down my cheeks. "Maitimo," he said, holding my hands in his that are ever warm. "Maitimo, my love, I'm sorry. I should not have brought you."

"Atar—" My voice cracked and I couldn't finish, couldn't bear to satisfy the sick curiosity inside of me, feeling suddenly that this "research" with which I had been helping him satisfied the same primitive need as the scary stories that Macalaurë liked to invent and the bloody war games that Tyelkormo and Carnistir played—only this was sicker, for this was real. We sat in silence for a long time—hours passed, perhaps—and he stroked my hair while the fire died and his supper got cold. At last, I whispered, "Is it wrong?"

"Is it wrong to remember those we lost? No, I don't think so. We should never hide from reality, Nelyo, even when that reality is cruel."

"Then … how?"

"Rúmil was one of the first of our people born in Middle-earth," Atar began, twining my hair in his fingers as though about to plait it. His voice was soft, almost reverent, like it tended to be when he talked about his mother. "His parents were of the Unbegotten, and their joy of their young son was unbounded. He thrived in his youth and quickly became powerful, but his love was for song and music, for our people had just discovered how to craft simple instruments to accompany the singing they had always loved. Like your brother, he was a poet and a bard, and many of the old songs are of his devising. He was young when he fell in love, and not much older than you when he wed a maiden early-born like him of Unbegotten parents.

"You know how Melkor ensnared our people, and Rúmil he got in a like fashion. He was one of the strongest of the people by Cuiviénen, so he did not heed the warnings not to walk or hunt alone. He was captured by the Shadow less than a league from the lake, so close that he could hear his young wife singing by the waters.

"He was taken to Angband and put among others of our people, Elves like him, like us, in various stages of torment. These people's bodies had been marred, but their spirits and minds were not yet destroyed, and they took strength from Rúmil's voice. He sang out from his prison, and the servants of Melkor whipped him. Still, he sang out, and they broke his bones. Still, he did not stop singing, and the torments they placed upon his flesh exceed that which I wish to put into words, but amid his tears and screams, he sang still, and the other prisoners hearkened, and hope flowered in the darkest and least likely of places, and the work of Melkor was stalled for a time.

"Melkor grew to hate the voice of Rúmil, for hope sprang in its wake, and Melkor sought to end his song. He had his servants cut from Rúmil his ears and deafen him, but his song was in his spirit—a place deeper than his ears reached—and he sang still. Melkor next had cut from him his tongue, but although words are in the tongue, the voice is not, and his song—though now wordless—continued. It was his final act that robbed Rúmil of his voice, for Melkor poured acid into his throat, and though his spirit sang evermore, never again would it reach the ears of his brethren, and hope died in the dungeons beneath Angband.

"When the Valar laid siege to Angband during the War of Wrath, Rúmil was one of the few Elves who survived the attack. So mauled was he that at first they thought him an Orc, and Tulkas raised his hand to smite him, but the song in his spirit kindled the hearts of the Valar and they knew him unchanged in spirit. He was led from Angband and given a special place at the feet of the Valar, but when our people arrived in Aman, they were not always kind to him, and sight of his face filled them with fear and recalled to them the life they had left behind. He was grieved that he should cause distress to so many. It was of his own volition that he exiled himself to a place where no one else cared to live, away from eyes that might be offended by the damage that had been done to him, and in this solitary existence, he first conceived the Sarati, by which even the voiceless could speak."

I did not sleep that night but lay with my head in his lap while he twined my hair, until Laurelin gilded the horizon and we rode the remaining short distance home.

Rúmil has haunted my thoughts ever since. No longer could I stomach my study of Orcs, and if Atar continues it to this day, I do not know. But the atrocity of Rúmil flees my mind now and is overtaken by a single thought, voiced by Atar that night: "Our people were not always kind to him."

And Annawendë, her beautiful body marred: I wonder if I will be tempted to forsake her.

As though he reads my thoughts, Atar leans over and whispers in my ear, as he had that night beneath the stars, years ago: "Fear not, little one. Fear not."

~oOo~ 

The minutes pass like syrup oozing from a spoon, but finally, the door opens and Nimelië steps into the hallway. She laughs as Atar and I turn our faces to her in twin images of eager nervousness. "To see you from afar, I would believe that I looked upon the mightiest of the Noldor," she says. "But all I see now are two children afraid of the monsters in the dark."

Atar stands and drags me to my feet before I can make a similar effort and stands, clutching my hand tightly at his side in both of his. "How is she?"

"Annawendë will be fine." She looks at me. "And you will be relieved to know, Maitimo, that your intended will heal with nary a mark."

Relief is like the touch of a cool towel upon fevered skin, and I feel as though two inches of my height are lost as my body sags back to its normal stance. "May we see her?" I manage, and Nimelië smiles. "Of course."

Amil sits at her bedside and quickly draws the sheet over Annawendë's bare legs when she sees me enter. Annawendë sees Atar first, and her eyes brighten. "Fëanáro!" she says, and then she sees me. "Maitimo!" she chortles in a voice bright and flattered.

Atar appraises her, seeking signs of pain or malcontent, but her face remains smiling and she shifts towards us. "How fare you, Annawendë?" he asks, taking her hand in his.

"Please don't tell me that you have waited all this while for me. I am well! Surely, Fëanáro, you have similar injuries in your many years of experience?"

"Yes, but my own pain is easier to bear than that of my wife, my sons, or my apprentices," he says.

"And Maitimo, who is looking out for those brothers of yours if you are standing vigil over my bedroom door? They are probably running the countryside wild by now."

Nimelië comes back to the bedside with several vials of salve. "Who will see that this is regularly applied to Annawendë's leg?" she asks. Amil glances at me and quickly volunteers, and Nimelië takes her aside to give her instructions. Amil watches me over Nimelië's shoulder as she speaks, and Atar gives me a secretive smile when she dares to glance away for a moment.

"I imagine that you two wish to speak alone for a while," Atar says, and as Amil comes back with the vials in her hand, Atar seizes her arm and pulls her in the direction of the door before she can protest. "Supper will be in two hours, if you feel well enough to eat, Annawendë," he says, speaking loudly to overpower the words that I can see want to spill from Amil's open mouth, dragging her from the room before she has the chance.

Soon, we are alone, and I sit on the edge of her bed and hold her hand that still carries the warmth of my father's. "I was worried," I say. "I heard you scream all the way in the library—"

She shushes me with fingers on my lips. "How is Tyelkormo?"

I am puzzled. "Tyelkormo? Well, fine, I'd imagine."

"He's the one that caused my injury, did you know that?" By my silence, she can tell that I did not. "You father had harsh words with him, and he ran from the forge before any of us realized what had even happened. I know it was your father's fear for me that spoke so rashly and cruelly, but Tyelkormo mightn't have known that."

"I'm sure he's fine, probably in the fields, chasing Carnistir and plotting against poor Findekáno, even as we speak. You have to learn not to treat him so delicately. Tyelkormo has probably the thickest skin of all of us."

"He is still little, Maitimo—not even fifteen."

Now it is my turn to hush her with a finger on her lips. They are plump beneath my finger and moist, and I want to kiss her but feel it would be unfair to take advantage of her while she is injured and unable to escape her bed. As though she knows my thoughts, she kisses my fingertip, and the nerves from my fingertip to my shoulder tingle at even this slightest of touches.

"Does it hurt?" I ask, to distract both of us from the electricity now humming between us. She shakes her head no. "May I see it then?"

"How dare you ask a proper maiden such as me to bare my leg for you!" she teases.

"I assure you that the sight of your burned leg will not tempt me into compromising our shared virtue."

She slides the sheet down from her waist. Beneath, she wears only a tunic that comes to mid-thigh. From mid-calf to just below the hemline of her tunic, Nimelië has wrapped her leg in bandages. The other leg is bare and unharmed, strong and beautiful lying against the dark sheets, and I quickly look away before I can wonder what—if anything—she wears beneath the tunic.

"You didn't say it would be bandaged," I mutter.

"I assumed you knew."

"Why would you offer to show me your injury if there was naught to see but bandages?"

"Perhaps I just wanted to show you my leg." Her arm reaches up and cups the back of my neck. "Why don't you lie down beside me, Maitimo? We do not often get two hours of uninterrupted freedom."

"Annawendë …"

"Why the hesitancy? There is no fear that we should be tempted into bonding, for I couldn't take you atop me now even if I wished, nor could I sit astride you." She smiles as she says this, as though she knows that her words make my heart race, and suddenly I am aware that my trousers are too tight in the groin. I can fathom only two options for how to proceed: I can kiss her or I can run from the room. I contemplate her slightly parted lips and imagine them warming mine. And I consider the cold stone hallway outside.

Outside her windows, the Lights are mingling, and I kiss her. My lips meet hers harder than I intended, and she draws away. "Be gentle, Maitimo," she chides. "That is no way to kiss a lady."

"I'm sorry, but with you baring your legs and all this talk of bonding—" She silences me with a kiss, tender this time. My hand cups her knee, then slides up her thigh until I am edging her tunic higher up her uninjured leg. She is kissing me deeply, our tongues twining and her teeth nipping at my bottom lip until it almost hurts. I swing my feet up from the floor to lie beside her in the bed.

"Ai!" Too late, I realize that I have bumped her bandaged leg in my thoughtless haste.

"Eru, I'm sorry, Annawendë!" She sucks hard on her lips, trying to conceal her pain from me, but it is futile. I slip from the bed—my desire wilted—and kneel on the floor, clutching her hand. "I am deeply sorry, my love."

Her eyes spring open, and the pain melts from her face. In the next instant, her arms are clamped around my head, hugging it tightly. "Ann—wha—?"

"You've never called me that before," she says into my hair.

"Called you what?"

"My love."

My face is pressed into her mattress, so when I laugh, it sounds muffled, more like a moan than laughter. She releases my head and sits back to contemplate me. "You are odd, Annawendë," I tell her. "Never before have I called a maiden love and had her—"

In a blink, her hand is slapped over my mouth, choking my words inside of me. "Do not say it, Maitimo. Let's pretend that I am the first maiden you have ever called your love, and I shall pretend that you are the first to say it to me."

I settle onto the floor with her arm still about my neck, and she buries her face into my hair. The light through the window is glorious and pale, bringing the world into perfect focus. "I love you," I whisper to her, raising my hand to caress her arm, and I feel her smile into my hair, and we both drift into sleep.

Maitimo

"Nelyo!" In my dreams, it is our wedding night, but Atar insists on coming into our bedroom in the early hours to awaken me to go to the forge with him. I mumble something to dissuade him, but he is persistent, as Atar always is, and he calls my name again. "Nelyo! Nelyafinwë!"

The sound of my father-name throws me from sleep. The room is bathed in silver, and Annawendë's arm is still locked around my neck, and I can feel the whisper of her breath in my hair. The floor is achingly hard beneath my backside, and I shift, just as Atar walks around the bed to stand in front of me.

For a bizarre moment, I think that he is chastising me for falling asleep while seated on the floor in Annawendë's room—as Amil surely would, if she knew—but then I see his face, and I know that something is amiss. He wears the look he only gets when something has disturbed him deeply—when news comes from Tirion of one of Uncle Nolofinwë's slights against our house—or when he is grieved. This is the look he got when, upon examining Macalaurë's shoulder, found the bone dislodged from the socket, when he knew that he would have to be the one to wrench it back into place. Behind me, Annawendë shifts and groans, and the warm collar her arm has made around my neck is removed. Lit from behind by the silver windows, Atar is just a shadow with a very perturbed look on his face.

"What is it, Atar?" I stand slowly and whisper so as not to wake Annawendë, whose ordeals have finally buried her beneath sleep. My soft voice and careful motions agitate Atar further, and he shows none of my courtesy, as his voice is just as loud and strident as it was upon his entry. "Have you seen your brothers? Or Findekáno?"

Annawendë groans again and stirs, sitting up carefully. "Fëanáro?" she mumbles into the silver light.

"Have either of you seen your brothers or Findekáno?"

I know the tone Atar takes when he stands on the brink of eruption, and I hear it now: a high, desperate note that surpasses what I would have thought possible for my perfect, collected father. "I've seen no one," I reply, trying to keep my voice calm.

Atar explodes into pacing, one hand raking back across his hair and tearing at the braids that Amil put in this morning. "You are sure? Absolutely positive?"

"We fell asleep, Atar, not long after you and Amil left." I pause for a moment, watching him pace. "What is the matter?"

"They are gone."

"Gone?"

"Yes! Gone! I cannot find any of the little ones. They should have been back hours ago." From fret, he is propelled into action. "Get your traveling gear, Nelyo. We'll begin by searching the town."

"Atar, you know how they are. They are probably hiding in a cabinet somewhere or behind a bookcase—"

"Would your brother take his longbow and arrows if he meant only to hide in a cabinet?"

Fifteen minutes later, Amil has our horses saddled, and we mount in the growing dark. Macalaurë has joined us, and even in the meager light, I can see that his gray eyes are nervous and wide.

We ride to town as though the wind carries our horses, with Atar in the front and Macalaurë and I behind, in a small V. The guards draw swords and raise lanterns at our approach, but upon seeing my father's crest on his horse's martingale, re-sheath them and breathe audible sighs of relief.

It is the older, senior guard who speaks first. "Prince Fëanáro—"

"Have my sons come into the town?"

"Why I saw the eldest—"

"Do you think I ask after the one who stands beside me now? Have my youngest sons come into the town? Or my brother-son?"

"I have not seen them. Why?"

Atar is already remounting. "They are gone."

The younger guard speaks at last. "Fëanáro, wait …"

Atar reins in his horse even as his heels dig into his sides. "What?"

"Search your property, and if you don't find them, send up a blue flare. We will send a messenger to Oromë for aid."

"Oromë?" Macalaurë whispers to me, fear heavy in his voice.

"Pray that the darkness holds," Atar says, wheeling his horse and heading home in a gallop.

The northern lands of Aman fall not under the blessing of the Valar and are subject to the weather and seasons as are the Outer Lands. The beasts of the land, too, are wild and vicious, and each year it seems, a child from the town goes missing. Most years, he is found wandering in the hills beyond the city walls, having run away to spite his parents or having become lost in his travels. But every century or so, it is told, the search goes on for days without relief, and Oromë is called for aid. Most of the time, the child recovered by Oromë and his hounds is not alive.

The horses are winded when we return home, and foam stands out on their necks. Amil comes to the stable and silently takes them from us, then drops the reins as she and Atar fall into an embrace.

"Come, Macalaurë," I say, turning my eyes from them. "Action is wasteful without thought." I tug my brother's arm until he follows. "There are three of them. They must have left tracks. We'll begin in Tyelkormo's room."

"Why there?"

"Can you honestly believe that Findekáno or Carnistir organized such an exploit? Any clues we find will begin with Tyelkormo."

~oOo~ 

It is deep night and weariness tugs my bones as I help Atar set the flare into the grass and strike the flint. The fuse twirls as it shortens, and the flare rockets into the sky with a whistling wheeze. It takes the space of a heartbeat for it to burst against the silvery darkness, sending a blue spray of light into the sky, falling back to the earth in sapphire fronds that should be beautiful but instead make my heart hammer with fear.

The night is silent, as though even the animals and insects sense our terror and grow mute in deference. Atar and I do not speak as we walk back to the house. I glance at him occasionally from the corner of my eye, but his face stays hard and he walks in silence with his arms crossed over his ribs.

The apprentices helped us search but wait now in the house, and they fall silent when the door slams behind us, waiting in the entrance hall like subjects hoping to be called before the king. "Where is my wife?" Atar says brusquely, looking at no one, and Vorondil answers, "She has gone to her chambers."

"Bring her to me, Nelyo."

I dare not even respond but whirl on the ball of my foot and run up the stairs. Approaching the door to the suite she shares with Atar, I hear her voice, muffled and mingling with Macalaurë's, which is much clearer but edged in unease. I knock twice sharply and Macalaurë calls for me to enter.

They sit side-by-side on the sofa, and for the look on my brother's face, I would weep if I had time to spare for tears, for he is thirty-nine no longer but much younger, yet he holds our mother in his arms and her tears drop onto the front of his tunic. "We have sent for aid," I say. "Atar requests your presence downstairs."

"Requests?" her voice is bitter through her tears. "Your father does not know how to request."

"Amil, I—"

"Well, you can tell him—" She takes her hands from her face and looks up. Our mother's fire is dim beside our father's, yet notorious still is her temper, and my brothers and I all find it harder to look in her eyes when she is angry than to look in our father's. I find that my glance has fallen to the thick carpet beneath my muddied boots. "No mind, Nelyo. I would not put you between us. I will tell him myself."

Macalaurë and I follow her down the stairs, trotting to keep up with her long, angry strides, and exchanging glances between us that betray the feeling of dread that we share. Amil flies from the bottom step and strides across the entrance hall, ignoring the apprentices and us, and shoves our father hard in the chest.

He gasps, and she seizes his tunic in her fist. "You order me before you like I was one of your servants? It is you who cannot hold his tongue; you, Fëanáro, who drove our children into the wilds, so if anyone has a right to fury, it is I."

"Nerdanel—"

"Do not twist fair words to soothe my heart, Fëanáro!" Tears stream down her face, but her grip on his tunic is so fierce that her knuckles have blanched and her wrist trembles. "If anything has happened to any of those children, it is you who shall face the ending of Arda alone!" She tears her hand from his tunic, rending the material, and seems then to become aware of Macalaurë, the apprentices, and me for the first time. A cry rises in her throat, and her hands fly to her face, and she pushes past us to pound up the stairs.

Atar stands in the center of the hall, his tunic askance, and stares after her, then in a single moment faster than a flash of light, his hand closes around the neck of a nearby vase—a beautiful many-colored glass piece, the materials of which he made and the design of which belongs to my mother—and he hurls it against the wall by the stairs, where it shatters into a thousand tiny pieces like a broken rainbow.

~oOo~ 

Before Atar and I sent up the flare, Macalaurë and I searched the property. We checked Tyelkormo's room first and found it as Atar had reported it. His longbow and three practice arrows were missing, as were his and Findekáno's travel cloaks and boots. "Let me get my cloak," Macalaurë said, for the night was becoming chilly, and a moment later, he flew back into Tyelkormo's room: "They took my bow and arrows too!"

Nothing of Carnistir's was missing. His tiny travel boots sat neatly aligned at the bottom of Atar's armoire. All of his cloaks hung above them. We ran down the stairs and scanned the lawn. "There!" Macalaurë cried at last, and we followed the broken grass to the big rocks beside the house.

The dirt had been kicked up there, as though a scuffle had occurred, and I found three strands of stiff, dark hair caught in a bramble bush nearby. "Carnistir," I said, taking them gently from the briers and holding them to my lips, wanting to weep for the fear that I might never hold my squirming baby brother while working the knots from his unruly hair again.

We followed their tracks to the road and there lost them, for Tyelkormo is a clever tracker and equally clever at losing pursuit, and I knew that he had led them awhile along the road to find a place where they could pass into the wilds undetected. If we were to follow them further, it would have to be with hounds.

Now, we gather provisions and saddle our horses, for it may be many days before we have a chance for sleep and sustenance. Atar does not speak, but he yanks the girth on his saddle so tight that his horse snorts and stomps and casts him a dangerous look. In the distance, we hear the baying of hounds and the thunder of hoofbeats, and when Atar is turned, Macalaurë and I dart outside to wait for Oromë.

He is not long coming and arrives on his steed Nahar in a roar of hoofbeats. "Hail, young princes!" he calls to us, and I suddenly feel very small and insignificant, like I had when Atar or Amil used to catch me as a little child, playing in Atar's good festival robes with his circlet slipping around my neck, pretending to address the people in Tirion.

Oromë swings from Nahar and stands before us. The Valar have chosen images like our own, in proportions close to our own, and he is not much taller than me. Like many of the Valar, he is bearded, and his hair is golden-brown, much like Tyelkormo's own, I realize. As though he senses our fear, he reaches out his hands and lays one each on our cheeks. "Fear not, sons of Curufinwë. Your brother is a quick-witted one but he has likely not wandered far. I am grateful that you called for me so soon."

"Is it true?" Macalaurë asks in a whisper. "What they say about the children who disappear and never return?"

"You have heard too many legends and stories, Canafinwë. You will see your brothers and cousin again, for there are much tastier things in the wild for beasts to eat than Elf-children. More to fear is that the littlest one travels without boots or cloak. Your father's fire is in Turkafinwë's spirit, but his body aches with chill, as would anyone else's."

"How do you—" I start to ask, but Atar appears beside us then, and Oromë makes a slight bow before him. Out of respect, Atar bows as well, but it is stiff and awkward.

"Prince Curufinwë, son of Finwë. Fair are not the circumstances of our meeting, but I am glad that you have called for me."

"Sons, be gone and secure the provisions," he tells us in a brusque voice, and as we hurry away, we hear him saying, "We followed them to the road, but subtle is my third son in tracking, and we can follow no further without aid."

~oOo~ 

The night seems very long and cold, and we don't stop until Laurelin's hours, when we find the remnants of their campsite in the dead leaves. One of the hounds puts his nose to a leaf, and Oromë dismounts to study it, placing it against his own nose before recoiling sharply. "It smells of pain," he says. "One of them is hurt."

We have found no traces of food: no spent bones, no berry stains, nothing to indicate that the children have eaten since yesterday's breakfast. Even Atar's face is tired and washed of color; Macalaurë looks slightly nauseated and glances quickly away when I try to meet his eyes. There is rain on the wind, and as Oromë lifts other leaves to his nose for clues about the location and health of my brothers and cousin, the canopy overhead begins to rattle and raindrops trickle and drip onto our uncovered heads.

We raise our hoods, and Oromë springs back onto Nahar, reining him sharply and calling, "Quickly! Before the rain washes away their trail! They cannot be far now."

We plunge from the copse of trees and gallop across a barren plain towards the high cliffs and bluffs in the distance, Oromë leading with Atar and I close behind and Macalaurë and the apprentices straggling along at the back. We have been riding for hours now without rest, and I know that they are hungry and weary, but we cannot stop to rest, for the hounds are keen on the children's scent now. I tell myself that it is because it is fresh and not because of the wounds of which Oromë spoke. Again and again, I tell this to myself, and when I look over at Atar, his face is lined and tired, and I know that he tells himself the same. The rain slaps our faces and stings our eyes; thunder roars so loudly that even the baying of the hounds is lost in the cacophony. We ride low on our horses' necks to protect ourselves from the worst of the deluge, but even my thickest cloak is soaked in a matter of seconds.

We stop suddenly, for the hounds are racing in circles, barking madly. Our horses are scrambling to keep their footing. Beneath us, the ground has become a muddy river. The children's scent has been lost.

"Manwë Sulimo!" cries Oromë. "I pray to you to stay your hand upon this storm and show pity for the little ones lost in the rain!"

A gust of wind strong enough to knock the breath from my throat wraps around us like a fist. I look over at Atar, who sits astride his horse with his head tipped back and his hood fallen around his shoulders. The rain soaks his hair and makes it the color of the sky beyond the light of Valinor. I see his lips moving, and I squint to detect what words he whispers into the rain.

The words are in Valarin, a harsh tongue like the rasping of metal on metal, and I've learned their meaning only at my father's bidding; still, translation is awkward for me, and even as I gasp at the meaning of the words on my father's lips, the rain stops. Manwë Sulimo, I add to the prayer.

We dismount into mud that is ankle-deep and grips our feet as though it has determination and spirit of its own. The hounds are baying again, for they have found a trace of a scent, and I feel hope flash inside of me like a flare against the darkness, but as quickly as the trail is found, it is lost again. Atar and Oromë have their heads close in quiet conversation. Macalaurë comes to stand beside me, shivering beneath his wet cloak, and I put my arm around him, although I am no drier than is he. The apprentices are silent and tired behind us, and in that moment, with the world quiet and my brother trembling against my side, I allow myself to contemplate an unhappy ending to our ordeal.

I remember the days all of my brothers were born, but I remember Tyelkormo and Carnistir best, for I was older when they came into Arda. In the cold morning, with icy mud clenching my feet, I remember being invited to Amil's chambers to hold them for the first time. Tyelkormo wasn't crying when Macalaurë and I arrived to meet our newest brother, and when I took him into my arms, he opened his eyes to me, and they were as blue as the summer skies in Tirion. Carnistir came ten years later, a week before his begetting day, with thick hair already on his head and little teeth like fangs in his mouth, as though he couldn't wait to be born to start growing up, and he was screaming when Atar handed him to me, but I cuddled him close until he stopped crying and fell asleep in my arms. Holding them, I felt a bit more complete, as though there had been empty places in my spirit waiting to be filled with love for little brothers, and I realized that the love I had for them—for strangers whose blood beat through my veins too—was stronger even than the love for my own life, and with cold certainty, I knew that I would sacrifice myself for them in any way that was demanded.

But now I am powerless, and my love for them is futile, for nothing that I give now can erase the mud washing over our feet or can recapture their scents lost in the storm. My throat closes until I fear that I might stop breathing, and tears burn my eyes. Macalaurë is looking into my face, and my pain must be clear to him, for he embraces me, and our tears mix and fall into the mud between us.

Macalaurë grows suddenly tense. "Listen," he says, and he pulls from my arms, baring both of our tear-streaked faces. "Do you hear that?"

Macalaurë's sense of hearing is keener than any of ours, even Atar's. He pushes his hair behind his ears as though the few strands that have escaped his braids might impede what he would otherwise clearly hear, and he cocks his head in the direction of a nearby rock formation that I suspect falls away to a valley below. Suddenly, he seizes my arm, and I hear what he hears: a sound that might have begun as a voice but was torn on the rocks and shredded by the wind across the mudflats until it is but a wisp of sound that falls into our ears. A child's voice, perhaps?

"Tyelkormo!" Macalaurë cries, and with my arm still in his grasp, we race for the rock formation, slipping in the mud and nearly falling, struggling to grip the rocks with wet hands and slick boots. The stone tears at my hands and rends the knees of my trousers, but I do not feel it, for in that moment, Carnistir's voice is in my head: "Nelyo! I'm cold, Nelyo!" as clearly as if he stood and spoke beside me.

The rocks fall away to a valley, as I suspected. The cliffs on either side of the valley are high and gray, and I see pinpricks of darkness that I identify as caves at the bases of many. The children hid there, I realize suddenly, to escape the rain. My eyes scan the valley, and with every rock that is roughly the size of a child, my heart leaps then sinks into despair until I see them, a league away, slogging slowly through the mud.

"Tyelkormo! Tyelkormo!" Macalaurë and I scream to our brother, but the very wind that had brought sound of them to us seizes our voices from our throats and casts them away from the little ones. They have stopped, and I see Tyelkormo pointing towards a gap between two cliffs in the north.

Atar and Oromë spring onto the rocks beside us, drawn by our cries, and Oromë lifts his horn to his lips and lets out a blast of sound the makes the rocks buzz and tickle against our feet. All three children start to turn in our direction, but something else calls their attention behind them, and I hear Atar scream before I see the wolf.

It is a scream that might have come from the depths of Angband, and I turn to see Oromë with his arms around Atar's waist to keep him from tumbling off the cliff, while Atar's feet push against the rocks, driving him to a leap that will not save his sons and would probably kill him too. A yip and a growl whisper on the wind, and I watch, stricken, as a gray she-wolf bigger even than Tyelkormo advances on my littlest brother. The air screams with noise: Macalaurë is sobbing—and only when I swipe my hands across my eyes to clear my vision, do I realize that I am crying and screaming too—and Atar still fights to free himself from Oromë, the most powerful of our people being held by a Vala, one of the few who have the strength to contain him. Yet none of it will save the little ones, and I beg my eyes to close, as the wolf settles back on her haunches and prepares to spring at Carnistir.

She launches herself into the air.

Findekáno leaps in the same moment and knocks Carnistir to the ground, covering his little cousin with his own small body, and snarling, the wolf falls atop both of them and rakes her teeth across Findekáno's back.

Tyelkormo yells something, and we all fall silent.

The wind dies then and, across the distance, his words are clear, but it is no language that I have ever heard. But the wolf stops with a mouthful of Findekáno's cloak, and her ears swivel in the direction of my brother's voice. Atar struggles in Oromë's arms, trying to reach his bow and quiver, but Oromë seizes his arms and hisses, "Shh! Listen!"

Tyelkormo speaks still, and his blue eyes are wide as though even the words pouring from his throat puzzle him, and the wolf takes her paws from Findekáno's back and trots instead toward Tyelkormo.

"I have a clear target! I can hit her!" Atar begs, but Oromë's arms tighten on him, making him struggle harder.

Tyelkormo drops to his knees and lies on his back in the mud.

The wolf closes her jaws around his throat, and his eyes squeeze shut and his words pour out faster, frantically, but she does not bite into his soft, exposed flesh. She releases her grip and sniffs down the length of his body, while his trembling hands lie futile in the mud over his head, palms turned to the sky in surrender.

Findekáno has stood and is fumbling with the ties on the pack that Carnistir was carrying, and as we all watch with shocked amazement, a wolf-puppy runs out and, yipping, sloshes through the mud to his mother. The wolf turns to her puppy then back to Tyelkormo, and he speaks a few more of the strange words to her, and she takes the puppy into her mouth and trots back in the direction of one of the caves.

~oOo~ 

It takes us several minutes to climb down to the valley, but when our feet touch the ground again, Carnistir is already running in our direction, sobbing so hard that his eyes are closed and he bumps against rocks in his path, before being caught in Atar's arms.

"Atar, Atar," he weeps onto Atar's shoulder. Tyelkormo has picked himself up from the mud and speaks to Findekáno, whose face is as white as parchment and sits trembling in the mire, and we run in their direction, for the unnatural color of Findekáno's skin is that of one who is wounded and succumbing to shock.

I find my arms filled with Tyelkormo and my neck made wet by his tears. Carnistir has been shoved on Macalaurë and is crying again for Atar. Atar and Oromë go to Findekáno and peel the muddied cloak and tunic from him while he stares listlessly into their faces. His skin is as white as porcelain and riddled with cold-bumps, but the only marks on his back from the wolf are bruises and a few stippled abrasions, and Atar embraces Findekáno with relief and lets his face fall into his hair.

~oOo~ 

The children are hungry, cold, and weary, and we do not trust them to a long journey. Oromë knows of a couple who live nearby in a small cottage, hunting and farming the land, and we ride to them in hopes of finding shelter and provisions for the night.

The farmer-wife answers our knock and looks quite surprised to find a Vala, the high prince of the Noldor, and his four soaked and muddied sons, brother-son, and three apprentices standing at her threshold, but when Oromë explains what has happened, she stands aside without hesitation and immediately sets off to draw a hot bath for the little ones.

I sit on the floor by the fire, and Findekáno and Tyelkormo fall simultaneously into my lap. Apparently, the last few days together have cured them of their aversion to each other, for their shoulders press together and their ankles cross on the floor when they stretch their numb toes out to the fire. I handle Findekáno delicately, but he does not cringe when I touch his back, and I conclude with relief that his injuries must indeed be mild.

Tyelkormo is a different issue. He burned his hand in Atar's forge, we've learned, and it is red and sore and is beginning to smell of rot. When the hand is exposed to the heat from the fire—just for an instant—he whimpers and tucks it delicately behind the opposite arm.

"You were both very brave," I tell them. I have a thousand questions for Tyelkormo, but his eyes are drooping drowsily, and I allow him to fall into peaceful sleep.

The color has returned to Findekáno's skin, and the fire is even bringing a pink flush to his cheeks, and would I not have seen the wolf's teeth scrape across his back, I would believe him to be a healthy child who has simply spent too long in the cold.

The farmer-wife has put a kettle of stew onto the stove and a loaf of bread into the oven, and the aromas of food are teasing my senses. Macalaurë comes to sit beside me, holding his hands out to the fire to warm them. "I am glad this day is over," he says, and although it is far from over—it is just the Mingling of the Lights—I know what he means.

"Me too. My body cries for a bit of supper and a hot bath."

"I'd forsake both," says Macalaurë, "for a set of clean nightclothes and a soft bed." He looks at Findekáno and Tyelkormo, who are now both sleeping in my arms. "Sometimes I wish they loved me like they love you. Most of the time, I would rather they leave me alone to my music, but at times like these, I wouldn't mind having one of them curl up in my lap."

"If it is any consolation," I tell him in a low voice, "you are still my favorite, even though I am too big to curl up in your lap."

He smiles, and I know that my words have warmed his spirit. "Just as long as my children—when I have them—like me best, then that is more than enough for me."

~oOo~ 

Atar and I bathe the children one by one while Macalaurë washes their muddy clothes and hangs them by the fire to dry. The farmer and the hunter have no children of their own left in the house, so they can lend us no dry clothes even small enough for Tyelkormo, so we wrap them each in a quilt and let them nap by the fire until their clothes are dry.

I sit with them and watch them sleep until I feel a hand on my arm and realize that I have fallen asleep myself. The farmer-wife shakes my arm gently. "Dear? I am sorry to bother you, but supper is almost finished, if you would like to tell your father?"

Atar had gone to the stable after helping me with the little ones' baths to curry and feed the horses. Vorondil has offered to ride home after supper to tell Amil that the little ones have been found, and one of the horses must be readied for him. The night is mild for the north, but a cold breeze slices across the open plain and makes me wish I thought to throw a cloak over my shoulders. In the distance, a wolf howls, and I shiver.

Atar is currying my horse, standing with his back to me, and he doesn't turn when I enter. "Atar?" The hand holding the currycomb is not moving, I realize, and his head is tipped until his forehead almost rests against the horse's back. Apprehension burns me, but I step closer and call him again, thinking he may have slipped into the place he goes sometimes, the place where only Amil's voice can reach him. "Atar? Supper is ready?"

I am close enough to touch him when he speaks softly. "I thought I was watching my babies die."

"Atar?" It is less a word than a breath in the shape of his name. I wonder: Does he speak to himself or does he know that I am here? I wonder that if I should leave. I wish to.

"Grief would have taken me, Nelyo." My heart thumps hard in my chest at the sound of my name. "I feel it still, behind me, like a black shadow, and it knows as well as I that if one tiny moment had changed, it would now be upon me."

"But, Atar, the little ones are fine." My words are weak and sound stupid even before I speak them, but the silence between Atar and me begs to be filled. I do not want him to turn, I realize. Like with Rúmil in the moment before he revealed his mutilation to me, I can find comfort in that which I do not know. I do not want to know what is behind the dark hair like a curtain that hides Atar's face from me. My father does not cry—I have seen him in rage and grief and happiness deeper than that which I ever hope to feel—but I have never seen the fire in his eyes washed by tears, and I do not want to. There was a dream I had once, when I was still very small, where Atar came to me and held me in his arms and wept, and the memory alone of that dream terrifies me, for the world has gone wrong when tears can be wrested from flame.

"I try only to love you, my sons who make me so happy and so proud, but sometimes there are words or actions, and only after I stand aside do I realize that it is I who has spoken them, I who has acted so rashly, as one whose spirit is empty of love." He turns to me now, and his eyes burn like sparks from metal, and he takes my face in his hands, holding me tight enough to hurt. "Do you know how much I love you, Nelyo? Even in the angry moments, do you believe always that I love you?"

"Of course I do," I say numbly, but I remember well the times when I was younger and sent from his forge as a disappointment, to study alone in my bedroom as punishment for some or another failing, and I would throw the hated books that he had written at the wall until their spines broke and weep until my tears drenched my pillows. The other children in Tirion always said how lucky I was, to be born the heir of a high prince and the greatest of our people. They told me how they wished that their fathers could instruct them in all subjects, could teach them lore and craft instead of hiring a tutor, but no one ever thought of the injustice placed upon my brothers and me from the moments we were conceived. For Atar is the greatest of our people ever born or ever to be born—such was the doom spoken by the Valar—and as such, we his sons can never hope to surpass him but only languish in his shadow, full of faint hopes and impossible dreams. Even as I study lore and take counsels with him to share my ideas, I know that I all I create would come to him before long, were he to bend his thoughts to it. I am a person of significance by his grace alone.

Such I said to Amil once, when I was angry enough with him to want to throw my lesson books into the fires of his precious forge, and she replied, "But think how sad it is to be your father, for one of the greatest joys in life is to marvel at that which we cannot ourselves achieve. Your father does not know this joy, and no thought or craft of our people will ever stir his spirit into wonder. But think of your power, Nelyo, for you are his son and the only thing of his devising that he will never fully understand! While others will kneel to worship the works of the Valar—the works of your father—he will kneel only to you and your brothers, for you are his only cause to marvel in life."

So I raise my arms now and hold him in an embrace, and I feel him start then relax. After a long moment, he takes my face again in his hands and kisses my lips. "Come now, Nelyo," he says, taking my arm. "You are hungry and weary, and I am keeping you from supper."

~oOo~ 

After supper, the hunter and the farmer help us make beds on the floor with extra cloaks and blankets. They offer their own bed to Atar, but he declines. "What is good enough for my sons and apprentices will serve me well too."

Macalaurë and I will share a bedroll by the fire. We take turns bathing; I volunteer to go second, foolishly, and cannot linger to enjoy the glorious feeling of hot water on my dirty skin because, with my body warmed and my belly full, I can barely keep my eyes open. The hunter kindly lent us each a set of his clothes while our wet, muddy oneswere washed and dried, and I start to dress after bathing but abandon the task to stumble to bed instead in my underclothes.

Macalaurë is lying on his half of the bedroll with his head on my pillow. I sigh and roll his head onto his own pillow and lie down, only to have him roll immediately back to my pillow to press his flushed forehead against my cheek and mumble, "It's good to be warm again."

I am too tired to roll him back, so I tolerate his presence, even when he starts snoring lightly. At the back of the big front room, Oromë is tending to Tyelkormo's burned hand while Atar holds him in his lap, and twice the exhaustion couldn't keep me from listening to their conversation. "This hand doesn't look bad," Oromë says gently. "Did you clean it?"

"Findekáno cleaned it for me with rainwater in the cave," Tyelkormo mumbles. If the ministrations hurt, he doesn't show it and sags in Atar's arm like a rag.

I see Oromë and Atar exchange glances. "You and Findekáno were very brave today," Oromë says. "How did you know what to say to the wolf?"

"I don't know."

"You have never been taught to talk to animals before?"

"I always talk to animals, but no one believes that they talk back."

"But no one taught you?"

"No, I always knew how to do it. When I was a baby, the butterflies would come into my room and land on me and tell me how pretty the sky outside was."

Oromë wraps a clean strip of cloth around Tyelkormo's hand and secures it with a clip. "There, little one. All done."

"You said it might hurt. It didn't hurt at all," Tyelkormo mumbles. His eyelids are drooping, and sleep slurs his voice. "I'm glad you didn't kill the wolf today, Atar. She was just as you. All she wanted was her baby back."

Atar carries him to the fireside and lays him beside Findekáno. He kisses them each on the forehead. "Thank you for being so brave, little ones," he says.

~oOo~ 

Exhaustion beckons sleep to me, but my mind churns. Even after Atar lies down to sleep with Carnistir in his arms, I lie in exhausted wakefulness, turning the day's events over and over again in my mind. Macalaurë's forehead presses still against my cheek, and he breathes noisily through his open mouth; Tyelkormo mumbles in his sleep; and I long for the sleep that has so easily claimed them.

My brother speaks to animals, I think, and the thought strikes me as fantastical, like the stories that Macalaurë invents to get to the little ones to go to sleep, but for the fact that the image of my brother—lying on his back in the mud with his hands turned to futile submission and the wolf's jaws locked around his throat—is burned into the backs of my eyelids, and the strange language he spoke whispers ceaselessly through my tired brain. My brother speaks to animals, I think again, and find that when I allow myself the luxury of quiet mirth, two surprised tears squeeze out and trickle down into my hair at the same time.

Grandfather Finwë told me once that some of our people in the early days would speak with animals but that most of these people had refused the invitation of the Valar and remained in the Outer Lands among the creatures that they loved. I wonder: Had we been born centuries sooner and given a similar choice, how would we align ourselves? I see myself beside my father, among the Noldor, with Carnistir in my arms. I see Macalaurë joining the Teleri. But Tyelkormo—with his vestigial gift—I see on the shore behind us as we depart, bidding sad farewell to brothers he loves but is content never to see again.

"Maitimo?" The voice is tiny and imploring, and I look up to see my little cousin standing over me. "You can't sleep either?"

I open my arms to him, and he wriggles beneath the blankets to lie beside me. "Why can't you sleep, little one?" I ask, although the memory of the wolf's teeth on his back—even just the sight from afar—chills me too.

"Do you ever do things, Maitimo, and only after they're done, wonder why you did them?"

"I think everyone does those kinds of things, Káno."

"But today …" He hesitates, and I see his blue eyes watching me in the darkness, trying to read my face through the layers of shadow. He breathes deeply and begins again. "Today, I did not mean to leap onto my cousin. I saved his life, everyone says, and everyone tells me how brave I am, but I did not mean to do it. I was lying on the ground, and I felt the wolf upon me, and I thought of how stupid I was for wanting to die. But I was still there, and it was like someone else had pushed me onto little Carnistir, like I really had nothing to do with it at all. So I wanted to tell you this, so you know that I'm really not brave at all."

I choose my words carefully, whispering into the darkness. "No one pushed you, Káno. You acted on your own volition."

"No, I didn't!" Findekáno's voice is high and hysterical. "Tyelkormo chose to lie down and speak to the wolf; you chose to try to find us—and those were very brave things—but I don't know what happened to me; I didn't jump onto Carnistir! I wasn't brave! That was someone else."

Beside me, Macalaurë mutters in his sleep and rolls back onto his own pillow. I shush Findekáno, and his voice lowers to a desperate whisper. "Even this I tell you because I am afraid to tell Uncle, for I know he already thinks me craven and I fear disappointing him still more, and I hope that you will tell him for me, and I will never have to know what he said of it."

"Káno, little one," I say, "there are places within all of us that surprise us sometimes." I think of the anger that comes upon me sometimes, of the uncontrollable desire that seizes me when I'm in Annawendë's arms, and wish that my own secrets were so noble and brave. "Sometimes, when we think too hard on things, our mind overwhelms that which is true in our spirit. You have a valiant spirit, little one, for it forsook all thoughts of your own welfare to protect your cousin. That courage might be new and strange to you, but the little boy who saved my brother today was none other than you, and even if you do not now know how you chose to do what you did, it is part of the past now, and it shall forevermore be part of your name."

He hugs me in the darkness, and I feel his mouth smiling against my shoulder. I whisper a song to him and feel his little body relax beside mine.

Gentle was the heart of he,
The son of earth, of sky and sea.
Gentle was his every word,
He wielded neither shield nor sword,
But sang songs in his voice so fair
To his beloved kinsmen dear.
And when sorrow came like the tide,
Revealing places deep inside,
He gave not cries nor made laments
But showed his spirit valiant.

I am deluged by paperwork—the inventory of our grain supplies, to be more specific—and nursing the beginnings of a headache when my half-brother's messenger arrives.

There is a curt knock on my study door, and my page introduces him with a name that slips right past my ears and becomes embroiled in the aching mess of lists and figures that I am already trying to hold in my brain. I hear myself mumble something, and it must have been an invitation, for the messenger enters, and although he bears no mark or crest of my half-brother, he is small and dark and I know that he comes from Formenos, for I heard his voice in the hall, and it was loud and brash and used to filling the empty spaces outside of the city, not the echoing halls of Tirion. He wears an ugly leather scabbard at his side that holds a dagger of exquisite craftsmanship; his clothes are brown and unattractive, but the hands that unbuckle the message pouch that hangs over his shoulder move with amazing speed and grace, and I become almost hypnotized watching them, until I am alarmed by the sudden slap of letters upon my desk.

"Our Lord Fëanáro kindly requests that you read his message first," the messenger says, and his voice is leaden, as are the accents of the north, and my gratitude, however insincere it sounds to my own ears, is quite light and whimsical in contrast. I feel suddenly as if a gameboard has been placed between us, for he is equally deceptive in his words, and we both know that Curufinwë does not make requests and certainly never does so kindly.

I gesture to a teapot on the edge of my desk, and the messenger says, "That would be well, my lord," and after a few moments of awkward inactivity, I realize that he expects me to pour it for him, so I overturn an extra cup and dispense the amber fluid, adding honey and cream to his specifications.

"Would you care to rest a while?" I ask, gesturing to the extra chair that sits before my desk. "And tell me the news of the north?"

He accepts and sits, sipping his tea a bit loudly, resting the cup on his knee, and begins to talk of minor lords and persons whose names trigger only brief flares of recognition. I shuffle the letters he has dispensed onto my desk. In accordance with his wishes, Curufinwë's is on top. Beneath it is a letter from my son, and I am tempted to cast Curufinwë's message aside, ignore the messenger's chatter, and allow my eyes to devour the words of my eldest son, whom I miss terribly.

But the messenger's gaze is keen on my riffling fingers, so I tuck Curufinwë's back on top and swallow my temptation. Beneath Findekáno's letter is one addressed to my wife from Nerdanel and another from Findekáno. Maitimo writes too, as he always does, and I feel my heart squeeze in surprise—as it always does—for even after forty-seven years, I cannot believe that one so gracious as Maitimo could be Curufinwë's child.

The messenger talks on, about the weather and how it has been an exceptionally rainy summer in the north, good for some crops and poor for others. "The nights have been cold too," he says, "and many times, we have feared a midsummer frost and covered the fields, but naught has yet come." I listen, nodding, but really I want to leap across the desk and choke from him the news of my half-brother and his family, among whom I placed my heir—foolishly, I sometimes think, in my darker moments—but Curufinwë has always been an intensely private person, and when the messenger at last stops to sip his tea, I ask, "And what of my half-brother Curufinwë?" and he replies, "No news, my lord."

I sit back in my chair and sigh. I should know to expect as much by now; after all, Curufinwë once walked into our father's court with a wife by his side and a baby he named as his son in his arms, all before we even knew that he had entertained the idea of betrothal, so I should not be surprised that he would send a messenger to me now without instructions to at least give word that all is well.

The messenger drains his cup in one last, loud slurp and stands. "Begging pardon, my lord, I still have messages to take to your brother and a day's ride to Alqualondë, unless I may be of further service?"

I am overcome momentarily by the fantasy of busying Curufinwë's messenger with inane and silly tasks until Curufinwë brings his family—and my son—home, but good grace gets the best of me, and I stand and walk him to the door. "I thank you for your service," I say, "and for the news."

"No mind, my lord."

"Give my greetings to my brother," I say, and only after he has departed down the hall do I realize that I said "brother" when I meant "half-brother," and he will likely greet Arafinwë for me—with whom I am having supper tonight—and tell Curufinwë that I gave him no word. I sigh and retreat back into my study full of the unlikely hope that, by his return, Curufinwë will have forgotten the accidental slight and will say nothing of it to our father.

The letters are sitting on my desk, where I left them, atop mounds of parchments bearing row after row of figures. Curufinwë's seal glares up at me, a red bloom of wax that beckons me to break it and read whatever perfunctory words are inside. I despised his seal from the moment I first saw it, for it is exactly what I wanted for my own seal—a fact I realized only after seeing his: a star, so simple a design but so representative of our people. I shove the letters aside—even able to resist the urge to read Findekáno's if it means I must first read Curufinwë's—and busy myself totaling the figures on the parchments beneath and drafting a report to my father.

There is another knock on the door. This time I know that it is my father, for he knocks by rolling his knuckles quickly against the door, and I spring to my feet and call, "Please! Come in!" and circle to the front of my desk to greet my father with a kiss on the cheek. "Atar! What a pleasant surprise!"

Atar said that he was taking the day off from all meetings and counsels; when I raised concern, he waved his hand and said, "Ah, if they need the advice of a king, let them come to you. I miss being able to lie in bed with your mother until the high hours of Laurelin."

I know that Atar and Amil have been trying for some time now to conceive another child, but what I don't think Atar wants to realize is that the fire of his firstborn that took the life of Míriel Serindë took its toll on him as well, and he will have to be content as the father of just three sons. I do not wish him to see this truth in my eyes, so I lower my face when he returns my kiss and says, "A messenger came to me from your brother in the north, bringing word of his family."

"Yes, he wrote also to me."

"I suppose, then, that you are already rejoicing that your son is being named a hero?"

His eyes skip to the unopened letters on my desk and back to my gaping, speechless face and twinkle with mischief. "I—I had—I put off reading—"

"Well, perhaps you'd like to read them now," he says, and I circle my desk so fast that I bump my leg hard on the corner but do not even notice the pain of a bruise spreading like a stain of spilled wine beneath my skin.

~oOo~ 

Dear Nolofinwë:
I hope this letter finds you and your family well and in good spirits. As agreed, I write to you concerning your son Findekáno and his progress thus far in his lessons. Maitimo has indicated also that he intends to write you, leaving me the freedom of not supposing to understand Findekáno's progress in the lessons that he takes with my son.

Although his letters were abhorrent upon his arrival, I find them much improved after close counseling, to the point of legibility and, perhaps, the beginnings of beauty. In his seven weeks of lessons, he has memorized and recited for me thirty-nine poems, four in excess of that which I expect of him and his cousin Tyelkormo, and also written five of his own. Currently, he and Tyelkormo are busy working on a summer-long project of copying and illustrating a book of songs from the Great Journey, and while their progress has been slow, I feel the finished product will be rewarding for both.

Excepting horsemanship, it was obvious to me that you had not procured instruction for Findekáno in any of the athletic arts, and his performance in archery and swordfighting surpassed poverty into complete ignorance. Maitimo and I have made it a point to work with him on all of the aforementioned skills—as well as hand-to-hand combat, knife throwing, and tracking—and while his performance is still quite wretched, it is much improved. In horsemanship, I have begun putting him over some low jumps and also have him and Tyelkormo do a short regimen of dressage each week, as both have become lackadaisical with regards to seat and posture.

My wife cites Findekáno's progress in sculpture as most impressive, and I find that his ability in drawing is much improved as well. With regards to his basic lessons in jewel-craft, I desire faster progress and greater results and intend to increase my tutelage in this area. Additionally, the lore of metals and gems is a loss for your son, and indeed, it is even difficult to get him to concentrate on his lessons. I have not the time to work with him on these matters, but Maitimo has provided most satisfactory remediation in the past weeks, and I hope my next letter will bear better tidings.

I feel that you also deserve to know that your son was party in an effort by Tyelkormo to run away from home following a most displeasing accident in my forge. Apparently, while trying to comfort my son's distress, Findekáno decided to accompany him in his plot to leave home, taking with them my youngest son Carnistir. It was evening-time before we discovered that they were missing, and Oromë had to bring his hounds to aid our search. I ask you to forestall punishment, however, in recognition of the fact that—when confronted by a wolf that was aroused by the folly of my youngest son—Findekáno immediately leaped upon Carnistir without thought for his own safety, saving his cousin from certain grave injury and possible demise. I have expressed my gratitude to Findekáno for his quick bravery and ask that you overlook his part in Tyelkormo's rebellion as serendipitous, for if he hadn't been along with them, this letter would come to you in far different spirits. Also, may your heart rest easily, for although Findekáno sustained a few minor scratches and bruises, he was for the most part unharmed and has since remained in good spirits.

My next letter shall be soon forthcoming and shall detail the progress that Findekáno is making on the aforementioned weaknesses as well as cite those areas in which he excels. Findekáno has indicated that he shall also be sending you a letter, as well as one to your wife; I have counseled him not to include any discussion in the latter regarding the incident with the wolf and trust you to best know what she is well enough to hear in her condition. May peace find your family.
Your kinsman,
Curufinwë Fëanáro Finwion

Dearest Atar,
I hope you and Amil are doing very well at home in Tirion. We are doing very well in Formenos. I am having a really great time here and learning a lot, although I miss you and Amil and Grandfather Finwë and Grandmother Indis and Uncle Arafinwë and Aunt Eärwen every day. I hope my baby brother is doing well and my baby cousin also. Maitimo tells me that he really likes being a big brother and expects that I shall like it too, although little Carnistir cries a lot and gets into a lot of trouble, so I suppose that I am hoping that my brother will behave a little better than that, although Maitimo says that you learn to love your brothers no matter what their shortcomings, so I suppose that once he is here, maybe I won't care so much about that at all.

I am learning a lot here. My favorite lessons are historical lore with Maitimo and sculpting with Aunt Nerdanel. I also like horsemanship with Uncle Fëanáro, and he says that I am doing very well at this. I am reading a lot on my own now, and Uncle Fëanáro says that when we come back to Tirion, he will let me borrow some of his books so that I can keep reading about history. Did you know that when Grandfather Finwë came to Aman, it took them more than two hundred years to cross the Outer Lands? I suppose that you probably did know that. Will I be coming back here next summer, do you think?

The journey here was really long but sort of fun. Macalaurë fell off his horse and hurt himself pretty badly, so we were late getting here, but he is fine now. Uncle Fëanáro said he had a separated shoulder, but I don't know what that means. Macalaurë is really nice and I like when he is put in charge of watching us, but he is also very busy because he is doing a musician's internship by correspondence, so he is always working on lessons or writing songs. He got a little bit of free time when Uncle Fëanáro said he didn't have to work in the forge anymore, but he is courting a maiden in Alqualondë, so most of the time he spends writing to her.

Maitimo is courting one of Uncle Fëanáro's apprentices. The apprentice is a girl. Her name is Annawendë. She doesn't talk to me a lot but apparently she has a lot to say to Maitimo because they spend a lot of time in his study with the door closed. Maitimo is my favorite of my cousins. I think he might be my best friend, even, but when I told him that the other day, he said that when my brother is born, then he will probably be my best friend instead. Maitimo is a really good teacher, better even than Uncle Fëanáro, and he doesn't mind explaining things until I understand them, even if it takes a thousand times! The bugs are really loud out here and sometimes I have trouble falling asleep (I have to share a bed with Tyelkormo too, and he snores sometimes and kicks), but I can always go to Maitimo's room, and we sing songs together until I fall asleep.

Maitimo tells me that I am very brave because I jumped on Carnistir to keep a wolf from biting him, but I don't know if that's enough to make me valiant, like Maitimo says. But we did find out from that that Tyelkormo can talk to animals! He's apparently been talking to them all of his life but no one believed that they talked back to him. He told me once that there are always birds in our room because he asks them to bring him the news of the town, but I thought he was just being funny.

I really miss you, Atar, and I can't wait to come home but I am having fun here too. Maybe, if you have time, you could write back to me?
Love from your son,
Findekáno

Dearest Uncle Nolofinwë,
I send you my greetings and those of my brothers and wish that you and yours are doing well at home in Tirion. I hope that Aunt Anairë's pregnancy is going well; Findekáno is very excited about his new baby brother, although I think he is a little nervous too. (Especially after seeing some of the messes that Carnistir has made!)

I have nothing but the highest praises of your son. He is industrious in his studies and a most apt learner. He has shown a great love for historical lore and often seeks me out during his free time to have elucidated one or another event he is studying. I have found tutoring Findekáno to be nothing short of a joy and would gladly continue his lessons through the autumn and winter, if you so desired.

My father has told me that he also told you of Findekáno's recent bravery. I know my father probably put it in as brief as words as possible, so please allow me to extend gratitude from our entire house, for I am not sure that my baby brother would be here right now but for the quick actions of your son. I do not know if this is something you have taught him or if he has been blessed with a valiant constitution, but either way, you should be exceedingly proud of him. I certainly am, but I do not delude myself that the pride of a cousin can in any way equal that of a father.

I leave you again with gratitude and highest praises of Findekáno. Please give my greetings to Aunt Anairë. May your house be blessed.
Fondly yours,
Nelyafinwë Maitimo Russandol

~oOo~ 

Arafinwë and Eärwen are escorted into the rose garden precisely fifteen minutes after the Mingling of the Lights, right as my cook is bringing out the soups and the baskets of bread. I saw Arafinwë in the street this morning and again at midday by the fountain in Atar's court, but he springs into my arms and greets me with a tight hug and a kiss on each cheek anyway. Eärwen walks behind him—her belly is just beginning to swell and is only a little smaller than Anairë's—and leans over to give me a delicate hug and kiss. Looking at her, it is hard to believe that carrying and bearing the baby inside of her will weaken her body, for her silvery hair and gray eyes seem ever more radiant than usual, and after releasing me, her hands find Arafinwë's, and they exchange a kiss that is a little more robust than is generally thought appropriate for the dinner hour at one's brother's house. "Mmm," Arafinwë says, licking his lips after she releases him. He turns to my cook and flicks his fingers in the direction of the soup tureens. "You can take that away. I've had my appetizer for the evening."

I give the cook a stern glance that tells him to ignore my brother's request and pull out a chair for Eärwen. Anairë is already seated, and the women kiss cheeks and begin their litany of embellished complaints about their conditions. "He's really started kicking," Eärwen says. "He had me up half the night, feeling as though a sporting match was being held inside my belly."

"I stayed up and kept her company, though," says Arafinwë, winking at me, "and we made our own sport of it. Hence my excessive joviality this morning, dear brother." He raises his glass in my direction and swallows half of the wine in a single gulp.

I give him a reproachful look and take my seat at the head of the table. Anairë is trying to suppress amusement at my brother's antics on my behalf, but she exchanges twinkling glances with Eärwen when they pass the breadbasket. "I requested pumpkin bread especially for you, dear. I've always been told that consuming gourds during pregnancy make your first labor less painful. I wish I had known of it when I was pregnant with Findekáno."

At the mention of labor pain, Arafinwë's sparkling mood subsides a bit, and I feel a pang of sympathy for him. He came to my study last week, barging in without knocking and plopping his little behind onto my desk—two things that he does all of the time that I hate—but before I could even voice my protests, he confided that he was frightened about the imminent birth of his first son. "Eärwen gets to have her mother and sisters with her for comfort, and I wish I could bring you or Atar to comfort me. That's selfish, I know, but I'm really scared."

I remember thinking bitterly at the time that he should bring Curufinwë instead of either Atar or me because Curufinwë has been through four childbirths—more than any of us—and had even delivered Maitimo himself on a riverbank somewhere in the north. I alternate between being amused, disgusted, and mildly jealous of the latter. When Findekáno was born, it was all I could do to keep breathing, much less remember all that the midwife had told us about contractions and dilation and when to start pushing. If it had been up to me to assist Anairë, Findekáno would probably be in there still.

I was sixteen years old when Curufinwë brought Maitimo home—young enough to still entertain the delusions that my older brother would one day come to appreciate my admiration of him—and I clung to Atar and listened to Curufinwë's every word, as though I expected to be tested on them, in awe of the red-haired baby in his arms whose face looked just like his. Atar was incredulous that Curufinwë—who had been away from home when both Arafinwë and I were born—would know how to deliver a baby, and I remember Curufinwë shrugging and saying, "I put him in there. I figured I could get him out." When Anairë became pregnant with Findekáno, I entertained the fantasy of taking her on a chariot ride to Alqualondë on her date and breaking a wheel halfway there, right as she went into labor, and returning home with my beaming wife and newborn son riding beside me in my perfectly mended chariot. And when people would inquire how I, a new father, knew how to deliver a baby, I would shrug and say in the same bland manner as had Curufinwë: "I put him in there. I figured I could get him out."

A salad is set in front of me, disturbing my musings, and I look up to see Arafinwë looking at me most strangely and the wives chattering on still about their pregnancies. Anairë is talking about a new breathing technique she's learning from the midwife that supposed to help manage the pain of contractions, and Arafinwë quickly says to me, "I got a letter from Fëanáro today."

I stab a tomato with my fork and remember the brusque excuse for a letter that I received, the list of complaints and dutiful praise about Findekáno's progress, drier than the accounting reports on which I'd been working. Arafinwë's own letter was probably overflowing with glowing reports and gossip, for Curufinwë always has been more easily swayed by Arafinwë's persistent charm than he has been to my own quiet longing for his love. "I received a letter also," I answer and bite hard into the tomato.

"Yes, I know that you did. You sent your greetings to me by way of Fëanáro's messenger. By the way, I sent greetings from both of us to Fëanáro."

"I misspoke," I say, "when I sent my greetings to you. I meant to say 'half-brother.'"

"You misspeak a lot, Nolofinwë."

I give him a hard stare. "At least mine are honest mistakes."

He reaches over and flicks a tomato seed off of my chin. "You know, I have figured why you and Fëanáro do not get along so well."

I am tempted to say nothing, to change the subject or call to the cook and ask when our entrees will be delivered, but when I look into Arafinwë's eyes, they are so full of hope that I sigh and say, "Why is that?"

"You two are exactly alike." My jaw falls open but he goes on before I can speak. "You are both disgustingly proud. You would both rather be pulled apart by horses than to apologize to the other. You both pick apart every nuance of what the other says and does, looking for some way in which you may have been slighted. If Fëanáro says, 'Good morning,' then he is boasting. If he does not, then he is ignoring you. But look at me. You love me, and so does Fëanáro. Yet you cannot love each other? We all have the same blood in our veins, but perhaps, I don't take every little thing that the two of you have done to me to offense. And, believe me, you have both done to me some things that deserve offense."

I am flabbergasted. "What have I ever done to you?"

"Why, just the other day, I came into your study to talk to you, and you pushed me right off of your desk and onto the floor. But I was not offended."

"Because I tell you all of the time to knock before coming into my study and not to sit on my desk! You smeared a parchment that I had just finished!"

He pats my knee under the table. "I am glad, Nolofinwë, that the welfare of a parchment means more to you than the welfare of your own brother."

I glower at him, but his attention has gone to his salad, and he is picking out the bits of reddish lettuce that he does not like and crunching loudly on a crouton. He may be past his majority; he may be married and expecting a child, but Arafinwë has never ceased to remind me of the little brother whose feet dangled well above the floor when he sat in his chair for supper. He swallows the crouton and takes a strawberry. "So, I suppose Fëanáro told you about Tyelkormo's new talent?" he says around the strawberry.

I consider chiding him for speaking with food in his mouth. "Curufinwë writes to me nothing but what he must. But Findekáno wrote of it, yes."

Eärwen says, "I always thought that Tyelkormo reminded me a bit of a Sinda."

"Yes, he looks as a Vanya," says Arafinwë, "with the gifts of the Sindar—"

"And a Noldorin temper," I add. "Or, rather, his father's temper."

"Do not be so hasty to blame Fëanáro," Eärwen says lightly, "for I have seen your own father in ire, and it removed for me all doubts of where your half-brother finds his tempestuousness."

At last, Anairë speaks. My wife speaks the most softly of anyone in our family, even my mother, and her words may not be frequent but are always chosen with care. "Now I knew Míriel Serindë," she says, "in the days before she married your father. A more gifted woman will likely never bless our lands, but she was notorious in her obstinacy, may Námo bring her peace." She bows her head in respect for the dead, and there is a moment of silence. Míriel Serindë is not often mentioned in our family.

"Míriel Þerindë …" Arafinwë says softly, with reverence, as though there is power in her name as there is in the names of the Valar. Neither Arafinwë nor I ever knew the mother of Curufinwë in life; she was only an invocation used against us in death. Her name alone rings in my ears like a question of our legitimacy, of the legitimacy of our parents' marriage. Chills run up and down my arms. "She looked like him, didn't she? Like Fëanáro?" Arafinwë says brightly, using the innocuousness of the question deliberately to dispel the gravity that has settled around the table.

We all turn to Anairë, for Míriel Serindë passed to the Halls of Mandos before any of our recollections. Anairë pushes a yellow pepper around her salad plate. "Yes, she did. She was beautiful."

I feel nauseated and shove my plate away.

~oOo~

When I was born, Anairë was already past her majority. As the eldest daughter of one of Atar's most trusted lords, she should have been married—or betrothed at least—by my birth, but Anairë is soft-spoken and regal and was easily overlooked by suitors in favor of the more energetic, loquacious maidens that typify the Noldorin court. Like the Vanyar, she delighted in music and poetry and was not skilled with her hands. Indeed, her few courtships were with lords of the Vanyar—more like to her—with their stern traditions and aristocratic bearings. Still, love did not come for her, and she remained unwed in her father's house for many long years.

I must have seen her many times through the first days of my life, but my first memory of Anairë was made when I was five years old. It was my begetting day celebration and Curufinwë was required by Atar to attend. I was in his care, being endured with the same enthusiasm as one withstands a cold rain. He was thirty-three years old at the time—although Curufinwë grew fast and looked as an adult from a young age—and had been called from Aulë's Halls to attend the celebration. I remember the feeling of his arms around my body—he felt utterly invincible to me then, even stronger than Atar—as I asked him the names of the people whirling around the dance floor. He probably recited alloys and compounds to Aulë with greater enthusiasm, I realize now, but then, I was delighted by the beauty of our language in his voice.

Anairë did not dance and sat alone, but when she saw my half-brother, she stood and came to us. "Fëanáro," she said, "how fare you?" and she kissed him, and he turned his face to me—his nose bumped my cheek and one of his braids whispered across my shoulder—and her kiss landed on the side of his face. "This little one," she said, not even waiting for him to answer her, "he is your brother?"

"Half-brother, yes," he said, and even then, I sensed the weight behind that single word, half. I know now that it means more than the brother.

"He is beautiful," she said. "May I hold him?"

Curufinwë's strong arms left me, and for a moment, I cried at being awash in her unfamiliar scent and being balanced in her delicate arms, but then she began to move slightly to the music, and like the calming motion of a ship on the water, it soothed me. I leaned into her skin like silk and breathed her scent like flowers, and she laughed and swayed harder, dancing with me around the floor, and I laughed too, and held tightly to her neck.

I fell in love with Anairë that day, I think, but it was understood that when Curufinwë reached his majority, she would be his wife. It was nothing that was spoken aloud, for the choice of one's spouse is left always to the individual, but Anairë began to spend many meals at our house, and always, she sat beside Curufinwë. And Atar, too, talked of his eldest son's wedding as a certainty. "One week after your fiftieth begetting day, in Manwë's Halls," he always said, "so that you may beget your children young, while your body is its strongest."

Curufinwë said nothing then but usually excused himself soon after, even if his meal was unfinished, and rode back to Aulë's Halls within the hour.

I said nothing also, for it is well known that a spouse may be desired by more than one person, and even though I was but a child, I became resigned to this fact and understood that I would never marry and never have children of my own, for if Anairë was Curufinwë's wife, then she could not also be mine.

When Arafinwë was only two years old, Atar and Curufinwë had an argument the likes of which I had never heard before. It began with Curufinwë being summoned to private counsel with Atar, for he had not been home in weeks and had missed both Arafinwë's and my begetting days, and this upset our mother, and she bade our father to have words with her stepson. In my playroom across the house, I could not hear their every word, but their voices quickly grew hateful and, less than an hour after he arrived, I heard my half-brother thunder down the stairs and slam the front door so hard that the windowpanes in the playroom rattled.

We didn't see Curufinwë again for three years, and when he came back, a red-haired woman walked at his side with a red-haired baby sleeping in her arms. I had seen her before—she studied in Aulë's Halls with him—but had never known that Curufinwë loved her, much less that he intended to take her as his wife. He wasn't even old enough to wed, according to the customs of our people—but neither was she—yet there they were, with golden bands on their fingers and a son of their own.

Curufinwë moved outside of the city gates with his new wife and son, and Anairë stopped coming to sit beside him at dinner. I didn't speak to her again for many years, until I was past my majority, although our fathers remained friends. In the years between, I courted several maidens unsuccessfully at my father's bequest, but I found love for none of them, and each romance eventually withered. I saw Anairë occasionally at feasts and festivals, but she always seemed content in her solitude, if not a bit mournful, and I figured that she grieved my half-brother's marriage still.

I encountered her one day in the marketplace in my fifty-first year. I was procuring ten yards of gold brocade for a new gown my mother was commissioning for the Spring Festival, and I looked up from the shimmering cloth to see Anairë standing beside me, admiring a bolt of deep blue velvet. "Anairë," I gasped because to have her so close was like flying from sleep and into the arms of the person who had been haunting my dreams.

She turned, and recognition came slowly into her face. "High Prince Nolofinwë," she said and bowed. "My lord. How fare you?"

I was embarrassed then, for the maiden whom I loved was bowing before me in a crowded marketplace. "You need not—" I began, and she rose quickly, and color pinked both our faces.

"I did not think you would remember me," she said, as way of apology. "It has been many years since we last met."

I had seen her less than a season prior, at the Winter Festival my father held each year, but I did not tell her that, for such a revelation would also require a confession that I had been too shy to speak to her. "You were going to marry my half-brother," I said quickly, and immediately regretted my words, for her face reddened further, and her eyes darted away from mine.

"That was never agreed upon," she mumbled, but I knew—by her frequent presence before his marriage to Nerdanel and her sudden absence after—that she had once assumed it had.

We took to spending time together in friendship, and it did not take many months for this to develop into courtship. I had witnessed the way my half-brother was with his wife, and Anairë and I did not begin to equal such passion, but the love between us burned gently, a flame that nurtured and warmed us from the chill of loneliness. We became engaged and married within the strict customs of our people and both remained celibate until retiring to her bedroom in our new home on our wedding night, having done naught together but exchange kisses.

She spent a long time in the bathroom that night, undoing her elaborate hairstyle and bathing with the door shut against me, while I paced her bedroom floor nervously, barefoot but still wearing the robes and braids in which I'd been married. She emerged, wearing a silk nightgown and, casting timid looks at me, climbed onto her bed and tucked herself beneath the covers. I went to her and lay atop the blankets in my clothes, and I kissed her, letting my lips linger long on hers. Her hands were on my face, and I slid the blankets away and cupped her breast through the silk of her gown.

Atar had explained to me when I started to come of age about the love and passion that could exist between a husband and wife, but I knew nothing of the physical desires that crippled him and my half-brother. Other boys my age I heard joke about self-love, and I had tried it once—picturing the maidens that I thought beautiful as I touched myself—and achieved tenuous arousal after many long minutes but could not attain the bliss that they described. Now, as I touched the smooth curve of Anairë's breast, I felt my excitement growing, but it did not begin to become unbearable until my palm brushed her nipple through the silk and she gasped, and the tip of my tongue slipped between her lips and touched hers.

I kissed her throat and whispered in her ear, "Will you bond yourself to me?" and felt her face move against mine as she nodded.

I rose from the bed with my back turned to her and, undoing the clasps and laces, let my robes fall from my body. I turned to her and found her lying with the blankets pulled to her chin, a blush heating her cheeks and her silk nightgown pooled on the floor beside the bed like a puddle of water. Her eyes slid down my body and skipped away when they reached my erection, and I slipped beneath the cool sheets and lay beside her.

I tried to draw the blankets away from her nakedness, but she whispered, "No, Nolofinwë, not yet." I kissed her instead, aware that I was holding my hips away from her, afraid of my penis bumping her thigh, and my hands clutching the sheets instead of touching her body. As she responded to my kisses and half-turned to me, I found myself thinking of Curufinwë and wondering if things would have been different had he consented to wed her. I imagined that she would not shy from him, and he probably would have been inside of her by now.

"Nolofinwë?" she said, and I realized that I had stopped kissing her, although my lips were still resting on hers and my breathing came hard and fast. "Are you well?"

"I—I'm just nervous," I told her and made myself kiss her again.

"I'm nervous too," she whispered to me. She shifted, and her fingers moved like a spider against the inside of my thigh until she reached my groin. She trailed her fingers gently along the length of my penis, and I moaned. "Let's just—" she said, blushing and touching me harder.

I pressed her onto her back and moved atop of her. Her knees were pressed so hard together that her legs trembled, but when I put my hands between her thighs, she spread them willingly, although her body shook so hard that the sheets quivered. She touched me no longer, and her hands clutched the sheets and kept them pulled tightly around our naked bodies. "Don't hurt me," she whispered, as I touched her between her legs and opened her flesh, seeking the place I knew only in the most rudimentary sense.

"I won't hurt you," I promised her softly. "I love you."

I guided myself inside of her, and she breathed in sharply but didn't cry out. I began to move slowly inside of her, and I felt her light join mine, and I knew our spirits had bonded.

I felt her discomfort and shifted positions until her pain subsided and I could move more comfortably within her. Bliss seemed to warm my entire body, gathering and concentrating in my groin until I didn't think I could stand it anymore, and I heard myself groan and cry out, "Anairë!" and I thrust my hips hard and released deep inside of her.

"Nolofinwë, Nolofinwë," she gasped, as I fell aside. We clung to each other, and I knew that my ecstasy had been shared with her as well, just as I had felt her first pain. As quickly as the pleasure overcame me, it was washed away, although my heart hammered and my body was slick with sweat. "I love you," she whispered, as our lips met in kiss after kiss. "I love you so much, husband of mine."

Our lovemaking became easier over time, and I learned to bring her the same kind of pleasure that she brought me and basked in the glow that her ecstasy made in my spirit. We never became as impassioned as Nerdanel and Curufinwë, and sometimes we would spend weeks sleeping apart in our separate bedrooms, but when we did lie together, the moment was as sweet as an unexpected breeze on a hot day. It took seven years to conceive Findekáno and many weeks to realize that Anairë was pregnant. One day, returning home from counsel at the palace, I saw from afar the healer passing through my gates, and racing home, found Anairë dressing in her bedroom. "Are you unwell?" I cried, my heart hammering with panic, but she just smiled at me through her mirror, turned, and said, "How would you like to be a father, Nolofinwë?"

Shortly after Findekáno was born, I finally found the courage to ask her the question I had been pondering through all of the years of our marriage. "Anairë?" I asked her. She had just finished nursing Findekáno and looked up from his tiny sleeping body curled in her arms. "Would you really have married Curufinwë?"

"I don't know," she said. Her voice was honest but strayed into the whimsy of memory—where a moment changed and a heart was captured that had eluded her before, and the wedding occurred that was supposed to be held but never was—and she paused a moment to think. "From the time Fëanáro was born, my father planned that I should marry him. When he grew older, I convinced myself that I was in love with him, but yet I never knew him. He never let me know him. I was in love with his title, his reputation. His looks." With her final statement, she gave me a quick appraising glance to see if I was upset, but I have long ago come to terms with the truth about my half-brother: Although people claim that I strongly resemble him, we are as trees, alike in our leaves and our branches, but he is Laurelin and I am a simple oak. "He was the greatest of the Noldor, so named by the Valar, and I figured that left him without fault." She sighed. "I know differently now."

I told her then of the moment that I'd fallen in love with her, of being passed from Curufinwë's strong, secure arms to dance in her more precarious ones. She laughed. "I remember that day. I remember that kiss, when he turned from me. I'd never realized it then, but he never let me kiss his lips until we were both wed. But in our youth, all of my friends told me that the son of the King was exceedingly chaste, and that was my comfort, I suppose." She smiled. "I would imagine they do not say that now."

With Anairë, I am at peace. The concavities in her spirit support the swells in mine and we lock together, stronger whole than we were as individuals. Words do not pass often between us when we are alone. We sit in silence, too content in the fullness that we give the other to bother with trivial words. We are not like Nerdanel and Curufinwë—or even Eärwen and Arafinwë—we do not constantly react to one another, deflecting and tumbling like two molecules, but rather lock together like two seas joined as ice, stronger together than we could ever hope to be alone.

~oOo~ 

When Curufinwë comes to Tirion to attend Atar's councils, I am often forced for one reason or another to summon him to my study, usually for advice.

Curufinwë and I are rarely alone together anymore. Usually our father or Arafinwë is with us, or one of our wives, sometimes Maitimo. But when I ask Curufinwë to come to my study, he always comes alone, and words pass between us that cannot be spoken in the presence of others.

My half-brother's precocity both astounds and dismays me. We share the same father, and our upbringings were not so different from each other, but wisdom that comes almost intuitively to him escapes me, a ship lost in the mire of a fog. There are times when my station requires tasks of me that I cannot complete, problems—particularly of a mathematical nature—that I cannot solve. It is then that I summon Curufinwë, and always he comes, to stand over me at my desk while I explain to him what needs to be done in a voice kept stony to hide its shame. "Nolofinwë," my father had named me—"wise Finwë"—but though my political counsels may be wise, it is Curufinwë who is the master of art and lore.

I always stand and give him my desk to use while I pace around the room like an anxious child waiting to be called into his father's chambers for discipline. He asks no questions of me—although he rises occasionally to pull a ledger from the shelf beside my desk—and works swiftly in intent silence. It is I who force conversation, asking questions with the significance of raindrops into a vast sea: inconsequential, nervous inquiries about his house.

"Maitimo has grown tall," I might say, or, "Anairë said Nerdanel looked well at their last meeting."

But such innocuous statements inevitably seem to metamorphose into something more sinister, evolving further into a near-silent argument delivered in acidic whispers.

"I am surprised," I said once, "that you and Nerdanel have not given Atar more grandchildren." Anairë and I had been married a year, and Macalaurë had just had his twentieth begetting day. I'd meant it innocently, as a jest almost, for Curufinwë and Nerdanel had been renowned in their passion for each other and did not do much to hide the knowledge of their fiery sexuality from others. I had once, when I was only twenty years old and just beginning to understand the mechanics of reproduction, gone to get a glass of water from the palace kitchen in the middle of the night—it was the Winter Festival, and Curufinwë and Nerdanel were staying with Atar for the week—and found Curufinwë pressing Nerdanel against the wall, locked in a kiss, with her nightgown around her hips and her legs around his waist, fumbling to undo the ties on his trousers. I could not believe that my precocious brother and his sturdy wife had not managed to conceive again after having Maitimo and Macalaurë in quick succession, in only ten years of marriage.

But Curufinwë did not take my comment as the gentle jest that it was supposed to be, and he looked up from the ledger with his eyes aflame. "What do you know of it? He who does not even share a bed with his bride?"

I had never realized that rumor of Anairë's and my substantially cooler romance would spread in the same manner as the tales of Curufinwë and Nerdanel's lascivious exploits. My brain fumbled to understand how the conversation had turned from trivial to dire in a matter of seconds, but before I could sputter a response, Curufinwë snapped, "You know nothing of it, Nolofinwë. Nothing!"

"I—" I could not understand what had caused such a reaction, and before I could formulate a civilized reply, my anger at the attack took over, and I retorted, "I do not appreciate such implications about my wife."

"And should I appreciate the same about mine? Hmm? As though she is nothing but a machine used for punching out my babies?"

"No, I always assumed she was a machine you acquired for satisfying your carnal pleasures." He leaped to his feet and his eyes blazed, and that made my spirit sing was sickened satisfaction. I spoke in slow whispers, savoring the fire that rose in his eyes at my words, a torturer honing his cruel art. "You blamed Atar for procuring a second wife after your mother made her choice to die, claiming that he was ruled by lust, but you are no better than his supposed intentions. It is you, Curufinwë, not Atar, who is controlled by lecherous desires, for you now make no secret of the fact that you lie with your wife without hopes of begetting children!"

The argument escalated and spiraled beyond both of our controls, with neither wanting to relinquish and concede defeat, even as we trod the same tired ground as we had in hundreds of arguments before. Curufinwë was ruthless when angered, and many foul names he called me, and while I tried to remain calm and use my dignity to my advantage, I found that I could not overcome—as I never could—the deadly acuity of his oration, and I found myself resorting to my own low rhetoric. That which began in angry whispers like the slice of a blade through the air swelled and grew louder, until we were both shouting and entirely unaware of it.

Neither of us heard the knock on the door—the soft roll of knuckles against wood, easy to overlook—or noticed the door open, until our father called, "Fëanáro? Nolofinwë? What is the cause for this?"

Atar never sounds angry when he interrupts Curufinwë and me in an argument but rather bewildered, as though he still cannot understand why his two eldest sons cannot get along. Feeling as though a cold wind had swept all anger from my mind, I recalled the words I have been using against my half-brother and felt guilt that my father had overheard.

"I am sorry, Atar," I said, trying to regain some status by being the first to apologize. Curufinwë said nothing and fell into a heavy silence. "We did not know you could hear."

"Did not know that I could hear? Nolofinwë, the whole court can hear you!"

Shame burned my face, for I would speak before them later that afternoon on an important matter that would now be ignored in favor of gossip about the King's son's chosen words against his own half-brother.

"Fëanáro, would you wait in my chambers please?" Atar asked, and Curufinwë left the room, but not without first taking the unfinished work left upon my desk. Atar turned to me. "Nolofinwë? This is not like you. What happened?"

I told him of my request for aid with the inventory figures and my attempted jest about his obvious drought in begetting another child. I told of his overreaction and my own response. "He is a hypocrite, Atar," I said, "for he blames you for seeking marriage to Amil, yet he himself allows his body to overcome what is moral and right. He obviously lies with his wife without the intention of begetting a child, and that, I think, is wrong."

"Nolofinwë." Atar's head hung as though in great shame of me, but his warm hands came upon my face and lay on either cheek, framing me as he had when I was a small child. "You speak of something of which you know naught. You have wounded your brother terribly, although you may not have known it."

His fingers trailed from my face, and he turned and left without a farewell or embrace, and I sat at my desk and thought on his words, imagining Curufinwë wounded and unable to reconcile the idea with the memory of my brother's fury. Such a spirit was impossible to wound.

For many hours, I sat, unable to work or even think, until my study door opened unbidden and Curufinwë strode forward and tossed the finished parchments onto my desk without even a glance of acknowledgement. "Curufinwë?" I called to him as his hand lit on the doorknob. "Is it forgotten then?"

He did not even pause. "I did it not for you but for the kingdom," he said, and the door slammed behind him.

~oOo~ 

Arafinwë and Eärwen do not stay long after supper, and Anairë and I retire to her bedchamber shortly after their departure. While we normally sleep apart, in separate bedrooms, it is unbearable to be parted from her during pregnancy, and I lie beside her in her bed each night. I am ready long before she is, and I lie propped up in bed on a pile of pillows, sketching in the book that I keep on the night table.

Indeed, sketching seems to be the only artistic skill I was given, and it is still mediocre at best. I am not compelled to create—as Curufinwë is—but sketching before bed relaxes my mind and draws me into sleep. I draw Anairë sitting at her vanity table, unbraiding her long, dark hair, her belly swelling beneath her silken nightgown. On this, I allow my pencil to linger, for I am also sketching my son, and I concentrate on meticulously shading ever ripple in the cloth, imagining that I am tracing his contours instead, until Anairë rises from the bench and comes to bed.

She peeks over my shoulder at my sketch and smiles. "Beautiful," she says, and I tilt my face to kiss her mouth and say, "Just like the subject."

I show my drawings to no one but Anairë, for who would have interest in the mediocre scratchings of a prince? I showed Atar once, when I was very small, a drawing I had done of my mother, but he was accustomed to admiring Curufinwë's work, and his praise was tepid and insincere. I cannot blame him. The works I have seen appear beneath Curufinwë's competent hands draw my breath from me and make me ache with jealousy. I close the sketchbook and set it aside on the night table.

Anairë snuggles into my shoulder, and I circle her with my arms. Indeed, it is times like these when I wonder why we have separate bedrooms at all, for I would gladly wile away the ages just like this. But once our son is born, I know our need for each other will subside as the sea recedes at low tide.

"What will you name your son?" she asks softly of me.

"What do you sense of him?"

"He will be very wise, gifted in lore. He will have a greater eye for beauty than Findekáno but a lesser heart for forgiveness." Her words are becoming tenuous, torn on the winds of sleep. "His daughter will be beautiful," she whispers, and I feel her eyes close. Her next words are barely audible. "And her son will watch over us all and sail among the stars …"

Sleep takes her then, and I smile at the beauty of her dreams.

I am the shadow.

I am the darkness.

I crouch in Atar's cabinet and close my eyes. Becoming invisible is like pulling a black sheet over yourself: First, you are overwhelmed with darkness, but then you realize that you can peer between the threads in the cloth and see nearly as well as before, although no one can see you. Unfortunately, all there is for me to see is the oaken inside of Atar's cabinet, but I lean forward until my hands bump the doors and nudge one open, just a crack, so that I can see them sitting around Atar's worktable, which has been cleared for the occasion.

Amil is offering Oromë a glass of wine. Atar is sitting in his desk chair, which he has slid over to the worktable for the meeting, but he is reclining on its back legs like my brothers are not allowed to do. Amil glows with soft pride. She is joyous, I know, to have a Vala in our home. She prays to them sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking.

But from the shadows, I see her.

Atar has made himself look relaxed but he festers, like flesh wounded and further insulted with infection, and I find it hard to look at him. He is trying to be angry but the anger can't break through the bewilderment swarming around him like a black cloud of bees. As Amil sets a goblet of red wine in front of Oromë—her eyes lowered in piousness—Atar lets the front legs of his chair bang back to the floor. His hands splay upon the tabletop. "You are telling me that I have two sons now who will amount to naught in the forge?"

"Fëanáro!" Amil hisses, but Oromë sets his big hand over hers. Never would I have thought that Amil's hands could be seen as delicate, but beneath Oromë's, her hand might belong to one of the china dolls that she is commissioned to make sometimes for the lords' children in Tirion.

Oromë's voice is low, like the wind winding around the corners of the house at night, and he speaks with slow patience. "I cannot speak for Canafinwë, but young Turkafinwë has been given a gift that lies beyond that which can be bound by walls," he says.

I squeeze my eyes shut and drink of Oromë, but nothing comes to me but light. Such is all I ever see of the Valar: billions of particles streaming endlessly away from them, colorless, as though they are immune to the emotions that tint ours—blue like my cousin, green like Turko. They feel emotions, yes, but it changes the speed and density of the light, not its color. I close my eyes and deepen my concentration.

I should pity him, for he has lost so much, but he is shamelessly impetuous.

The voice of Oromë in my head is like the thunder of rocks, and I have to squeeze my inner eyes shut tighter to keep hold of his voice. With my renewed concentration, Oromë's thoughts turn, and I know that he is becoming aware of me, and I quickly open my eyes to the darkness, feeling his light streaming off of me like water from the oily back of a seabird.

"It is strange to me," Atar is saying, in a gentler voice to please my mother, "that my wife and I are both craftspeople, yet none of our sons show even a glimmer of such gifts."

"Your children's spirits are not as their bodies, built from what is given by you and your wife at their conception," says Oromë. "It is Eru who gives each new child his spirit, and so they will be what Eru makes them. Do not grieve, Curufinwë."

"I do not grieve," Atar replies, "for each of my sons is dear to me in a way that can be claimed by no other. But I never imagined that I would father four children and still be teaching those who belong to others."

Silence falls over the room, but many things churn beneath it, things I am not yet skilled enough to perceive. I sense that Atar and Amil have much that they wish to say, things that may hurt each other, but Oromë acts as a dam in a creek and subdues their words for a time, although with his strong hands removed, the dam may weather, and they may burst forth later. Oromë chooses his words carefully: "Turkafinwë is your son, Curufinwë, and in the end, it is your choice if you allow him to ride with me. I merely wanted you to know that I would have him, if you desired."

Atar sits for many long minutes before he speaks. "I would deny my sons no happiness, nor would I deny the intentions of Eru. If you wish it, then Tyelkormo may ride with you when he pleases."

~oOo~

Turko is standing in the field beside the house, his quiver strapped to his back, shooting arrow after arrow at the lumpy red and blue target that he has leaned against a tree. I let my feet slide through the grass in parody of the wind, until even the keen ears of my hunter-brother cannot hear me. His quiver is filled with arrows, and his arm no sooner releases one and it is cocked back to grab another, each motion identical to the last until it reminds me of one of the devises that Nelyo likes to build from scraps of metal where each part is perfectly balanced and swings endlessly in perpetual, fluid motion.

Atar gave each of us only three arrows with which to practice our archery—he says that we are less likely to be careless about recovering them if we only have three—and Turko has far more than three arrows in his quiver now and many more arrayed in a neat cluster at the center of the target. I am close enough to smell his scent like leaves washed in rainwater, remaining downwind so that he still cannot detect me, and I see the arrow flash from the quiver in a blur of silvery steel and vivid red. They are Atar's arrows that he uses, and all of us—even Nelyo—are forbidden to touch much less use Atar's arrows.

There is a thrush on my brother's shoulder, and when I shift in the grass, it catches my motion in its eye and rises, twittering, to the tree overhead. Turko's hand pauses in mid-draw, and without turning, he speaks. "Carnistir? Why do you come here?"

Without waiting for me to answer, he whistles to the bird

—come back, little bird, come back, for it is only my brother and he means you no harm—

and it flutters back from the tree and alights again on his shoulder. He turns from me and draws back the arrow. Thwack. It embeds itself in the wooden target amongst a peppering of its red-fletched brothers.

"You are using Atar's arrows," I say.

"I am." He draws another and fires. Thwack.

"He might kill you, Turko!" He snorts. "I would miss you. I think I like you the best of our brothers." He does not answer. I size up his arm—he wears a short-sleeved tunic and his muscles ripple like waves beneath his skin—wait for him to draw back the arrow, and chomp on the back of it.

"Ai!" His hand releases the arrow, and it flies into the tree branches. The bird on his shoulder takes flight in a flurry of tiny wings, quickly becoming a lost speck in the sky over the field. I do not let go and my brother's taste floods my mouth—dust seasoned with the salt of his sweat—until he turns and throws me to the ground, pinning me with his knee on my chest.

"What did Atar say about biting?" he shouts.

The same thing I imagine he'd said about using his arrows, but I do not say that. The cool grass prickles my back through my tunic; Turko's hands are clamped on my shoulders with iron strength, hard enough to hurt, and I whimper.

He pushes my shoulders harder into the ground for an instant, and his anger stings me. My eyes shut, and I feel his hands release me. Shame trickles from him, for he has hurt me unwittingly, as though someone removed from his mind and unaware of the love of brothers that exists between us shoved his hands hard into my shoulders. I rise from the ground, latch my arms around his neck, and kiss his tight, dry lips. "That's better," he says. "Kisses, not biting, right?"

Atar has forbidden me to bite, although I have found that no one protests tiny nips if they are quickly followed by a kiss. I was a bit too enthusiastic, a few weeks ago, in expressing my love for Atar, and when he shifted at the wrong moment right as I nipped his ear, my teeth closed on the cartilage at its tip hard enough to draw blood. It tasted like the metal Amil sometimes uses to make statues. My own blood tastes the same way, although that makes sense, seeing as everyone tells me that I am of Atar's blood. "I can see your blood in him," Grandfather Finwë said once, after I'd screamed in protest of being picked up by his wife Indis and ran to Atar instead. Atar didn't seem to like the comment much.

Turko leaves me to retrieve the spent arrows. He hoists himself into the tree with graceful ease, and moment later, the arrow he misfired into its branches clatters to the ground. "They had counsel with Oromë about you!" I shout into the tree. I cannot see him in its thick branches, but I can hear the scratch-scratch of his boots against bark.

"You should call him Lord Oromë," Turko calls down to me. "He is one of the Valar."

"Lord Oromë, then. They were talking about you!"

"It does not matter." Like a stone, he drops from the tree, landing only inches away from me, and when his feet collide with the ground, they hardly make a sound. Louder is the sound of his body falling through the air, as though the air protests at having to part so suddenly to accommodate him. He begins to shove Atar's arrows back into the quiver. It is also Atar's quiver, I realize—in awe of my brother's audacity—beautifully tooled leather with the Star of our House inlaid with tiny rubies and diamonds. "I care not about theses strange gifts I have been given." He waves his hand. "I am going to be Atar's apprentice."

Given his unflinching skill with the bow, I failed to remember the wound on his hand until I notice that a tail of bandage has pulled loose by the tree branches and flutters when he waves his hand. The wound—although hidden from my eyes—is a token, just like the stone my oldest brother wears around his neck or the golden bands on my parents' fingers. I stare at the bandage until Turko tucks away the loose end. His blue eyes on mine are as cold as knives.

He stoops and continues gathering arrows. He is noisy inside, a cacophony of thoughts each asserting itself, trying to be heard over the others. He is angry but not at me. The wound hurts, but it is not a pain of flesh but of spirit. I sense thoughts of Atar, and they shout louder than the others.

He grabs the tip of one of the arrows, and I see him flinch as it opens the flesh on his finger, but his hands flash to fill themselves with spent arrows, ignoring the new injury. He shoves the arrows into my hands. "Here. Put these away," he says, and I place them one-by-one into the quiver. His blood is left on some of the shafts, and it colors my hands. He shoulders the quiver, and once his back is turned, I suck my fingers and taste the red upon them.

It tastes like metal. Like Atar.

Like me.

~oOo~

The house is cool and quiet, and Turko and I are creeping up the stairs to our rooms when I hear Macalaurë behind us. "There you are!" he says, and Turko scurries away quickly to put away Atar's quiver before Macalaurë sees it, but I trip on the steps and cannot regain my footing fast enough, and I am scooped into Macalaurë's arms and smothered with his frazzled grayness that is like an old, worn blanket.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," he says. "It is nearly supper and look at you! Filthy!"

My two older brothers and my parents could find dirt on a raindrop. Turko and I are never clean enough to suit them. I squirm in his arms—Turko must have escaped his notice—but his grasp tightens around me. He sniffs behind my ear. "Ugh! Filthy!" he reiterates. "You smell like a dirty hound."

I clamp my teeth onto his wrist, less in a gesture of love than to make him loosen his hold on me. "Carnistir! Stop! Or I'll tell Atar," he threatens, carrying me into our parents' suite and taking me to Atar's bathroom. As we pass through the bedroom, I see Atar's quiver leaning against his armoire, precisely where it was this morning. I sense green under the bed and give Turko—who I know is watching—the scariest stare I can muster.

Macalaurë carries me into the bathroom and stands me beside the washbasin, yanks my shoes from my feet, and strips me down to my underwear. He soaks a cloth in the water and rubs it cold on my skin, ridding me of dirt and sweat, and I whimper as my flesh rises into cold-bumps. "What?" he says, not bothering to conceal his impatience.

"Atar …"

"Atar is preparing supper and asked me to make you presentable." A snippet of song zips through his thoughts, and he pauses momentarily to contemplate it, and it is tucked away beneath the more pressing matters on his mind, where he will use it later. "I like it less than you do," he tells me, dousing the cloth back into the washbasin and scrubbing at my chest and belly with cool water. Hot tears blur my vision and course down my face.

"Atar!"

"Carnistir, please …" He plunks the cloth back into the washbasin and, as he poises it over my arms, notices for the first time the cold-bumps on my skin and collects me in an embrace. I try to wriggle away from him, but he is too big and strong for me, and after a moment, I settle into his arms to be bathed in the warmth of his body. His hair tickles my neck, and I turn my head to nibble on it. Macalaurë's hair is the color of chocolate, and I always expect it to taste that way and am always disappointed to find that it tastes blandly organic, like licking unfinished wooden furniture: It tastes like hair. With exaggerated stealth, he shifts and reaches for Atar's comb sitting on the washbasin, as though he thinks that moving with such extra care will escape my notice, and plunges the comb into the tangle of my hair.

I feel several strands pop free of my scalp, and it hurts! I scream, and he tries to jerk to comb away, but it is embroiled now in my hair, and more strands are pulled from my head. The dull gray that is Macalaurë begins to churn and foam like an angry sea, and when he tries to untangle my hair from the comb, I bite his arm as hard as I can, grinding my teeth into his wrist until I can feel the ridges in the bone through his skin. He yelps and shoves me away, and I scamper into the corner of the bathroom, jumping into Atar's bathtub to get as far from my brother as I can manage.

"You hurt!" I shriek, thrusting an accusing finger in his direction. The comb is still caught in my hair and bumps against my shoulder.

Jaw set, Macalaurë hurls the washrag to the floor and flounces from the room, and I hear him calling for our brother Nelyo, who has been given the day off from chores to study.

Irritating Macalaurë is immensely pleasurable for some reason, like watching a pending storm stir up a flat, boring summer sky. There is a tingling pressure in my belly, and I realize that I have to pee, so I do it in the bathtub, soaking my underwear, just to hear what Nelyo will say to Macalaurë.

I hear Nelyo's heavy footsteps growing nearer, interspersed with Macalaurë's pattering ones. "The little imp is unbearable," Macalaurë says, and Nelyo shushes him. "He will hear you," Nelyo says, and Macalaurë retorts with "I care not."

"That is precisely why he acts the way he does. Because you 'care not.'"

Nelyo is irritated at Macalaurë, at having been interrupted. Turko and I have been forbidden from trying to get Nelyo to play with us on certain days of the week. Amil says that he is preparing hard and cannot be disturbed. I wonder, sometimes, for what he is preparing that could make him ignore his brothers.

Nelyo comes into the bathroom. He is barefoot and wearing a loose tunic over worn trousers. His hair is secured at the nape of his neck in a sloppy knot, and his lips are dotted with ink. He sees me crouching in the bathtub in my underwear with a comb caught in my hair, and the irritation prickling his color is smoothed by sympathy. "Carnistir," he says, "little one," and, stooping next to the bathtub, reaches to lift me under my arms. The hot, sharp smell of urine hits us both then, and he grimaces and turns his face away. Pee is pattering into the bottom of the bathtub from my dripping underwear.

"He is soaked!" Nelyo shouts to Macalaurë, who is hovering in the doorway.

"Soaked? There was no water in the bathtub—"

"He has wet himself, Macalaurë." Nelyo stands abruptly and retrieves one of Atar's red towels, monogrammed in gold with the Star of our House at the corner.

"Well, he hadn't done that when I left to get you a minute ago!"

"Did you think to ask him if he needed to relieve himself first?"

"He's four years old, Nelyo! I didn't still piss in my pants at that age; neither did you, and neither did Tyelkormo!"

Nelyo gives Macalaurë a cold look and turns to peel my soaked underwear from my body and envelope me in the fluffy warmth of Atar's towel. He wraps me too in his arms as he pats me dry. Nelyo has the same gift as does Atar: the ability to make me feel as though I am a pea being folded inside a pod, hidden and protected from the cruelty of the world beyond. I snuggle into his neck and hear myself mew in contentment.

"How do you do that?!" Macalaurë rages, and I hear him storm from the room.

Nelyo kisses the top of my head, and I reciprocate by kissing his neck, adding the tiniest of nips when I know by the rumble of laughter in his throat that he won't notice.

~oOo~

Clean, dried, and dressed in fresh clothes, I am carried on Nelyo's hip to the dining room.

On the way, we meet Annawendë. In Formenos, the apprentices dine with us every night, since they don't have quarters of their own, like they do in Tirion. Her face and hands are pink from being scrubbed clean, and the scent of soap lingers around her in a flowery aura. She has put on a dress for dinner, and I think—as I always do—that Annawendë looks funny in a dress, when I am much more accustomed to seeing her in a tunic, trousers, and a smith's apron, almost as funny as if Atar took to flitting about in gowns.

"Maitimo!" she says, when she sees my brother. She pats my hair as a way of greeting, but her eyes are on Nelyo, and her smile is wide enough to show her teeth at the top and bottom. They lean in to kiss, beginning with a chaste peck on the lips and returning for a second kiss, lingering until I grow impatient, lean over, and bite Annawendë on the shoulder.

It is a most satisfying bite. Her flesh is softer than my brothers' or Atar's, and the silk of her dress slips against my teeth. The smell of flowers overwhelms me.

"Ai!"

She pulls back, and Nelyo bobbles me for a second, startled. "What is the matter?" he asks.

"Your brother! He bit me!" she cries, rubbing her shoulder.

I try to smile at Nelyo, to assert my innocence, but I feel the whisper of a silk thread against my teeth and clip my mouth shut before he sees it too. Too late. His fingers worm past my lips, pry open my teeth, and close on the offending strand, producing it with indignant triumph and a stern, "What is this?"

Tyelkormo would point out that it is a string and probably get into trouble for his insolence. I stare at it in silence and feel my lip begin to tremble. Nelyo prickles with irritation, and looking into his bright, angry eyes is nearly as difficult as staring at a white-hot piece of metal in Atar's forge. Tears sting my eyes, and I let a sob erupt from my throat, burying my face in Nelyo's shoulder so that I don't have to see his anger anymore.

My ploy sways Annawendë first. "Oh, Maitimo, do not make him cry. It was not so hard a bite …"

Amil is so interested in my brother's goings-on with Annawendë that my early weeks in Formenos were spent following them about, hiding in draperies and behind statues, trying to determine what Amil found so fascinating about them. Watching Nelyo with Annawendë was almost as boring as watching Nelyo sit alone in the library for hours, reading. Their conversations were dry—usually about metallurgy or chemistry—and never lasted long before they started kissing. And once they started kissing, that was all that they did until something interrupted them. I don't see how something so boring could occupy a person for so long. The only time they became even slightly interesting—and even "slightly" is a stretch, mind you—was on the rare occasions that Atar and Amil were both gone from the house, and Nelyo would take Annawendë to his bedroom, and they wouldn't even bother with the dry conversation before commencing to wrestle around on his bed. Of course, they kissed through the whole ordeal, and I don't think Nelyo had put forth his best effort because Annawendë often bested him, and as big and strong as is my brother, he should have been able to win easily every time.

Annawendë wins this time too, and her pleading eyes make my brother turn to me and offer reluctant forgiveness. "I ought to tell Atar," he says, but his voice is irresolute, and I know that my transgression will remain a secret between the three of us.

Atar is setting supper on the table when we enter. Vorondil and Amil's apprentices are already seated, eagerly eyeing the breadbasket in front of them. Atar comes to greet us, but when he leans in to kiss my forehead, he sniffs hard and looks queerly at Nelyo. "He smells too clean. And didn't I send Macalaurë to ready him so that you could study?"

"Yes, but Carnistir had a little accident, and I came in to help."

The answer pleases Atar, and he kisses me. "Well, these clothes are far too clean to feed him in. He'll have them ruined within five minutes."

Atar takes me into the kitchen, and I am stripped again and dressed—again—in one of Macalaurë's filthy old forge tunics. Amil could never get all of the soot streaks from the front, and there are yellowish sweat stains under the arms. Despite the stains, the tunic is clean and smells of fresh, soapy water, but beneath, the acrid stench of the forge lingers like a monster beneath the pleasant surface of a lake. I hate these garments, and I have taken to gnawing on the collars of them, hoping that if I fray them too badly, then I might be excused from wearing them, but all that it's gotten me so far is a stern chastisement from Atar and a few loose strings that tickle my neck. Nonetheless, as I am carried about on Atar's hip while he finishes the supper preparations, I put the collar into my mouth and grind it between my back teeth as hard as I can, feeling the tired strings wear further.

Nelyo comes into the kitchen to help Atar finish supper. He goes to the oven and removes a roasted pheasant. I am not fond of pheasant; even when Atar cooks it, it tastes like the leather of Turko's dirtiest riding boots. I must have made an unpleasant noise because Atar turns from the reddish sauce that he is stirring on the stove and gives me a stern look.

"You need to eat, little one. I'm starting to feel too much of those ribs." He tickles my belly, and I giggle. He turns back to the sauce, whisking it rapidly, and to Nelyo, he says, "A message came today from Verkaturo."

Nelyo does not look up from the pheasant, but his voice is interested. "Oh?"

"Wolves have been coming down from the north; there has been a serious loss from some of the sheep herds." Atar pours the red sauce from the saucepan into a bowl. "He has asked me to go with him and his sons tonight, to hunt these wolves and hopefully minimize the town's losses. You know they must have wool for the winter. I am aware that you are busy, Nelyo, but he asked if you would come along with us."

"Of course, I will." There is a pause as Nelyo transfers the pheasant onto a serving plate. When he speaks again, his words are careful and deliberate. "Did you ask Macalaurë?"

"You don't think he'd want to go, do you?"

"I can't speak for him, but I think he might like to be asked."

"I will ask him then."

Atar and Nelyo carry the last of the supper—and me—into the dining room. Everyone has arrived and the noise rises to the ceiling, where everyone's voice bangs together like bells clanging. Macalaurë must have eventually located Turko because Turko is wearing a clean tunic and his hair has been tugged into a semblance of order. Amil is seated with Findekáno, and they are both powdered with stone dust and smile with the tired contentment of a productive day. Nelyo sets the pheasant at the center of the table, and Atar hands Amil the carving knife and fork. "Please, beloved wife mine, show us your exceptional skill," he says, bowing to her—a bit awkwardly because I am still perched on his hip—and she laughs as she stands to begin cutting neat slices from the bird, while we walk to Atar's seat at the head of the table.

It is Atar's turn to feed me—and while I think I love my father more than anyone else in the entire world—it is the one time I'd rather sit with Amil because she is more forgiving if I do not finish my entire supper. Also, if I arrange my face correctly, she will not attempt to overfeed me. Not Atar: Eruhantalë is no sooner finished and he is piling my plate with vegetables and a thick slice of pheasant. Before I can even murmur a protest, he says, "I do not want to hear a complaint from you until all of that is finished."

"Can he complain if he eats it all?" Turko chirps, earning a frightening look from Atar that makes him fall silent and turn back to his own hearty slice of pheasant. Not that he minds; Turko likes pheasant and makes a grand show of chewing it enthusiastically and a bit noisily.

I sigh and contemplate my plate. There is pheasant and carrots and a big crusty roll and a tureen of cheese soup. I like none of it, and with Turko across from me, I cannot even switch my wine glass with his when his is empty without Atar noticing.

"Eat your soup," Atar tells me, setting down his cutlery so that he can fold my reluctant fingers around my spoon. I poke the surface of the cheese soup, which is beginning to harden into a skin. Cheese soup always reminds me of the water in swamps.

Atar is watching me carefully to make sure I don't use any of my usual tricks. I decided that, if I must eat it, then I might as well not prolong my misery by eating it slowly, so I stab my spoon into the bowl, swirl the soup around (to get rid of the film on top) and shovel four spoonfuls into my mouth in quick succession. By the time the fourth passes my lips, I realize that the soup is still scalding hot and my mouth is burning. I open my mouth, hoping to cool it off some, and hot soup trickles down my chin, but I have taken too much, and the pain quickly becomes unbearable, so I scream and soup sprays from my mouth and across the table, soaking Turko, and liberally splashing Vorondil and Atar on either side of him.

Atar leaps from his chair so fast that it is knocked backward, and all the noise in the room abruptly dies. I feel tears on my face and begin to cry. The inside of my mouth burns, and I can feel the skin peeling away and hanging in little streamers from the roof of my mouth. Turko, blinking through the soup caught in his eyelashes, is the only one who realizes what has happened and shoves a mug of water in my direction. I drink from it, while Atar offers Turko and Vorondil napkins and chides me, "You're supposed to test it first, little one, to make sure it's cool enough."

I make myself cry harder, until Atar removes the soup from my plate and says, "Fine, Carnistir, finish your carrots and your pheasant and you may be excused."

"I—I can't," I sob. "It hurts too much!"

Actually, the water has soothed the burns just fine, and I could eat if it was something I liked, such as pudding or banana bread. But Atar does not know that, and he scrapes my untouched supper onto his own plate with a sigh. "Your mother will give you a bit of lembas in milk after supper," he says, and when he looks away, I allow myself to smile because lembas is one of the better-tasting things my mother makes and, mixed in milk, it is nearly impossible to taste at all.

~oOo~

After supper, Amil takes Turko, Findekáno, and me into the parlor to read us a story while Atar and my two oldest brothers get ready for their hunt. I wait until Amil becomes distracted by one of Turko's incessant questions and slip from the room unnoticed.

I follow my feelings of my brothers until I find them in Macalaurë's bedroom. The door is half-closed, and it is not hard for me to scurry into the room and slide under Macalaurë's bed unnoticed. Nelyo is braiding Macalaurë's hair away from his face. Hunting wolves can be dangerous, and they are both dressed to suit. Their long-sleeved tunics are heavy and tucked into leather bracers at their wrists. They each wear leather gloves with the fingers removed to protect their hands and high, heavy boots over their breeches. Two woolen cloaks are draped over Macalaurë's chair, for nights in Formenos are cold, even in the summer.

Macalaurë is jittery, and Nelyo has to keep telling him to hold still. "Maybe I should have pled out of this," Macalaurë says. "He wouldn't have questioned me if I said I had too much work to do. I guess I was just honored that he even thought to ask …"

I saw Macalaurë when Atar asked him to accompany them, and his gray color faded momentarily beneath sparks of excitement like fireworks against the night of Telperion. "I'd love to!" he gushed, and fairly raced up the stairs when Atar sent him away to get dressed.

"I don't see why you find it so incredulous that you should be asked to go along," Nelyo says. "You will be forty in just a few months. You are nearly grown, Macalaurë."

"Yes, but I am neither skilled with the bow nor a strong rider. I hope I do not weaken the group."

"Don't be silly. You will do no such thing. You are too harsh on yourself, Macalaurë; that is your only problem. If you stopped constantly judging yourself by Atar's example, then you might realize that you are a decent bowman and a decent equestrian. If we all found self-worth only in equaling Atar's achievements, then our society would despair and fall to ruin."

"But how can I not!" Macalaurë says miserably. "I am his son! Are not sons supposed to follow in the footsteps of their fathers?"

"When he goes where we cannot, then there is no way we can follow. We will never surpass him, Macalaurë. Námo prophesied that much, long before we were born. Atar is the greatest of our people, and ever shall he remain, and no might or magic from either of us can change that. We can only strive to meet our own expectations, and delight in the fact that we are named in Atar's house and hence share in the blood of greatness."

Macalaurë sighs and Nelyo ties the end of his braid and pats him on the shoulder. "There. You are finished and ready to claim your title as Canafinwë Macalaurë, Slayer of Wolves in Northernmost Formenos."

"I suppose I shall be happy if I wake up alive in my bed in the morning," said Macalaurë, "and if I don't shoot you again by accident or any of our companions. As long as I don't make a fool of myself."

Nelyo kisses Macalaurë's hair. "You will not do that, little brother, so do not fear."

~oOo~

I wait for Nelyo and Macalaurë to leave to retrieve their bows and knives from Nelyo's bedroom and dart down the stairs to wait in the foyer. Atar appears first, scowling at his bracer and twisting it around his wrist, and he is nearly upon me before he sees me and stops. "Little one! Aren't you supposed to be reading a story with your mother?"

He picks me up. He smells of dusty wool and pungent leather. I lay my head on his shoulder and say, "I had to pee."

"Good. You do that in the lavatory and not in your pants, right?"

"Yes, Atar."

When Atar is content, like he is now, I wish that he would hold me forever. He is a warm fire on a cold night, the kind you stretch towards without fearing the bite of a spark on exposed skin. I put my thumb in my mouth—it sates the temptation to bite—and snuggle against his shoulder until my brothers arrive: Nelyo, loud and confident, and Macalaurë, his voice kept low to hide the way that it trembles just barely. I am kissed farewell by each in turn and then set on the ground, whimpering, cold, and bereft.

"Go to your mother," Atar says, stooping beside me. I lurch and lock my arms around his neck. Being set aside by Atar is worse than stepping from a warm bath and into the cold air. He hugs me and kisses my cheek, but I find my arms abandoned once more at my sides, and I am staring at his knees. "Poor little one," he says, patting my hair. "I will be back."

They leave then, letting in a rush of cold air through the front door, and I stare long at the heavy oaken door after Macalaurë closes it behind them. I want to cry, but no one is around to hear my sobs, so they would be futile. I sigh instead and go to the window to part the curtains and watch for three silhouettes of horses and riders to gallop past on their way to the town. The knock of their hooves on the ground remind me of the wooden chimes in Atar's garden.

"There you are!" Turko is almost as good as I am at walking silently, and so enraptured was I by the horses' hoofbeats that I failed to hear him come up behind me. His arm circles my neck, and I am squeezed in the crook of his elbow until my head feels warm and fuzzy. "Amil has been looking for you," he says, and I wiggle until he lets me go.

"I had to pee," I tell him.

He snorts. "Not a likely story, Carnistir. You wanted to spy, didn't you? You always pee in your pants."

He laughs, and I wait until he turns to kick him as hard as I can in the backside. Granted, that is not very hard, but he turns in anger anyway, and soon, we are chasing each other through the house, pealing laughter through our rage.

Turko is faster than me, but I am smaller, and I dart underneath furniture and wait for him to squeeze after me before slipping out and running into the next room. "You little imp!" he yells when he gets stuck under Atar's desk, and I laugh and duck easily from beneath and race from the room. I hear him struggling to free himself, and I slip behind a curtain and whisper the incantation to keep the lump of my body from being seen.

I am the shadow,

I am the darkness …

The curtain collapses around me, as though I am not there.

I stoop and listen for his footsteps. It does not take long before he is pounding down the hall after me, shouting insults that he learned from our brothers and that would get him into serious trouble if Amil overheard. When his shadow flashes past the drapes, I leap out and tackle his feet, sending him sprawling face-first into the floor and tearing the curtain rod from the wall.

He knocks his nose hard, and when he comes up, blood covers the bottom of his face and drips onto the front of his clean tunic, and he is already bawling. "I hate you!" he screams, striking me with a bloodied fist between the shoulder blades, hard enough to make me start crying too. Soon, we are wrestling on the slippery, hardwood floor, tangled in the curtain, crying and striking at any little bit of tender flesh that the other reveals. Turko is much stronger than me, but he is less ruthless. The actions of my body seem to precede any thoughts I may have, any mercy I may show, and I commit acts that horrify me even as I am doing them. I bite his fingers when he tries to slap my face and yank out hunks of his blond hair in my fists. He pushes me onto my back, looming over me like a predator about to bite the throat of its prey, and I kick him between the legs as hard as I can, fortunately missing any tender flesh and hitting the inside of his thigh instead. It is enough to dissuade him, however, and he falls backward, howling, and I hear Amil shouting our names as she runs down the hall.

Amil tears us apart and forsakes me to cuddle Turko, although I can see why, because blood is smeared all over his face now, and he is curled in the fetal position with his hands cupping himself between the legs, sobbing. (Maybe I did hurt him a little bit? I wince and press my own knees together.) Amil is using her skirt to clear the blood from Turko's face, but he must have hit his nose hard on the floor, because more is trickling and pooling on his upper lip. I kick free of the curtain and stand behind him before stooping to hug him around the neck. "I'm sorry," I say.

"Get gone, you stupid little twit!" he yells, and Amil scolds, "Tyelkormo!"

We are carried/led to the sitting room, where Turko is given a genuine handkerchief to put over his nose and we are seated on opposite sofas while Findekáno sits in the armchair and watches us with smug superiority over one of Atar's books that he is always reading. Amil paces before us and asks us what happened, and with our chests hitching, we both fight to explain and paint the other in the more dismal light, until we reach the conclusion of our story and both stare at the other, full of the shameful realization that what began as play escalated to rage for no reason at all.

"You both have to learn to control those tempers," Amil warns. Turko and I exchange looks; under Amil's scorn, we are made allies once more. Many times we have both heard her say the same thing to our father. "Now, Tyelkormo, I want you to apologize to your brother and give him a kiss goodnight."

"Goodnight? But it is only—"

"Do not argue with me, Tyelkormo!" The anger in Amil's voice makes him choke into silence. "I am tempted to tell your father about this, as it is, and you will both rue the day that I do so, for he will punish you as I will not. Now, do as I say, Tyelkormo."

Turko stands and crosses the room to give me a delicate hug and a kiss on the lips. I smack my kiss extra loud and squeeze my arms around his neck. "I'm sorry, Carnistir," he says, and I echo: "I'm sorry, Turko."

I am left under Findekáno's watch while Amil takes Turko to wash and go to bed. I could easily escape, I think, failing to realize that Findekáno will watch me with a vigilance even Atar rarely musters, forcing me to sit obediently on the couch and stare at the paintings on the walls. Amil is gone no more than ten minutes, and upon her return, she lifts me and carries me to the room that she shares with Atar, where I sleep on a cot in the front room. She is hasty in dressing and washing me for bed—she skips the bath, which is surprising and dismaying in that it means she must really be angry with me—and tucks me into bed. She kisses my forehead. "Why can't you be good like your two older brothers, Carnistir?" she asks.

It is a fair question, I think. "Being good," in the sense that Amil expects it, seems unattainable to me. Most of the time, I do not understand how I come to anger people so easily; it seems a natural reaction to my presence. Nelyo and Macalaurë always know how to respond to make people happy. I sigh, and her hands on my face soften, and she kisses my lips and whispers, "Good night, little one. I love you."

I mumble a response, and she leaves. It is still an hour before my bedtime, and I am not sleepy, so I lie on my cot and imagine my father and my brothers in the wild, hunting wolves. Only, in my imaginings, Atar is not mounted and does not use a bow and arrow. In their place, he wields a sword like the one he uses when sparring with my brothers, a long strand of silver, catching Telperion's light and sending it back as brightly as if his blade was aflame with silver fire. He cuts through wolves with the ease of destroying excessive underbrush, twisting and bringing the silver fire upon them, again and again, until they lie at his feet in a pile of red-smeared pelts. His movement is beautiful, like the dance of a bright light on water.

Far off, I imagine that I hear a wolf howl, in mourning for its kin, perhaps, which lie dead at my father's feet.

~oOo~

Dreams come upon me.

I see Macalaurë first, and maturity has set in his features, and he moves with a certainty and grace that escapes him now. On his arm is a beautiful maiden with silver streaks in her ebony hair, and they both wear white, and joyful tears brighten both of their eyes.

Nelyo embraces Macalaurë first. His red hair is braided more beautifully than I have ever seen it before, and he weeps as he holds our brother longer even than Atar. Turko, nearly grown, is behind him, and at first, I think the little black-haired boy must be me, but the boy's features are porcelain-pale like Atar's, and he holds the hand of a stormy-eyed youth with coarse black hair becoming undone from the braids that seek to tame it. That is me, I realize! How I will look when I am older! I wonder who the little boy is. Maybe it is Nelyo and Annawendë's son, although he looks as I picture Atar must have when he was just a little boy, before grandmother Míriel became foreverdead.

When Macalaurë steps into Turko's arms, the picture fades and changes. Turko is hunting in the forest with a big dog, yelling for me to hurry and follow him. "Slow git!" he shouts. His hair flutters behind his head like a golden banner. "You would have us go home, shamed and empty-handed!" Then I am being handed a red-haired baby who wails in my arms. That must be Nelyo's son, I think. He is newborn—damp still—and his eyes are very bright, like Atar's. Then, Amil riding through the gates, heading back to Tirion from Formenos, and Turko is beside me—grown into a man, with broad shoulders and long legs—with his hand over the bottom half of his face to subdue sobs that might belong to a little boy.

Then the images pass too quickly for comprehension, and there is blood and fire and madness, and I hear myself cry out in my sleep, but the dreams hold me tighter and I feel Him there, whispering in my head like an icy wind. I am fighting creatures with shapes like ours—but their features have been twisted grotesquely—and they are dying on my sword.

Carnistir, you have been taught to show mercy to the children of Yavanna, but you would slay my children?

Laughter. I cry out and buck my body against the blankets on my cot, but like chains, they hold me there.

No mind, I shall make more.

Darkness.

Shall I take you to your brother now?

How beautiful, that the eldest son of Fëanáro should become one of my own.

Would you let him die so easily on your sword?

Are you sure you wish to seek him? Knowledge of his torment will make it yours to bear as well. Better you should languish in ignorance, like Macalaurë.

Your brother shall bring me the King of my children. Beautiful, beautiful spawn of Fëanáro.

Then, there is Nelyo.

I scream, but he does not hear me. The room is dark, but in dreams, my eyes need not to struggle to see him. I stand only a few feet from him, but when I reach out, I realize that I cannot move. Never can I move. I can only watch. Witness.

The walls are close about us, cold, black stone dripping with slime. Nelyo is chained to that wall, with his arms held in shackles over his head, holding his arms stretched above him to the point of pain, his tendons standing out like wires on his thin arms. His arms struggle ceaselessly against the metal that binds him, but it is hard, black steel the likes of which I have never seen, and it cannot be broken. He crouches, his head limp against his chest, as though asleep, but I can see his pulse beating at his throat and know that he does not find rest here. He is naked, and his knees are drawn close against his chest, covering his private parts and protecting the soft vulnerability of his belly. The room is cold, and he shivers, but when I see inside his head, I know that it is fear—not cold—that makes his body tremble.

His red hair falls over his face. It is matted with blood, and when he shifts, I see a long, skinny cut on his cheek. It is sticky and healing, but dried blood dirties his face. His silver eyes open, and they are afraid.

Nelyo! I scream; I sob, and he looks towards me.

Carnistir, be gone from here! You cannot help me.

But Nelyo—

Pray that my death is fast.

At that moment, a hand encased in black steel gauntlets seizes my brother by his throat and drags him to his feet, and I erupt from sleep and into Atar's arms.

He is just returned from his hunt, for it is deep night, and he smells of wind and leather and blood. I try to fall into his light, but the image of Nelyo—naked and scared—haunts me. Atar is speaking to me, words of comfort, but I cannot hear them for the echo of Nelyo's voice: Pray that my death is fast.

Atar's words—tremors in the air around my head, the reality of the world I cannot quite reach—at last come to me like a whisper in a vision. Of what did you dream?

Through my tears, I speak one word, a word whose meaning I do not know but that resounds in my head like a dying heartbeat, with the harsh unloveliness of a hammer being driven into flesh.

"Melkor."

I know that I will have no trouble falling asleep this night. My body is heavy with exhaustion, and gravity seizes me and pulls me deep into the warm depths of my bedclothes. I did not even have the energy to retrieve my nightclothes from the armoire across the room—much less wash the smell of the hunt from my skin—so I fall into bed in my underwear and let dark, dreamless sleep wash away my weariness.

There is contentment too, for the hunt went well—better than I could have ever imagined—and I helped to slay three wolves this night, driving my arrows with deadly accuracy into their throats. Only Atar, Nelyo, and the Lord Verkaturo killed more, and I drew even with one of Verkaturo's sons and exceeded the other.

But I do not wish to dream of my triumphs, for once the adrenaline left my veins, I was sickened by the scene, by the blood that contrasted so startlingly with the green grass, over-bright in Telperion's gentle light. Atar and Verkaturo dismounted straight away to cut the pelts from the beasts—the only parts we could use; the meat would be left for the carrion birds and to feed the ground—sawing at still-warm flesh with their hunting knives, peeling away the skins that made the same sounds as peeling away wet clothing, but I excused myself to go drink from a nearby stream, suddenly dizzy.

Upon returning, I found that the furs had been stowed away and the others were making ready to leave. Morning was near, and we still had an hour's ride home. I tried hard not to look at the steaming piles of bloody flesh we left behind, but my eyes were drawn to the red stain on the otherwise beautiful land, and I mounted quickly and got ready to ride, to keep my eyes from drifting in that direction.

"One shall belong to you, Macalaurë," Atar said, riding up beside me, "for the largest was killed by your arrow to its throat." We were mounted, and he put his ever-warm hand on my arm. "You never fail to surprise me, Macalaurë," he said, and pride flowered in my heart once more.

As sleep takes me, I wish that I could write a song of Atar, but his spirit cannot be contained within the discipline of music. Indeed, the only time I have heard music that makes me think of Atar is when I hear the orchestra in Alqualondë warming up before a performance, each instrument drifting along on its own melody that—when teased apart from that of its neighbors—is beautiful, but when wrestling in the air with the others around it, is seventy separate voices making noise. At first hearing it, I cringed at the wall of sound that fell upon my ears, but as I listened further, there was beauty in it too, happening upon my ears like gems in the dirt: when the individual songs of three players, for instance, would chance to merge into a minor chord that twisted my heart, or when a discordant groan of a bass was made into sense by the flitting melody of a flute, playing a separate song across the orchestra. Such is Atar.

I think I am dreaming when I hear the door bang open and see Atar standing there. It is not like him to enter our bedrooms unbidden. He always knocks and enters with our invitation, extending to us the same courtesy that he requires. Even more puzzling, he is angry, and I feel my insides drag with disappointment that the gift of sleep should be tainted by nightmares.

But I can feel myself blinking and the idiosyncrasies of the room stand out starker than they should in dreams: the scribbled pictures that Tyelkormo drew when he was just a year old, hanging crookedly on the wall; the neck of my lute being used to hold the bracelets that Nelyo removed earlier today and forgot to take with him; my old lettering primer, left in the middle of the floor. And Atar, in his nightclothes, smelling of the cold water from the pump by the barn that he and Nelyo used to wash the blood from their hands.

"Macalaurë!" he says loudly, and his voice leaves no doubt that he is real.

He strides to my bed and tears away my blanket. "Atar!" I cry out, reflexively drawing my body into a ball against my headboard, as though protecting my nearly naked body from attack. His eyes burn with anger, and I can no more bear his gaze on mine than I could bear hot iron against my flesh.

"Get out of bed. I want you to tell your brother that the chimeras with which you scare him are not real."

"Chimeras?" I am puzzled.

"Your brother is having dreams about Melkor! Now where else would he learn such a name if not from you, he who delights in frightening others with scary tales?"

Nelyo and I—when we were very small—read Atar's secret writings about Orcs and Melkor and torture, until we became sick with fright. Nelyo dealt with his fear by immersing himself in the same research under the guise of history; I construed twisted stories in an effort to dull the fright of the original. I must admit that telling these stories to my little brothers, when they are being particularly disagreeable, is a joy of mine. But I never told of Melkor.

For Melkor I could make no worse, even in the long deliberations of my mind.

"I—I never—" I stammer.

"Do not tell me you never did!" Atar roars. He seizes my shoulder, and his hand is hot on my cold skin. "Get out of bed! You will sacrifice your rest to comfort Carnistir tonight!"

Tears of injustice sting my eyes, and I am ashamed by them. I want to believe—was I not exhausted already and seized from sleep—that I would be able to respond as Nelyo does when he faces Atar's wrath, with calm deference threaded with clean logic. But hot tears course down my face, and my voice shakes as I insist, "I never told him of Melkor."

My words must have been serendipitous, and like a hot pin driven into the frail skin of a balloon, Atar's anger deflates with alarming suddenness. His hand falls away. "Then how does he know, Macalaurë?" he asks, and his voice is almost pleading.

He spies and sneaks, I want to say; he hides in close, dark places and watches that which he is not supposed to see; he uses cunning and trickery to learn that which he is not supposed to know. But I cannot make such accusations to Atar, who loves his baby son with every bit of his being, so I answer lamely, "I do not know, Atar."

"Are you sure you said nothing, Macalaurë? Nothing at all? You said nothing about how Melkor speaks in the minds of some Elves?"

"I didn't even know—"

"Well, such are the tales carried from the Outer Lands, saying that some of the Avari heard the voice of Melkor in their minds, and for that reason, forsook the Great Journey." Atar begins pacing, as though there is nothing odd about slamming into his son's room in the middle of the night to discuss legends and myths from the Outer Lands. I wait until his back is turned to draw the blanket around my body, so that he cannot see me tremble. "I never believed them myself. We are people of light; surely darkness speaks not in us. How can it? Light always overtakes darkness."

He despairs. His hands clench each other, painfully wringing his own fingers, and lines furrow his brow. "Atar…" I begin, but I do not know what to say to comfort him, although the sound of my voice alone seems to soothe him. He stops pacing, and his arms fall to his sides.

"Carnistir says that he hears Melkor speaking in his mind, from beyond the confines of Mandos. I always believed that it was you giving him such ideas. I beg you to confess that it was."

"I would, to ease your pain, Atar, but it would be a lie," I whisper, and Atar reaches over to touch my face as way of good night, then quietly leaves my bedroom.

~oOo~

When I next awaken, Laurelin is bright in my windows, and it is nearly afternoon. Amil is sitting on the edge of my bed.

"Macalaurë!" she says, delight brightening her voice. "I wondered: Would you like a midday meal? It is nearly time." Her hands are soft on my face, as though she is memorizing my contours for one of her sculptures. Of my brothers, my nature is the most like my mother's, and she clings to me like one might hold tightly to a friend in a foreign land.

She wants to ask me about Atar last night, I know, but she cannot find the words.

I sit up in bed, and my stomach grumbles. I clap my hands to my belly as thought to suppress it and laugh. "A midday meal would be lovely," I say, and my joviality must ease her fears a bit because the creases in her face flatten and she smiles. "I will tell your father then," she says, watching me carefully when she says father, but there is nothing for my face to betray, so she can leave contented.

Indeed, Atar's intrusion seems almost a bizarre dream in the golden clarity of Laurelin. I rise to draw a bath, for with my exhaustion dissipated, I am conscious of the reek of my body, and I doubt that I could eat with my own smell in my nose, much less expect that others should do the same. I test each movement of my body carefully before committing fully to it, for I am not as athletic as my father and my brothers, but my muscles do not ache as I expect, although I find that my drawing arm is a bit stiff. The hot bathwater is luxurious on my dirty skin.

Soreness does not slow me from running down the steps to the kitchen, from where the warm aroma of freshly baked bread is just beginning to wend through the rest of the house. I pause before pushing open the door, for I hear singing, and when I at last enter the kitchen, find my mother and father dancing together in the middle of the floor, singing a duet, with Tyelkormo sandwiched between them, hanging from Atar's neck, and Carnistir standing on Atar's left foot, squatting with his arms locked around Atar's calf and his teeth fastened into Atar's trouser leg. Nelyo is cutting carrots and knocking the knife in time to their singing. Findekáno is kneeling on a chair beside him and appears to be peeling radishes, smiling as though he doesn't know whether to be heartened or frightened by the bizarre behavior of his aunt and uncle.

I hear my own delighted laughter join the ruckus, for it is rare when my parents join their voices together in song, and it is beautiful. Atar sees me standing in the doorway, and I find myself being dragged with his arm around my neck into the hullabaloo, while he pleads for me to take over his part in the song. "I cannot," I say—my face is pressed against Tyelkormo's and now one of his arms is around my neck too—"for it is a love song, and only you can sing it with Amil." I manage to wriggle free and join Nelyo at the cutting board, straightening my clothes. Their circle closes and the song continues without me.

When the song ends, Atar says, "We are getting nothing done," and draws away from Amil and sets Tyelkormo onto the floor. Tyelkormo immediately latches onto his right leg, and when Atar walks to the stove, Tyelkormo drags behind him like an abandoned piece of baggage and makes Atar's right leg lurch with each step. But he says nothing and moves the vegetables steaming on the stove to the counter behind him with such ease that he appears to walk unhindered.

Before Tyelkormo was born, I was certain that one day I would marry and have children of my own. After all, this is the normal way of life for Elves. Looking back to my youth, such assumptions never came with practical considerations, like the frightening, delicate process of procuring a girl to court and then convincing her to marry me, and then—the ultimate in scary considerations—actually bonding myself to the body and spirit of another and continuing to repeat the act over the course of years until a child is conceived. It was Atar who explained to me—when, at the tender age of five, I asked him over breakfast one day when we were dining alone—the means by which children are created and born into the world, and I was quite disgusted by the idea of putting my private parts inside of a girl and then peeing inside of her. Not only was it one of the most hideous things I'd ever heard, it seemed like it might be rather painful to have soft parts mashed inside another person like that. I couldn't imagine my proud, dignified Atar ever doing such a thing either, so there had to be another way that he wasn't telling me, and I was therefore not deterred from believing that I would marry and beget my own children someday.

Then Tyelkormo was born, and while the initial idea of being a big brother made me proud, I quickly grew weary of the constant responsibility brought by a young child. Tyelkormo had a relatively restricted range of vocalizations—mostly crying, screaming, and shrieking—and he didn't seem to respect the hours that a normal person observed by being quiet late in the night or early in the morning. He also didn't respect one's need to study for assessments that Atar administered regardless of whether or not his youngest son had kept the entire house awake the night before with his caterwauling. And—being as I was twenty-five when Tyelkormo made his glorious, noisy entrance into the world—I was charged to be capable of certain responsibilities that seemed to me should have belonged to our parents. I babysat, I gave him bottles, I helped Atar bathe him, but I drew the line at changing his diapers after my first attempt, when after I removed the dirty diaper, I accidentally dropped the clean one onto the floor, and stooping to retrieve it, felt something pattering on my hair and discovered that my little brother had launched a most impressive fountain of pee directly onto my head.

The only times I enjoyed Tyelkormo in those first years was when Atar and Amil would dress him in impeccable, miniature robes and his glorious golden hair was combed and tamed for introduction to whatever lord or king. (And, seeing how Atar knew every person of importance on the continent, there wasn't a noble Elf or Ainu in Valinor to whom my brothers and I were not introduced within the first two years of our lives.) Tyelkormo—drinking of the attention like a lush gorges himself on wine—was well behaved then, a golden, cherubic beauty, and I was proud to be his older brother. But every other time would have made me wish for the times before he was born but for the fact that Atar and Amil were made so happy by his arrival. Although I could not see why, for Tyelkormo drove my diligent parents to distraction in the first years of his life, and I could not understand why they would desire his constant demands on their attention. I did not know if, in their place, I could be so selfless to set my music aside whenever my son began to cry. I began to shamefully doubt that I would ever want children of my own.

When Carnistir was born, my secret belief that I would be one of the abnormal few to never marry and beget children of his own compounded. Carnistir somehow managed to be even louder than Tyelkormo had been, and he was aggressive too and would sooner bite or yank my hair than deign to give me a smile. I was thirty-five when he was born, and it wasn't long after the arrival of his fourth son that my father called me into his office to inform me that I had reached the age where I would soon be experiencing "desires to wed" and that such feelings were normal as long as I didn't do anything stupid. Like actually wedding.

(I had been warned of this talk by Nelyo, who'd been given it at the same age. Nelyo had also already warned me about these "desires," for it was no secret that what Nelyo felt could rarely be labeled with a word so innocent as desire, which seemed to me a term more applicable to wanting an extra cup of pudding with dessert than the commanding lust with which Nelyo was sometimes overcome. I once had the unfortunate embarrassment of encountering Nelyo in the barn with one of Grandfather's female messengers from Tirion, sprawled in the haystack with half of his tunic off, her lips attached to his neck like a leech, and her hand shoved down the front of his trousers. I'd been drawn by the thrashing and moaning, incorrectly assuming that Nelyo had injured himself and was crying out in pain.)

Atar apparently believed that—by the age of thirty-five—I would also have succumbed to such lust. He had replaced his desk chair with Amil's wicker rocker, and he rocked Carnistir as he spoke—Carnistir was slurping on the bottle that seemed perpetually shoved between his lips—telling me that such "desires" merely prepared my body and spirit to wed, although I couldn't actually marry until I was fifty years old. Atar had married Amil when they were both forty-two, and I have a feeling that their early wedding was generally regarded as an instance where they allowed their normal desires at that age to overwhelm them—hence Atar's caution.

I knew nothing of the desires of which he spoke, however, and I told him as much. I didn't even think that I wanted to marry and bond myself to a woman. I certainly didn't want to have children, I said, staring hard at Carnistir, who stopped sucking on the bottle long enough to turn his head and spit a mouthful of milk onto Atar's lap. "No mind, Macalaurë," he told me, smiling despite my peevishness and the spitty milk soaking his trousers. "All Elves develop and mature at different rates." He and Amil and Nelyo had matured at young ages, he said, so he'd simply assumed that I would be the same.

I had grown physically as expected: Hair grew in all the right places and my voice wavered alarmingly for a year before dooming me to never sing in the upper octaves again. I even awakened sometimes with an erection, but it had all the feeling of a broomstick, and it was akin in my mind to waking with a leg cramp: something that had to be endured and eliminated before emerging from one's room in the morning.

But Atar reassured me that the body often grew faster than the mind. His father had been more than one thousand years old, after all, before he'd decided to marry. It was less common, but there was nothing wrong with it. "But marriage," he said, "always brings children. It is what our bodies are designed to do, and everyone—even you, eventually—is driven to fulfill this purpose. It is the reasoning behind the inconvenient differences between males and females."

I sniffed and said that I thought bonding was disgusting and found the way that he and Amil pawed at each other—and the way that Nelyo pawed at every willing female to enter the property, although I didn't say that—to be undignified. He should have been angry, but he only laughed and said, "Had I known that, Macalaurë, I would have saved my words for a later day. Yes, I suppose when you think of it in terms of brute mechanics, there is little grace in the act of bonding, but wait until you meet the right person, and you shall find that there is no greater joy given our bodies on Arda."

I scoffed and silently thought that I had joy enough in my solitude and music and fellowship enough with Nelyo and Amil to compensate for the lack of a wife, and my thoughts were honest and abided for the next few years. Indeed, aside from when I had to urinate, I never thought of my genitals—except for the time that Tyelkormo hit me in the balls with a practice sword—and they were just another body part to dress in the morning—albeit, one that was far more often a nuisance than a blessing. I often wished that I could have been the girl that Amil and Atar wanted so badly, without dangling parts to protect and tuck into my clothes. I certainly wasn't like Nelyo, who, when Tyelkormo asked, once named his hair his favorite body part then later confessed to me that his favorite part was actually his penis. I was horrified by this revelation, although less by the unnecessary insight about my brother than by the fact that, in comparison, it seemed that I was dead between the legs. I began to jealously wonder why my own flaccid organ couldn't make itself similarly likeable and, instead, hung like a superfluous bit of flesh, good only for carefully spelling my name with pee in the snow that sometimes lingered upon our arrival in Formenos.

Only months had passed since my talk with Atar before I started to attend midnight feasts with Nelyo, one of the few young people willing to forgo all chances of romance to act as a musician. There, I began to admire the way maidens wove themselves into space, whereas males plunk themselves into a void and expect the air to circulate around them. Such easy grace inspired me and worked its ways into my songs, but I convinced myself that such songs were tributes to my mother and my aunts and had nothing to do with the desires of which Atar spoke. Furthermore, I denied the emergence of furtive resentment that I should always be stuck at such gatherings with a harp in my hands while my beautiful brother held maidens against his body and disappeared with them into the shadows beyond the clearing. No, I would remain as did all the great artists and scholars—Rúmil for instance—unwed and in a state of unfailing and inspiring misery.

Then I met Vingarië, and with the force of eyes opening to Laurelin's light in the morning, my body awakened. After sharing my first kiss with her, I realized that I might manage one bond to consummate our marriage, just so that I could spend the rest of the life of the world with her, and then realized that—should she expect more from me in the ensuing years—that I could probably accommodate that too. I even introduced my mind to the idea of children, reckoning that I was even-tempered—as was she—and the likelihood that we would be cursed with a Tyelkormo or Carnistir was therefore small. With my nascent love for her came surprising relief, for it seemed I was not born abnormal after all, and I might not be doomed to live my life as the virgin virtuoso, whom everyone loved and pitied in equal measure.

My love for Vingarië also brought shameful discoveries, and my dreams became peppered by tantalizing images of her. They were not the dreams Nelyo had described to me—those that sounded less like a romance and more like the outrageous adventure stories that I made up to amuse our brothers, only the participants were all female and no one wore clothes—but innocent enough. We spoke of trivial things; we played music; sometimes we rode my horse along the beach, with me sitting behind her and holding her around the waist. Those were the worst. She never kissed me, never touched me provocatively, and all of our clothes stayed firmly in place, yet I woke with desire hot in my groin, uncomfortably hard and unable to sleep until I allowed my hand to slip into my nightclothes and—imagining that it was Vingarië's hand that caressed me—coaxed myself into guilty and blissful release.

But the sight of my baby brothers dangling off of my father makes me reconsider the thought of having children. I wonder if there is a way to achieve the bliss of marriage without conceiving a child. According to Atar, there is not. Atar once told me that, in the early years of his marriage, he had set his thoughts against begetting a child because he'd never wanted children. However, his outlook had changed, he said, the moment that Amil had told him that she was pregnant with Nelyo. I think he told me that story in an attempt to convince me that my opinion would be different when they were my own sons and not my cantankerous, noisy baby brothers clamoring all over me. I'm still not sure about that.

Our people are gifted with extraordinary patience, but Atar is less patient than anyone I know. He is restless and quick to anger, yet he is also willing to put up with a dismal array of annoyances, as long as they come from his sons. As he carries the midday meal into the dining room, Tyelkormo and Carnistir are still hanging from his legs, only now they are kicking and trying to dislodge the other. Tyelkormo wins, and Carnistir holds on to Atar's trouser leg with only his teeth while Tyelkormo cackles madly, and Atar calls over his shoulder to Amil, "Would you mind bringing the butter, love?"

Although I don't think we were as loud, I have recollections that make me fear that Nelyo and I were just as annoying when we were little. I remember running into Atar's office while he was in the midst of projects and pulling ourselves onto his lap using whatever handholds were available—clothing, hair, ears—and firing off overlapping strings of questions, most of which began with "What—? Why—? Can you—? Can we—?" Occasionally, Atar would host councils at our Tirion home, and I remember the two of us bursting into one of these affairs once, in tearful hysterics because we'd found a box turtle in the woods with a cracked shell and we wanted to know if Atar could heal it. Atar took us roughly by our hands and removed us from the room without a word, but once we were outside the parlor, his face softened and he crouched in front of us. "Take him to your mother. She is a far more skilled healer than I," he said and sent us on our way with a kiss on the nose apiece.

Of course, he had his angry moments too, and Nelyo and I weren't always treated with kisses and gentle words. One of my most vivid memories from babyhood came when I was a little over a year old, and we had spent the week in Grandfather Finwë's palace for the Winter Festival, and when it was time to leave, Nelyo decided that he would rather stay with our grandfather than go home with Amil and Atar. Atar had to force him into his clothes and boots and was dragging him across the main hall of Grandfather's court when Nelyo decided to wrench his hand from Atar's, sit down in the middle of the floor, take off his boots, and hurl them at Atar. One of them was thrown well enough to knock him on the side of the face, and Atar's already fraying patience was completely ruined, and I hid behind Grandfather Finwë and sobbed into his robes while Atar screamed at Nelyo and all of the lords in the court stopped talking and gawked. "Eru grant it, Nelyafinwë, I will drag you home barefoot by the hair if I must, you bloody little brat!" Atar yelled once, and two minutes later, Nelyo was following Atar from the court, shod and silently weeping.

Atar places the dishes on the table and lifts each of my brothers in an arm and sits them, squirming, in chairs on either side of his. They both duck beneath the table almost immediately to play in the darkness created by the tablecloth.

"What did you feed them for breakfast?" Atar asks Amil, as she sets the table. "Pure sugar?"

She smiles at him and resumes folding the mauve napkins into the shapes of birds. "They have inherited their father's spirit, my love, as well as his boundless energy."

From beneath the table, there is a thud and a shriek, and a moment later, a wailing Carnistir emerges with his hand over a cheekbone already beginning to bruise.

"And his ability to find mischief," she adds, stooping to examine Carnistir's injury, while Tyelkormo scrambles from underneath the table, shouting about how the kick he'd delivered to his brother's face was only a reflex caused by the fact that Carnistir had been biting his foot.

Nelyo emerges from the kitchen with Findekáno, carrying a vegetable tray, which he sets in the middle of the table before nearly being knocked over by the force of Tyelkormo attaching himself to his waist and sobbing into his stomach.

I sigh and, grabbing a carrot stick, seat myself as far from my younger brothers as I can manage.

There are carrots and celery sticks on the tray and radishes cut into the shapes of flowers. I pluck one of the latter from the tray—it is shaped like a daisy—and pop it into my mouth. Pretty or not, they still taste the same—earthy and slightly bitter—and I call to Nelyo, "You have far too much time on your hands, you know, to be cutting radishes to look like flowers when your exams are less than a half-year away."

He looks up from stroking Tyelkormo's hair and gives me a reproachful look, probably because most of the sentence was incomprehensible, thanks to the radish in my mouth. "Káno did them, not me," he says.

With some surprise, I turn to Findekáno, who is helping my mother fold napkins, and he gives me a shy sidelong glance and, blushing, returns to his task. "They are good," I tell him, and Atar appears over my shoulder to set a tray of thickly sliced ham on the table and says, "Macalaurë, when the day comes when you find any sort of food not good, I will gather each of you close to me and hold you tightly, for the ending of the world is nigh."

As though answering him, my stomach emits a loud brrrr, and Atar laughs and playfully tugs my hair before walking back into the kitchen to fetch the pitchers of tea and water.

Nelyo comes to sit beside me. Our brothers—their insults and injuries already forgotten—have been reseated and are kneeling on their chairs and making their napkin-birds fight each other in the middle of the table. Nelyo begins by delicately straightening each piece of flatware at his setting—although Amil has set them perfectly—and carefully moving his origami napkin to the side, and I know he wants something of me. "Macalaurë," he says at last, "may I ask you a favor?"

"You may ask, yes," I say, although in truth, I will likely grant him whatever he wants. Nelyo's generosity to me is unbounded, and it would be ungrateful of me to deny him.

He gives me a flicker of a smile for noting his misspeak and says, "I have a lore lesson with Findekáno tonight and I was wondering, if you are doing nothing else, if you might give him his music lesson tonight instead? And I will give him his lore lesson this afternoon, when you usually practice music with him. Would you do that?"

"You would interrupt your afternoon study that Atar has so generously granted you?" My voice is laced with facetiousness, which Nelyo notes.

"Only this once," he answers.

"And what would warrant this sacrifice on your part?"

"Well," he blushes a bit, and I know that it will have to do with Annawendë, "it seems that there is a meteor shower tonight, and Annawendë and I thought that we might go watch it, by Telperion's light."

"You mean that you will go fondle each other with astronomy as your excuse?" I reply.

"Shh!" He looks sharply in Amil's direction, but she is helping Atar to pour the drinks and didn't hear me. "That is not the reason, Macalaurë! I could do that after Findekáno's lessons, if I wished. I have an actual interest."

His phraseology actual interest and the intensity with which he utters it make me laugh and spray a few bits of chewed celery onto the tablecloth. Embarrassed, I wipe them up with my napkin, crumbling the bird in my haste. "I will," I say quickly, "if Findekáno doesn't mind?"

Nelyo doesn't answer my question but stands and kisses me roughly on the forehead. "Thank you, Macalaurë! I owe you three favors in return!"

"I'll remember that," I mutter, as he rushes to Findekáno to inform him of the change in plans.

~oOo~

We are finishing our apple salad for dessert when Atar says to Amil, "You know, Nerdanel, it just occurred to me that someone at this table has a begetting day next week."

Tyelkormo's eyes light up, and his hand shoots in the air. "It's me! It's me!" he chortles, as though there could be any doubt. He is the only one of us born in the summer.

"I believe you are right, Fëanáro," Amil says, ignoring Tyelkormo for the moment. "I wonder: Where would he like to go for his begetting day, do you think?"

The rest of our begetting days fall at times when we are usually in Tirion, so big feasts are held including every friend, family member, and passing acquaintance of our parents'. Tyelkormo—by virtue of being in Formenos for each of his begetting days—never gets to have such a fuss made over him, so he chooses instead a place to where he would like to journey, and we leave the apprentices and assistants behind to care for the property while we ride out, stopping whenever we please, with no timelines to hurry us along or to stop us from squeezing every bit of enjoyment from our time together.

"Perhaps we should ask him," Atar says, and turns to Tyelkormo. "Tyelkormo, where would you like to go for your begetting day this year?"

Tyelkormo answers in an uncharacteristically prim voice, as though he has been rehearsing his answer for many days now. "I would like to go to Oromë's Halls, if we could."

Silence settles around the table.

Atar sits back in his chair and contemplates my brother.

Atar makes no secret of the fact that he resents the rule of the Valar in this land, and he has had many arguments with Amil and Grandfather Finwë about his beliefs. "They would oust you if they could!" he shouted once to Grandfather Finwë, when Grandfather asserted that he—not the Valar—ruled the Noldor. For three months after, Atar and Grandfather didn't speak, and Atar spent most of his days alone in the forge, tight-lipped and silent, until Grandfather finally rode out to the estate one day, with the excuse of bringing a cask of exceptional wine to Amil, conveniently from Atar's favorite vineyard.

But now Oromë wants to befriend his third-born son, and Tyelkormo—although he maintains that he wishes for nothing more than to be just like Atar when he is grown—is quickly losing interest in the forge, much as I did at his age, and his heart is turning to Oromë, one of the Valar whom Atar believes would have him caged, if he could.

Silence reigns for several long moments, and I can hear the birdsong outside the dining room and the rush of my heartbeat in my ears and nothing else. Amil speaks first: "Perhaps, Tyelkormo, it would be best if—" she begins, but Atar interrupts her.

"It is granted," he says sternly. "To Oromë's Halls, we will go, next week, to celebrate the begetting of my fair son Tyelkormo." He pushes back his chair and begins to clear the table.

With an unexpected afternoon free, I wander to my music room after helping Amil with the dishes. I have been busy working on the compositions for my basic exams in winter, and the room is messy with discarded sheet music and twisted, broken harp strings. I step over the mess and shut the door behind me, lodging an extra chair that I have nabbed from the library beneath the doorknob to keep my little brothers out (they like to burst into the room when my head is full of song and scatter my inspiration like feathers in a puff of wind), and flop onto the old sofa against the wall. My harp is sitting on the floor beside it, and I pick it up and absentmindedly play a few scales and soft chord progressions, but my inspiration sleeps for a time, and I set it aside as quickly as I pick it up.

I decide to work on a music lesson for Findekáno instead. Normally, I have him play basic songs for me on his harp and finish the lesson with a few bits of information about music theory and a ten-minute lesson on the lute as a reward. Having a student was fun in theory, until I discovered that students require time for lesson planning and assessments—not to mention several hours of actual instruction—and that such time was taken from no one else but me. A student also doesn't necessarily learn everything as easily in life as he does in my mind, and my grand plans for presenting Findekáno to his parents upon our return in the fall by having him accompany me on a difficult composition that we would devise together were shattered when I discovered that Findekáno's love for the harp abides only when there is nothing better to do with his time. And, having become nearly as bad of a bookworm as Nelyo, there always seems to be something he'd rather do with his time.

Given this, my interest waned quickly, accelerated by the fact that inspiration has come so easily in recent weeks, distracting me from my role as a teacher and casting me into the role of composer. For Findekáno's last lesson, my disinterest was so bad that the poor child followed me to the music room after the midday meal and stood and listened to me play for an hour before I realized that he wasn't drawn by an interest in me or my music but because he had a lesson, and I had forgotten about it.

With that in mind, I hunker down and attempt to produce the best lesson I have given him since we arrived here two months ago. I sketch out some passages of music for him to practice that highlight the techniques he finds most challenging and draw on the important theory concepts that I have been trying to teach. Next, I formulate a syllabus for our remaining two months of lessons, covering all the theory concepts that he should know before we return to Tirion. I conclude by riffling through a stack of old books that Atar brought home for me years ago, books that were compiled by the Teleri and include almost every song I know for the lute. I pick out a few that I know Findekáno prefers with the goal in mind that he should learn them proficiently over the next few months. Some of them I like myself on the harp; perhaps, our concert for his parents will include one of these, I think, lifting my quill to copy the music onto a clean parchment for him.

It is deep afternoon before I finish, and I flop back onto the sofa, more exhausted than if I had spent the whole day composing. It is hard to put oneself into another's mind, and that is what I have found I must do to be a teacher. I know now why Atar finds apprentices so wearying; why he resisted Findekáno coming along with us.

My thoughts drift to Atar. How I wish I could write a song for him! His begetting day is not long after mine, and I can imagine the surprised pride in his eyes if I were to perform a composition bearing his name for his one hundred-and-second year, but fire can no more easily be contained in song than it can in the palm of one's hand.

Perhaps a poem then?

I sit up suddenly, and a sick realization twists my gut. Poetry! I had forgotten! Tonight is the night when Atar and I read poetry together, and in order to do my brother a favor, I have forgotten about this time with my father that I have come to treasure. "No, no, no," I hear myself whispering under my breath, trying to imagine a way to fit a half-day's work into a few hours of the evening. Atar will be angry to learn that I have so easily forgotten the time he sets aside to spend with me; he will be equally angry if I choose to instead forsake Findekáno's lessons.

"You're so dumb, Macalaurë!" I rage, tearing at my hair. How could I forget? I had always been wary and slightly fearful of my father, but our poetry nights have made him into the friend that he so easily became to my brothers but never to me. I imagine his careful, cruel words: "Well, if it means so little to you," words that would hide the hurt he felt in suspecting that it did, in fact, mean so little to me.

But it doesn't.

How can I explain that to him, to Atar, who often hears ulterior motives between a person's sincerest words? Who is so easily hurt and so hastily covers his pain with anger?

I stand, knees quivering, for the sooner that I inform him of my mistake, the lesser his anger may be. At least, I hope. Dread makes my heart pound as I unstop and open the door and begin my slow trek down the hall to the outside and his forge. My feet drag, but I make myself step quicker, for prolonging my terror only sickens me further.

Atar scolds me constantly for being absentminded and careless. My inattention has caused me to ruin things as minor as a dish for supper to—one terrifying time—a gold ceremonial sword on which Atar had been working nonstop for four weeks. I have injured myself in the kitchen, in the forge, and in the forest. Once, while hunting with Nelyo, I became distracted and shot at the first movement I saw in the brush, not realizing that I had taken aim at my own brother. (Luckily, my aim was as sloppy as my attention, and the arrow did not lodge in his flesh but grazed him. It cut him deeply though—so deeply that when Nelyo removed his breeches so that Atar could examine the wound, the bone was showing—and he bled alarmingly for an hour before Atar took him to a healer in Tirion for stitches. Had my aim been true—my concentration better—he might have died. He bears the scar to this day.) I'm sure Atar also believes that the fall I took from my horse on the way to Formenos was caused by my heedlessness. Only the severity of my injury, I believe, kept him from punishing me as he normally would.

And now, for the first time in my life, I have found a way for Atar and me to meet and understand each other, even if just for an hour each week, and the same carelessness that he has decried in me in the past is what may jeopardize my only chance to be friends with my father.

I find myself standing outside the door to his forge. My heart pounds so hard that my head throbs with the beat of my pulse in my temples. I have to bite my lip to keep it from quivering, to keep from giving in to the childish urge to illicit pity through tears. Instead, I piston my arms out in front of me and push open the heavy door to the forge.

Dry heat blasts my face, and the smell of hot metal sickens me and reminds me of blood. I hated the time I used to spend here, working at Atar's side in an attempt to achieve something that was beyond the abilities I was given. The heat frightened me and the noise hurt my ears. I would watch as Atar completed tasks with enviable ease and precision, but when I tried to do the same, my fingers felt as though they'd been glued together. It is an effort just to walk into the building, even now, even when I know that I will not have to spend the whole day here, weary and afraid.

Atar is working at an anvil in the middle of the room, demonstrating to Annawendë and Vorondil how to fold a piece of metal for what appears to be a hunting knife. The heat roars in my ears, warning me that Elves like me are not safe in places built for spirits of fire, but Atar's voice cuts above the din. How confidently he speaks, as though the earth itself is his to command into the shape of his choosing! Annawendë and Vorondil are rapt in their attention, and none notice my approach, as Atar folds the metal again and again, with blinding precision, making a blade that will be as supple as silk and as deadly as the black iron of fallen stars. His clothes are dingy with soot; his face is streaked with dirt; his hair is tied up from his neck with a scrap of red linen, and the ends spray in a black half-halo around one side of his head, like a partially plucked porcupine. His appearance is as filthy and graceless as one of the Moriquendi who chose not to heed the call of the Valar, but his hands are more skilled than those of a god, and his spirit burns with the fire of Eru himself.

And I must speak to him.

I wait for him to finish the folding and call, in a voice that I try to steady but that quivers anyway, "Atar?"

He turns in surprise, his eyes wary, as though he expects an apparition, because I have not brought myself voluntarily to his forge in years.

"Macalaurë?" Now, his bright eyes narrow. He is concerned and suspicious, and the dueling emotions are struggling for dominance in his face. His voice is stern. "What brings you here?"

"I need—" My voice is high, that of a little boy, so I swallow and start again. "I need to talk to you. When you get a minute?"

The knife is shoved in Annawendë's direction, and she plunges it into a vat of cold water. Atar removes his smith's apron and walks towards me, shouting instructions over his shoulder to his apprentices as he goes. I follow him from the forge and into the cool afternoon air outside.

Breathing would be easier out here but for the searing tightness in my throat that threatens to spill forth as shameful tears like those used by a baby to bring his parents to him for comfort after a nightmare. "Is this talk something that can be done standing, or shall we sit in the grass?" Atar asks, and when I dare to look into his face, I see confusion and worry in his eyes. When I do not answer immediately, he takes my sweaty hand in his warm, dry one and leads me to a small hillside nearby, where I sit beside him.

This is best, I think, because I can speak here without having to look him in the eye and without having to worry about appearing rude. "What is it, Macalaurë?" he asks, using his thumb to brush an eyelash from my cheek. His thumb must have left a streak of dirt worse than the original castaway eyelash because he licks the thumb and scrubs harder at the spot.

"I have—I have made a mistake," I stammer.

"You have not become inebriated and accidentally wed one of the maidens from the town, have you?" he asks, and I shake my head. "Have you killed one of your brothers?" I shake my head again. "Then it cannot be so bad, no?"

The comparison works, and it gives me the courage to speak. "We were supposed to read together tonight," I say quickly, staring at the grass, "but I forgot and promised Nelyo to switch Findekáno's lesson times for today." The brown of my shoes blend with the green grass, and I realize that the tears I have been withholding with such success are ready to spill down my face. I bite my lip hard in shame, but that only makes it worse, and soon, tears cut burning lines from my eyes to my chin. "I am supposed to teach Findekáno tonight," I manage at last, and sobs make my voice hitch, "at the same time as I am supposed to be reading with you."

In the next instant, I am lost in the dark cloth that is Atar's tunic, breathing the acrid smell of the forge and—beneath that—the electrical smell that is Atar. I bury my face in his neck, and he holds me close and rubs my back while I soak his soft, warm skin with my tears. "Do not cry, little one," he says, and I feel as though I am four years old again and attempting my first pony ride alone, my boldness spilling me into the dirt, to be gathered into Atar's arms and comforted like he has comforted me since the day I was born.

My tears subside and he speaks without releasing his embrace. "Did you believe I would be angry, little one? Was that the fear in your eyes when you came to me?"

I nod, not trusting my voice to not erupt again into tears.

He squeezes me harder. "It was kindness, Macalaurë, that made you forget your commitment to me and make a pledge to your brother. You shall rescind neither. If you'd like, you may come to my office when your lesson with your cousin is finished. We'll read together then."

I at last trust myself to look at him, so I draw away. He wears a slight smile and tucks an escaped tendril of hair behind my ear. "You still want to?" I say in disbelief.

"Of course. I love my time with you, Macalaurë. An age of my life on this earth I would give for such an hour with any of my sons. How quickly my life would be wasted, some would say, but I would argue that the alternative is not worth living."

"I—" I am not sure what to say. The beauty of our language is mine to shape to describe Laurelin's light on the water, to describe the laughter of the fountain on the patio outside my music room, but it cannot capture the joy that fills my heart with his words. "I love my time with you too," I manage at last, lamely, but even such simple words make him smile.

"I will see you then, when you finish your lesson. Do not rush. I will wait for you. Come to my rooms; we will read in my study so that I may be nearby if your brother awakens in the night."

I nod and he rises to return to the forge. The last of Laurelin's light dries the silly tears on my face, and I smile until I think my jaw might break.

~oOo~

Even after all of the drama surrounding this evening, I still manage to be late for Findekáno's music lesson.

Since Atar made supper, then Nelyo and I are expected to clean up. Nelyo is eager to leave with Annawendë to watch the meteor shower—which is still what he is insisting they are going to do—so we finish clearing the table and washing the dishes with surprising haste, making me a few minutes early for my lesson. But then, Nelyo grabs my hand and drags me upstairs to his bedroom to help him pick out clothes for the night.

He has a half-dozen outfits already assembled across his bed, and he begins to drivel about the various virtues of each, holding them against himself so that I can imagine what they will look like on him. As though I haven't seen him in all of these clothes at least a hundred times before. "This tunic brings out my eyes," he says, "but this one accentuates the blond in my hair. Which do you think is more important? My eyes or the blond in my hair?"

"I didn't even know you had blond in your hair," I grumble, and he rolls his eyes.

"You did. Don't lie."

"I don't even know why you should care so much, if you're only going to watch a meteor shower. She's going to be looking at the sky, not you, and anyways, it's going to be dark."

He tosses the two tunics back onto the bed and fumes at me. "If it is that much of an inconvenience to you that you should help your brother—"

I can never resist Nelyo's pleas—hence the fact that I am now late for a music lesson that should have occurred this afternoon—so I sigh and resolve to be more helpful. I walk over to his bed and study his assembled outfits, wrinkling my forehead to make him believe that I am strongly pondering my choices. "What about your good black riding breeches?" I ask him. "Those always make the girls in Tirion walk into lampposts."

He rolls his eyes at me. "Yeah, but did you ever see the laces on them?" He strides over to his armoire and produces them easily, making me smile with the realization that he too had been thinking of wearing them. "They're far too difficult to remove!"

I laugh. "I thought you were going to watch the meteor shower."

His cheeks flush. "I am. But if I'm already going to be on my back …" He trails off and strides back over to the bed.

"Well, if that's your intent, then you ought to wear robes with no underwear."

"The embroidery makes my bottom itch," he muses, studying the array of clothes, "and robes are difficult to ride in."

"Varda's stars! You've actually worn robes with no underwear?"

"Lossirë and I once—" he begins but stops abruptly, as one halts upon putting weight on an injured limb. Lossirë is the girl who rejected his proposal of marriage. He grabs a green tunic with silver embroidery at the collar and a pair of tan trousers. The lacings on the trousers are very simple, I notice. "I'm wearing this. If it's not satisfactory, then I'll just take it off." He laughs a monosyllabic "Ha!" and, as though illustrating his point, yanks his tunic over his head.

It is one of the loose, practical tunics that Atar makes for us, with pockets for keeping quills or small tokens at either side. When Nelyo yanks it over his head, something—two things, actually—fly out of the pocket and clatter to the ground. One of the items, he snatches easily from the floor beneath his feet, but the other has plans of its own and rolls lazily across the floor and falls at my feet.

I stoop to retrieve it. It is a silver ring, made small, to fit a woman's hand. I have seen a similar ring in Atar's jewelry box: the engagement ring that he gave our mother. She has an identical—albeit larger—ring in her own jewelry box. The ring in my hand now has an inscription inside the band, but before I have a chance to read it, Nelyo tears it from my hand.

"Where did you get that?" I ask. "Is it Amil's?"

"Of course it's not Amil's! Why would I steal our parents' engagement rings?" he snaps. He shoves the rings into his trouser pocket and busies himself with dressing, but his face is nearly as red as his hair and suddenly everything—the date to watch the meteor shower, his extra care in choosing clothes, the rings in his pocket—makes sense to me.

"You can't ask her to marry you! You've only been courting for two months!"

Nelyo is beside me in an instant, his hand clapped over my mouth. "Manwë's britches, Macalaurë, hush! The entire house doesn't need to know! I didn't even want you to know."

His last words stun me into silence, and he removes his hand. "When were you planning on telling us?" I ask, after a moment, trying to keep the hurt from my voice.

He speaks in a frantic whisper. "When I thought you would understand. I know what everyone's going to say: I'm too young. I haven't known her long enough. I should wait. I should, I know—and if you were trying to do the same thing, I would tell you to do the same—but I'm in love, Macalaurë! Do you know what it feels like to be in love?"

I suppose that I do, albeit in a lesser sense. Marriage to Vingarië is something that I imagine in my future, but the thought of proposing to her tonight, of carrying our engagement rings in my pocket, makes my stomach clench with cold fear. I choose my words carefully. "I think I'm in love too, Nelyo, so I don't understand why you can't wait."

"I just can't, Macalaurë. This is my time. Atar says that everyone reaches a point in their life where they have no choice but to wed—that their minds and their bodies command them to do little else—and that is where I am now. The other day, when Amil and Atar went to Formenos for new clothes for Carnistir, Annawendë and I were in my bed—"

"Oh, Nelyo," I say with some disgust, "that's not love, it's lust."

"No, listen, Macalaurë! We were in my bed, but we were both fully dressed and we weren't even touching each other—just kissing—but I desired her so badly that it hurt, Macalaurë. My body and spirit actually ached to bond with her, and it was just like denying yourself food or water or something you need to survive to resist her. She kissed my ear and I exploded in my clothes like some stupid virgin—"

I shake my head vigorously. "I don't need to know that," I say.

"No matter what I do, I think of her! I look at our brothers and picture what our children will look like. She has dark hair like Atar and I have red hair like Amil; I'm built like Atar and she's built like Amil, so we could end up with children that look a lot like our brothers and us. Sometimes, when I cuddle Carnistir, I close my eyes and imagine he's mine. And when I open my eyes and it's just my baby brother in my arms—not my son—then I want to cry. I look at Annawendë and picture what she's going to look like when she's pregnant; I have father names picked out for four sons and four daughters … I can't help it anymore, Macalaurë! I'm going to be forty-eight in the spring. Atar and Amil were married and had a child by the time they were my age. I don't see why I can't be betrothed, at least."

He is frantic, pacing and wringing his hands. I touch him on the shoulder and he turns. His eyes are bright like light on a blade. "May I see the rings?" I ask gently.

He reaches into his pocket and presses them into my hand. "Will you not tell? Until we're ready? I will offer you three more favors if you will not tell."

"Keep your favors. I promise not to tell."

The rings are silver-slender and well made-and bear inscriptions inside each band. "Nelyafinwë and Annawendë," they read, and the engraving is done in rigid, formal letters, my brother's hand. "You made these yourself," I say.

"Is it that obvious?" He takes them and holds them to the light, studying them for unevenness or imperfections.

"No, but the handwriting on the engravings is yours."

He smiles. "Well, I could have asked Atar. They'd be more beautiful then, and he's the only person who I'm sure wouldn't care that I want to get engaged to Annawendë after a two-month courtship, but I thought it would mean more if I made them myself. So I snuck out to the forge last night and cast them, and I engraved them this morning while I was supposed to be studying. Maybe, when we make our formal announcement, he can make more beautiful rings for us then."

He goes to his dressing table and begins to comb his hair. His hands tremble, and I realize that he must be nervous too. Perhaps he is afraid that his proposal will be rejected again. Perhaps he is afraid that Atar will not be so supportive of his hasty betrothal. I walk over to stand behind him and make him sit with gentle pressure on his shoulders and, taking the comb from his fingers, begin to plait the sides of his hair away from his face, revealing his beautiful, enviable features. His red hair is silken and warm, like dipping one's finger quickly into a candle flame. "May I make one request of you, Nelyo?" I ask him.

"I owe you three favors, so yes, you may."

"Would you at least let us know before you marry? I've always wanted more than anything to stand beside you at your wedding."

He smiles at me in the mirror. "Of course, little brother. And I shall stand beside you at yours, one day not long after."

~oOo~

Thoughts whirl through my head like thousands of tiny birds, as I descend the stairs and head for the music room. I am nearly fifteen minutes late by now, but I know that Findekáno will be patiently waiting. He would sit and wait all night, if I forgot and left him there, unlike Tyelkormo, who would wait perhaps a minute for me before running out the back door to do what he pleased in the forest.

As I near the music room, the gentle sound of harp music being played by insecure hands winds down the hall. The melody shifts and changes, as though the player is unsure of what sounds best. I am about to plunge into the music room—apologies ripe on my lips—when the music twists one last time, and the simple beauty of the melody seizes my heart and makes me press against the wall beside the door, a gasp stuck in my throat and my eyes squeezed shut, listening.

Findekáno raises his voice in song, and the words on his lips are tenuous but beautiful. If he were to sing with all of his spirit, the music would be unbearable, I think. I do not recognize the lyrics and wonder if they are also of his devising. I let the music paint a picture in my mind: a forest, with the wind high in the trees, green leaves afire with light, and inexplicable love racing through my veins with every beat, inspiring me to courage I never dreamed I had.

When the notes at last falter and die, I am reluctant to open my eyes, reluctant to allow reality to seize my heart again. Findekáno's timid voice whispers through my head like a dream: This gift is not mine to keep. I know not from where it came.

I open my eyes and step into the music room.

It was Findekáno's fingers on the strings of my harp, and when he sees me, he jerks his hands away as though he fears I will be angry. "No, little one," I plead. "It was beautiful."

"Maitimo wrote the words," he mumbles to the floor. "He sang it to me when Tyelkormo and I tried to run away."

"But the music? You wrote the music?"

"I played it, yes, but no one wrote it. It is the song I hear when I think of Maitimo. You mean that you have never heard it too?"

"I have heard it," I whisper in awe, for it is the song I hear whenever I think of my brother.

"It was the song I heard when I saved Carnistir," he tells me, and lessons forgotten, I collapse to the floor beside him to hear him play the song over and over again, marking the hours of growing night.

~oOo~

Later, I am running down the hall towards my parents' suite, thinking that I can do nothing right this day. Nothing! After being late to the music lesson by fifteen minutes, I did not a bit of teaching but worked on my cousin's song until his eyes were heavy with sleep and I had no choice but to carry him to bed. Then, I realized, I was too late for the meeting with my father, after he so generously offered to meet with me tonight (to correct an earlier error on my part). Telperion has waxed, and the sky is glazed with silver. Through the windows, as I run, I see the bright spark of a meteor slice across the sky, and I wonder if Nelyo has proposed to Annawendë yet.

I stop short of the door to my parents' suite and curse myself further. I have been so distracted this evening that I haven't even paused to write a poem! I stand outside the door, waiting for my heartbeat to slow, writing the worst poem I have ever allowed to enter my thoughts. Little Carnistir could compose better, I think. When my breathing has returned to normal and there is an awkward pastiche of words in my head that might be called a poem, I carefully push open the door to the suite.

My parents' sitting room is one of the few windowless rooms in the house and the only light in the room flickers forth from the fireplace. The cot where my youngest brother sleeps is abandoned against the wall, the bedclothes tangled and spilling onto the floor, and after my eyes adjust to the near-darkness, I see that Atar sits in a rocker on the opposite side of the room, holding Carnistir wrapped in a brightly colored afghan knit by grandmother Míriel. At first, I believe him to be asleep, but as I ease back to leave as quietly as I came, his eyes open and fix upon me, as though the darkness is no obstacle for one lit, as is he, from within.

He motions for me to come into the room, so I roll softly on my bare feet while he stands carefully—so as to not disturb little Carnistir sleeping soundly in his arms—and settles my baby brother onto the cot, tucking the covers carefully around him. Carnistir whimpers in his sleep, bereft of the warmth of Atar's body, but Atar quickly slips a fuzzy stuffed puppy into his arms before he can awaken and protest. Soothed, Carnistir turns onto his side, away from the fire, and resumes breathing deeply.

Atar indicates for me to follow him through a door to the left of the sitting room and into his study. "I'm glad you could come, Macalaurë," he says, as though he hasn't noticed that it is the middle of the night. I expect him to sit behind his desk and leave me in the small guest chair that he keeps in front of it—the same chair I have to sit in when I am called to his office for punishment—but he goes instead to the two armchairs in the corner, where we sit at angles to each other, like old friends.

"I'm sorry it's so late," I begin, but Atar interrupts me.

"Nonsense," he says, stifling a yawn. "I never get more than a few hours of sleep lately anyway, with your brother waking up three and four times a night."

"Well, maybe you should try to get a few hours now, before he wakes up again. You look tired."

"I don't need much sleep, Macalaurë. I look tired because I am, but it has nothing to do with lack of sleep and everything to do with the fact that there are not enough hours in the day to do what I want." He yawns again, covering his face with his hand. "Excuse me. Although, if you are tired, Macalaurë, by all means, go to your bed. We can meet another time."

Not surprisingly, I am not the least bit sleepy. I am most alive at night, when my mind is free to wander where it will. It might be mid-afternoon for all the energy that I have. "I'm great, Atar," I chirp, and he laughs.

"Would you like a cup of tea, Macalaurë?" he asks.

I hesitate. I would love a cup of tea—my long evening has left my throat parched—but it feels strange to have Atar offering me such hospitality. Normally, it is I who is called to make tea for Atar and whatever important persons he is hosting in his study. I am not an important person, just his second-born son, and I feel wrong making such demands of him.

I realize that my mouth is flapping open and closed in indecision. Atar smiles and stands. "I'll be right back," he says, and I jump to my feet and say, "No! Let me!"

"I will not. I have invited you to my study, so I do not expect you to serve me." It all sounds so logical in Atar's clear, quick voice, and I guiltily settle back into my chair.

Atar returns a few minutes later with two cups. He offers me one and hops back into his chair, folding his long legs beneath him and slumping with the casual languor of a young boy. He has made my tea just how I like it, slightly weak with a touch of mint. It occurs to me then how incredible a feat Atar and Amil perform every day, just in remembering the precise preferences and quirks of their four sons. Remembering the extensive catalog of Carnistir's food aversions is a task in itself! I sip my tea, but it scalds my lips, so I sit it aside for a time. Atar drinks his as though the temperature is no hotter than tepid bathwater.

"So have you written anything this week?" he asks.

I think of the hastily composed poem, written outside his door, and nod. There are three ticks of silence, while he waits for me to begin—during which isolated lines from the horrid poem haunt me and make my cheeks flush with embarrassment—until he says, "Well?"

"Um," I say and stop.

"Are you going to read it?"

"Well, I didn't really write it." His eyebrows pop up. "I mean, I composed it, but it's not written down." I clear my throat. "It's not very good."

"I'm sure it's fine. You're quite talented, Macalaurë."

"Well, I sort of wrote it standing outside your bedroom door."

"Did you?"

"Like five minutes ago." His eyebrows arch higher. "I didn't have anything else to bring."

"You didn't have to bring anything. I didn't bring anything."

"But I made you rearrange your schedule—"

"Not really. I'm usually in my rooms by this time anyway. You just happen to be joining me tonight."

"Well, I felt bad canceling after all the uproar I caused."

"You didn't even need to cancel. Even if you haven't written anything, we can just sit and talk."

"Really?"

"Of course."

Without something constructive to center my conversation, though—like poetry—I don't know how to talk to my father. Luckily, Atar speaks first: "How are your lessons with Findekáno?"

"He's doing well. He wrote a song tonight."

"Did he? That's excellent. What of your own apprenticeship? Is it going well?"

"Yes."

"Are you learning a lot?"

"Yes."

"Nelyo has mentioned to me that he would like to continue tutoring Findekáno after we return to Tirion, if Nolofinwë will allow it. Naturally, I will leave it to your discretion as to whether you wish to make the same offer. I realize that you are very busy with your apprenticeship and will not have you pressured into something you can't handle."

Atar is rebelling against his half-brother Nolofinwë, answering an argument that has not yet been spoken—and likely will not. Nolofinwë is not much older than Nelyo and me and should well remember the overwhelming chaos of exams. He would make no demands on us that we could not meet.

The animosity between Atar and Nolofinwë remains enigmatic to me. Nolofinwë has been nothing less than kind to me, although his manners are a bit stiffer and cooler than Atar's. I am not sure how to reply: Should I act also as though a slight has occurred when I know that it has not? This would please Atar, but it would be an untruth. Or should I ignore Atar's silly indignation? With this, I chance angering him. Finally, I speak, diverting slightly from the original topic and hoping that he does not notice. "Nelyo also has exams in the winter," I say, hoping Atar will forget about Nolofinwë and take up a discussion of Nelyo instead, of whom I know he is very proud.

"Yes, he does. But he says that five days for study will be adequate, and he will spend the other two in Tirion."

"Two! He leaves himself no day of rest! He will be exhausted."

"That was my concern as well, Macalaurë," Atar says, weariness tugging at his voice. "But he insists …"

"You can forbid him. You are his father, and he is still underage."

"You would have me forbid something that your brother desires? Your beloved Nelyo?" Atar asks, an acidic edge livening his voice and his eyes brightening with the same curiosity as those of a child looking upon his first glimpse of blood.

"He's just worked so hard over the last few years. I hate to see it end because—" I cannot finish. Because of Findekáno, I'd thought to say, but such an accusation is unfair. Findekáno makes no demands on my brother. He is a small child, while Nelyo is nearly an adult who should know by now what is best for himself.

"He has worked hard, Macalaurë, and it also worries me that he should not complete his exams, after so many hours of toil. But Nelyo will be forty-eight in the spring, and if I expect him to act as an adult in all other things, then I can no longer forbid him from doing what he pleases. And, inexplicable as it may be, your brother and Findekáno have taken a strong liking to each other. I don't know why. I did not expect it, but as it has come to pass, then there is nothing further that I can do."

I do not know how to respond, for I am still uncertain as to what limits surround me in these conversations with my father. Indeed, in recent weeks, I have had more conversations with him then I have had over the previous thirty-nine years of my life, so many that it feels almost like those old memories of my father belong to another person, in another life. It is hard to imagine a time when my interactions with him were limited to chastisement and punishment, when all I did seemed to bring him only displeasure. It is hard to remember the resentment I felt to emerge from the library on my day off, after studying the lore he insisted that I know—lore than ran out of my mind like water through a sieve—for some assessment or another that he was giving solely to prove my lack of worth, and see him and Nelyo sitting together in the garden, their heads close, often laughing or bent over a book. Nelyo can speak freely to my father. On several tense occasions, I have even overheard Nelyo tell Atar that he was wrong about something, and the arguments that ensued on these occasions were terrible to witness and a testimonial to the fact that Nelyo has inherited a measure of our father's fiery spirit, even though he often does not show it. But my own liberty with Atar is still unproven, so I hesitate before I ask the question buzzing in my mind.

"Does it bother you that Findekáno and Nelyo have become such friends?"

I wait, tensely, for the explosion that might come, but Atar sips his tea and stares at the floor for a long moment before answering. "I would loathe denying any of my sons the love of a friend, and Findekáno's devotion to your brother is extraordinary. Indeed, he loves Nelyo as though Nelyo were his own brother. This love, the love of a friend, is in many ways greater, for it is not a union of blood but of choice. Perhaps their friendship will falter a bit when Nolofinwë's new son is born, but if it does not, then I hope that they grow to be great friends later in life. They do seem to have much in common."

The last part he says with some difficulty, and I know that recognizing the similarities between Nolofinwë's eldest son and his own is akin to conceding that he and Nolofinwë are not as different from each other as they wish to believe.

"I never wished for Findekáno to be a pariah in our house," Atar says, "but I never expected him to befriend Nelyo with such ease. I assumed, naturally, that he and Tyelkormo would become playmates—they are only a year apart in age, after all—but that seems not to have taken shape. I thought perhaps you, Macalaurë, would befriend him, for you are both of kind and gentle spirits, but that also has not come to pass. Yet I sense in Findekáno the same fire that I know burns your brother: It is my father's blood, that which makes him a great king, that which drove him to lead his people across the Outer Lands to paradise. I certainly never sensed it in Nolofinwë," he says, wearing a tiny smile to show that he speaks lightly, partly in jest, "but it burns in his son. Perhaps it is a mark of our house, and Arafinwë's eldest shall be similarly blessed."

"Perhaps Arafinwë's eldest will like me as Findekáno likes Nelyo."

"Perhaps he will," Atar agrees, "or perhaps you will find your devotion to one of your unborn brothers. It remains to be seen."

"Will I have more brothers?"

"Of course. I will bring many children into this world. Indeed, for all the love your mother has for her sons, it may come to pass that she grows weary of being a mother before I weary of being a father." He grows quiet, his face lowered and turned from me, largely hidden by his unencumbered hair.

"But what of sisters? How do you know that you will give me no sisters?"

Atar's head snaps up and the look in his eyes is as though I have unknowingly set my fingers upon a wound in his flesh. I feel him flinch, although his body never recoils physically, and the pain in his eyes is consumed in a flash of fire like the lightning that destroys the darkness.

"I will beget no daughters," he says in a low voice, and he winces slightly, eyebrows tightening and voice straining. "This I feel in my heart."

I do not ask anymore of him. Something has fallen between us, a barrier of silence, and I dare not penetrate it. I dare not douse the flames in his eyes to expose the pain beneath.

"I am weary, Macalaurë," he says, rising from his chair. And suddenly, he is. He is papery and gray, an exhausted tinder left to the play of the wind. "I thank you for sitting with me and wish I could remain, but my place now is with your mother. Goodnight, my love."

His kiss upon my forehead is dry and hot against my skin.

It is golden light that teases my eyes open this morning. Funny, since I remember closing the drapes the night prior, forcing my body suddenly weak with exhaustion to lift arms that might have been wet sandbags to pull the drapes shut and save my eyes from the light that poured forth. When I fell into bed, I hadn't even undressed but slept in the day's clothes, too weary to care.

I have not felt this well-rested upon awakening since we arrived in Formenos. It was a long time in Tirion, too, since I last awakened in the morning from sheer satiation of sleep and not because my mind drove me to task before my body was ready. I lie for a moment before opening my eyes and enjoy it: the warmth of the satin sheets on my skin, the pressure of the mattress against my back, the way the light shining through my eyelids is turned red and throbs with the rhythm of my blood. My mind is empty for once, as though swept clean of clutter while I slept, and as I lie still, I feel a few ideas on which I have been working emerging again, poking out from the folds of my mind like timid animals after a violent storm.

They begin to whisper to me in hesitant voices of tasks I had wished to undertake prior to my sleep. One cries louder than the others.

It cries of light.

There is a pressure on my chest, I realize—a warm, inexplicable pressure directly over my heart. I shift, but the pressure remains. It feels as though my heart is pounding against the inside of my chest, trying to punch through my ribcage and reach the source of the pressure.

I open my eyes, and it is Nerdanel. Her head lies on my chest, and her bright eyes are upon mine.

Our gazes linger upon the other for a long moment before she springs up. "Fëanáro!" she cries. There is fright in her eyes, but it quickly turns to glee, and her lips are upon mine, her hungry kisses devouring my mouth, my face, my ears, my neck. I let my head roll back to allow her easier access to the tender skin of my throat, and feel my blood beating against her greedy mouth. The drapes are open, I notice: Perhaps Nerdanel opened them? The light through the window is of a rich gold, and it only takes a moment for my eyes to appraise its strength and luster to know that it is afternoon.

And my arms—I lift my arms from the bed to embrace my wife, and it is silk that slides down to pool around my elbows, not the course wool of the tunic that I wore when I fell into bed last night. As my lips part to question her, she brings her mouth back up to kiss me, and the unexpected intimacy of the open-mouthed kiss makes my skin prickle with delight, and I let my tongue dart quickly across her bottom lip. Her body presses against mine, for an instant, firmly enough to tell me that the pleasure was reciprocal.

"Well," she says, drawing back, "I am glad to see that you are with us again."

"With you? Where did I go?" Laughing, I lift my fingers to brush her hair away from her face. So plain, people said when I returned and announced having taken her to wife, pointing out a nose that was too broad, a jaw that was too wide, a brow that was too heavy, as reasons why I should not love her. She was over-conscious in those days of her face—and of her body, which was strong and sturdy, not the willowy wisp of a woman that people would have as the princess of the Noldor—and she loathed to appear in public, except in loose dresses that hid her figure, with her hair unrestrained and falling across her face. I felt as though I was always clearing her hair from her face in those days, for she is unbelievably beautiful to me, and hiding her face seems akin to cloaking the stars behind clouds.

She smiles now, takes my hand, and kisses my fingers. "You were gone, Fëanáro. You know, as you do. For five days."

I close my eyes, as though this action alone will hide my mind's thoughts from my wife.

Gone? Five days?

The mattress shifts as Nerdanel shifts beside me, circling my chest with her arm and nuzzling her face into my neck. She knows my thoughts and also that I wish that she did not, so she closes her own eyes and feigns ignorance. I shock myself sometimes. How strange and humiliating a predicament, to be wise about so many things, yet to remain ignorant about one's own needs and motives.

"To where—" My throat clicks, and I clear it and speak again, softly, intently. "To where did I go?"

"You were in your forge for five days, Fëanáro. I know not what you were doing. You—" She presses her face more firmly into my neck, as though leeching from me strength to say what she must. "You barred the door against us. Until yesterday evening, when I came up here and found you asleep in bed."

I laugh, for I cannot remember, and the tale sounds ridiculous. Once, I told her, "You could make all of this up, and I'd be none the wiser," and she was hurt and ran from the room. I will not say that now. I hold her closer, as though to compensate for hurts long passed and—I hope—healed.

From the unexplored depths of thought, frail tendrils of memory tickle my recollection. They are more words than anything: Stone. Thought. Share. But then there are visions too, flickering images of a dark stone and pale hands upon it—my hands?—and Nelyo's voice from behind the door: Atar?

No! Leave me!

I flinch and Nerdanel—saying nothing—lifts her hand to soothe me.

But then, they might not be my memories at all, for I recognize that memory can be painted upon one's mind until it is as real as an actual experience. I used to do this with my mother, when I was small: paint memories of her that had never happened until they seemed as real as though they had happened just the day prior. I imagined her naming me, holding me in her lap and saying, "Fëanáro, I will call you, for you will do great things." I asked her to tell me of them, and she did; I memorized the look of her hands holding mine—the slender, deft fingers—and drew them over and over in my lesson books, and the quick sound of her voice, which I imitated, making my father cringe and murmur to the omnipresent Lady Indis, "So like his mother, he sounds." And Lady Indis reached out to comfort me, but I wouldn't have it; I wouldn't have my memories smudged and ruined by her dough-soft, incapable hands.

And so my thoughts on what happens when I "go"—for that is the safest word to call it, and even little Carnistir knows its meaning—could just be painted by my family, who have told me what I am like during these times. I do not speak readily, they say, and I will sit for hours and stare at something—or nothing—with such scrutiny that I might be reading fine print upon it. Sometimes, they say, I lift my hand and touch the air as though something lingers there, beyond their sights, but my fingers move as though with precise manipulations, and usually after is when I lock myself into the forge.

I could have their memories, not my own. But still, those three words remain: Stone. Thought. Share. I wonder what I will find when I go to the forge.

The first time it happened—when I went—I was very young and still living in my father's palace. In the weeks prior, as a way of hobby to distract my thoughts from my father's wedding preparations going on downstairs, I meticulously studied Rúmil's entire alphabet, identifying each inconsistency and inconvenience, twisting and changing the letters until my head ached with the effort. Still I strove, stretching my brain further than should be allowed in the rubbery intellect of youth. For many days, I did not sleep. I could not stop. I thought that my brain might be bleeding and filling my head with blood, only it was not. I checked my ears and my eyes in the mirror when I went to use the lavatory, my bladder full to bursting and sitting like a painful stone in my gut. But there was never any blood, just whispering thoughts and vague inspiration.

I cannot do it. There is no better way. It cannot be done.

But two days later, without my recollection, it was. I blinked. It was a dream; it must be.

I went to bed, wondering how the dream would end, loathing to wake to the taunts of those letters that were wrong but refused to be corrected.

When I awakened, a man was leaning over me, and I screamed. The man restrained me with hands on my shoulders, and I struggled and fought him until I saw my father in the chair beside my bed, his eyes red and swollen, a handkerchief twisted in his hands. He thought I was dying, as my mother had done, for she too had slept long like this in the year after my birth, without response. The man was my father's chief healer. I had been born into his hands, and he had cared for the minor injuries and pains of my childhood, and he told me—after my father left to get me a glass of water—that I had locked myself into my bedroom and refused to reply to my father's calls. My father had to break the lock and found me asleep in bed, still in the prior day's clothes, and I would not respond and slept through breakfast and the midday meal, my heart beating ponderously slow in my chest.

"Did you think I was dying?" I asked the healer before my father returned. He busied himself with returning his tools and elixirs to his bag. "I was not sure," he said at last.

Upon his leaving, I found on my bedside table a parchment. And upon the parchment: perfect letters that I did not remember writing.

My father, grieved by my strange behavior, postponed his wedding to the Lady Indis. No one said as much to me, but I could sense in their stiff show of concern that many believed I'd feigned it. My displeasure at my father's wedding was not unknown, but I was a child, and my opinion did not matter much. The affairs of adults were best left to adults. For many days, I sat in my bedroom, pondering the letters I'd found—for surely, I would have remembered creating them if indeed I had—and with their first use, I wrote in my lesson books of my anger towards my father's court—even toward my father himself—until I was certain that they were perfect. But I told no one. And at my father's wedding, when I stood beside him and I was supposed to be listening to the Speaking of the Name, I recited them over and over again in my mind—tinco, parma, calma, quessë—until I could no longer hear the words that finalized my mother's death. Tinco, parma, calma, quessë: With them drifting through my thoughts, letters like the waves upon the sea or the vines that twine the trees in the forest, I didn't even cry.

My emotions have always been like a pendulum, swinging through extremes of joy and despair, swishing all too quickly through the painless part in the middle, and at times, a spark of inspiration will seem to come from nowhere, suspending me at an extreme for a tiresome amount of time, until my body grows exhausted of suspension at that ceaseless apogee, fighting the gravity of reason, unwilling to break until I achieve whatever goal I didn't know I was pursuing.

Now, Nerdanel and I lie together in the warm light of early afternoon, our thoughts entwined in the space between us like our hands resting on my chest. I speak next: "So today is—"

"The day before Tyelkormo's begetting day." She finishes my thought for me.

"Today is the day that we're supposed to leave then."

There is a pause. I feel two of her breaths tickle my neck before she speaks again. "I told the children that we would not be able to take our trip this year. They were disappointed, naturally, but they understood. Nelyo is taking the little ones fishing in the creek tomorrow."

I have heard her tone before: She wonders if this was intentional, to avoid going to Oromë's when she knows I'd rather go to the sea.

But I am disappointed too. "We don't need to cancel!" I cry, foolish and impetuous youth coloring my voice.

"And what was I supposed to do, Fëanáro? Tie your hands together and drape you across my saddle like a deer carcass?"

"I am fine. We can go."

"I didn't know how long you would be gone. How was I to know?"

"I have never gone for longer than six days."

"This came upon me without warning. I do not know what precipitated it, only that I woke up five mornings ago, very early, expecting you to be in bed with me, but you'd gone to the forge already, and nothing I said or did seemed to affect you." There is a long pause while the question she wants to ask outright but will not breathes into my mind. Why … I ignore it, and she sighs resolutely—her curiosity overwhelming her proud refusal to allow me to triumph in such childish games—and asks: "Why do you act so, Fëanáro?"

"I do not know, Nerdanel."

I feel her lips move against my neck, tightening and shifting into a smile. I remember once, before we were wed, when we were both apprenticed to Aulë, and I made a statue of Manwë to give to my father—a beautiful casting done in a blend of bronze and gold—and then smashed it flat with a hammer without reason, not knowing that she stood witness in the threshold behind me. "Why did you do that?" she asked, her voice not horrified by my sudden rage or my blasphemy, but merely curious and curling into laughter when I was forced to answer, "I do not know," the power of my actions stripped away by the enigma of the reasoning behind them. In the earliest days of our marriage, before we even conceived Nelyo, I feared that her love for me would become clouded with doubt, for what we had done defied convention and was dismissed as lust and imprudence even by those Noldor in the north who did not give the decrees of the Valar the same weight as did my father and her parents, and I would at times demand to know why she had married me, why she had bonded herself to me until the ending of the world, becoming angered by the strength of my doubts, and she would kiss the fury of my mouth and say, "It shall take me until the ending of the world to understand you, Fëanáro, and never have I been able to allow a question to lie long unanswered."

I interrupt the comfort in which we lie for the sake of greater contact between us, turning and disrupting her face from the nook of my neck so that the lengths our bodies my press together: breast, belly, hip, and thigh, even our feet nuzzling against the other's. Her arm circles my waist, presses my spine, heightens the contact. "These are not the clothes in which I lay last night," I say, kissing her between words, and she laughs against my mouth, our lips parting against each other's but seeking no further intimacy, no tongues, no teeth, only the mingling of our breath. We linger like this for a moment, tempting the other, and it is I who lose this time and press my lips shut and hold them firmly against hers in a kiss, knowing that in a moment more, I would make love to her, and life would resume and the questions would become lost in the clutter of daily life.

"You smelled of sweat and the forge," she tells me. "So I bathed you and changed your clothes."

I raise my eyebrows slowly to hide my surprise. "Did you?"

"I certainly wasn't going to lie beside you last night while you reeked like swine."

"And how do you presume to have accomplished this?"

"It is not so amazing an accomplishment, Fëanáro. You are my husband. I carried you. I was gentle, and you did not wake up."

"You carried me?" I place deliberate accentuation on the pronouns to disguise honest astonishment. Likewise, she feigns offense at my doubt in an attempt to hide her own amazement—and pride—at having completed the task. At one point in our lives, she could lift me easily, although I outweigh her by quite a bit, but carrying and bearing four sons has taken its toll on her, and she is not as strong as she once was.

"I am not so weak that I can't carry you for need!" she says. "The lavatory is but a few paces away and you were hardly resistant."

"Yes, but I am heavy."

"I may have let your feet drag the ground a bit," she admits.

"You should have asked Nelyo."

"I did not think that you would like being undressed and carried to the bath by your own son."

"You should have asked Nelyo. And when I woke up, you could always claim that you did it alone."

"Why? You would have known that I was lying."

"I would have appreciated the attempt to save my pride nonetheless," I tell her. "You should have asked Nelyo. My pride is not worth your safety."

Now she is annoyed and does not bother to feign a new emotion to cover it. When she carried Nelyo and Macalaurë, she did what she would—what I did—without restraint. She rode, hiked, hunted, and worked, always by my side. But things have changed. Our lives are different now, and she will never again be the same as the woman I married.

"Stop thinking such thoughts," she demands. She kisses me again, although it is less a kiss of passion or affection than it is to keep my mouth busy and quiet. "The fabric of our lives is not ours to weave but to make with it what we will."

I snicker against her lips, for such truisms give her the reputation of being wise. Indeed, when we were very young, they gave me pause, as though my mind would stop and breathe, just for a moment, while the meaning of her words soaked into my brain. The world seemed simple, clear, and beautiful in those moments. On the day of our marriage, the unspeakable bliss of body gave way to something greater, and I discovered that—with the union of our spirits—I could leave the noisy clutter of my mind and enter the quiet of hers when I desired, and she has never turned me away.

But now, I have been drowning in the chaos of my thoughts for five days now, and I crave life, contact, her. My mind is full of whisperings and bustling thoughts: I notice that one of the curtain rods has broken, and I am instantly computing the lengths of lines and angles and making a new one in my mind while calculating the amount of provisions my family would have used in the last five days and contriving a special meal to make for Tyelkormo tonight, on the eve of his begetting day. But the warmth of Nerdanel's hand on my back, slipping beneath my nightclothes to press skin on skin, is more real than all of those things, and my thoughts skid in a new direction, to wonder about how she and the children have fared over the last five days.

"How are our sons?" I ask her.

She smiles. In even the heaviest moments between us, a new light brightens her eyes when our children enter her thoughts. "They have fared well through their concern for you," she tells me. "Nelyo has kept them well fed and busy at task to distract their minds from thinking too long on you, although both Carnistir and Tyelkormo insisted on sleeping with you last night."

"And where did you sleep?"

"On the sliver of bed that the three of you allotted me."

"And Carnistir's nightmares?" I ask.

"Macalaurë's songs soothe them quite well, we have learned."

"What of Findekáno?"

"He has barely left Nelyo's side. One might think he was glued there if I didn't see him waiting outside the lavatory door for Nelyo the other day. I am afraid that we will face quite the sad separation when we return to Tirion."

"And the apprentices?"

"Have gone to town as planned to aid the lords in crafting new hunting spears for the coming winter."

"And what of you, Nerdanel? How have you fared?"

"I have missed you desperately," she says, taking my face in her hands and kissing me.

I feel belligerent, like I used to feel when I was young and would argue with my father regarding councils about which I knew naught, just to hear my voice stir the air. "I was right there the whole time," I say and she pauses, laughs, and then tugs the blankets over my head. "Do stop, Fëanáro."

"Well, I was," I tell her from under the blankets.

She lowers them a bit, to my nose, so that she can see my eyes but my mouth is still covered. "So you were," she admits before yanking them over my head again.

"Is this any way to treat your husband?" I ask her, and when she doesn't respond, loudly demand, "As High Prince of the Noldor, I order you to release me from these bonds!"

She releases the blankets, and I scramble free, trying to look miffed, while she laughs and says, "Perhaps you have been spending too much time with Nolofinwë, my love." Like leaves reaching for light, our hands find the other's body, and we lie close once more. "I have a bit of good news for the High Prince of the Noldor," she said, and her face is pressing into my chest, so I can't see her smile, but I can hear it in her voice, more beautiful than the music of fountains.

"You're pregnant?"

The words are out before I even think, and I feel an immediate sting of regret. I am not yet ready to beget another child; how can I expect that she is ready to bear one? If she notices the insensitivity of my words, then she does not show it to me. She laughs and squeezes me tightly. "No, not yet, Fëanáro. I still ache with the memory of bearing Carnistir. But, perhaps, it is not so long off. I have not been tired for weeks now. My body is recovering. That is my good news."

And good news it is! So naturally, my mind must deconstruct it, ruminate over the inane details. "So quickly?" I say. "But it was much longer after Tyelkormo."

"Tyelkormo was a much harder birth," she says. "Indeed, if I thought I would ever have childbirth like that again, then I might well bind my legs together before getting into bed with you at night."

Tyelkormo was a hard birth. Fifteen years ago tomorrow, I think, feeling a chill at the memory. As many hardships as preceded his conception, it seemed unjust that his bearing should be so long and laborious that the midwife wanted to cut him from the body of my wife like he was a parasite inside of her. Like she was no more valuable than a head of livestock. No please, I hear myself pleading. Give her three more pushes. You can try three more pushes, can you not, Nerdanel? And her hand, normally a vice in mine, lying cool and limp across my palm—she had fallen back in the bed, and her hair was soaked with sweat so that it was nearly as dark as mine. There was blood on the sheets between her legs. She rolled her head to look at me. I don't think I can, Fëanáro. And beneath her words, a thought: Please don't make me.

That is why we celebrate begetting, I think, and not birth.

"But I did it, didn't I, Fëanáro?" she says to me now, and my thoughts are torn back to reality, back to the warm bedclothes around me and her head on my chest, tilted now so that she may meet my eyes with hers. I hear my heartbeat thudding hard in my ears, as though a vestige of that day's fear still lingers in my brain, a sour taste of metal at the back of my throat.

I swallow hard. "Did what?"

"I pushed three more times."

I hold her close.

She was not going to. She was too exhausted. Contractions wracked her midsection, but she lacked the strength to do anything more than gasp with the pain of it.

Nimelomë was the attending healer. I pled with Nerdanel. Please try. Three more times. Then I felt a warm hand on my arm. If we do nothing, then we may lose the baby. Nimelomë's eyes have always been clear, like water that lets you see the pebbles at the bottom of a brook. I saw my choices in her eyes. I could lose my son. Or I could lose all his brothers that would follow him. Maybe lose my wife.

How could I choose?

How is this fair?

The Valar hate me.

I couldn't speak, so I looked away. Pretended that I wasn't choosing one life over another. I conjured Macalaurë's voice in my head, his hand tugging my trousers. "Another piece of candy, Atar?" I nodded to his apparition and felt Nimelomë's hand alight on my arm, intending comfort.

She began preparing an elixir that would numb my wife so that they could cut her. I looked at the smooth, porcelain skin of her belly, rounded by the life she held inside of her. I looked at the knives that Nimelomë unrolled from a leather case. I hated her then, for bringing those knives into my house, for anticipating that Nerdanel would not be able to deliver our son normally and would have to be disassembled like a broken machine and have him lifted out of her. I imagined those knives tracing a line across my wife's perfect skin and leaving a narrow red wake that would gape and run, like a broken mouth. I felt sick.

She spoke to Nerdanel. Nerdanel, I want your consent before we begin the operation. I have your husband's. I will likely be able to save the life of your son. But you will have no more children. You may die. Nimelomë had known us when we were children, with scabby knees from crawling about the mines and dizzy with love for each other. She does not bother with formalities.

And Nerdanel's faint reply: I will give my life for him.

Those are the fated words that I imagine my mother speaking as I was born, knowing that the energy in her body was only enough to give life to one of us.

I leaned over to kiss her mouth. Maybe for the last time? Nimelomë began to spread the elixir across Nerdanel's belly. Her body tensed, her lips grew hard beneath mine, as another contraction tore her body.

No!

I thought that I must have spoken it, for Nimelomë paused with the knife, but her clear eyes went to Nerdanel, not to me.

Nerdanel?

Let me push three more times.

Nimelomë made as though to argue with her, but Nerdanel was already reaching for me to help her sit up, she was already gripping my hand as another contraction began to ripple through her, she was already pushing. One.

Nerdanel, you are losing blood. If this fails, then you will not survive the operation.

Two. She gave a strangled cry, what would have been a scream with Nelyo or with Macalaurë, when her voice had the strength.

Fëanáro. Hold me.

She couldn't even speak. Her voice was a feeble whisper in my mind. The blood on the sheets made me think of slaughtered animals, nothing befitting our third son's arrival.

I supported her back, kept her from falling onto the bed. There was a gossamer hope. One more time. By the grace of the Valar, please …

Three.

"Fëanáro, why must you always think on such things?" Nerdanel's voice penetrates the haze of memory. She is growing irate with me. "Of all the things in our life together on which you could think—"

I silence her with a kiss.

She lures me from the bed with the promise of food. It has been five days since I have eaten. Also, I do not remember when I last relieved myself, and my bladder feels hard like an apple, so I sprint to the lavatory before I wet myself like a small child. Nerdanel laughs at my back as I run and mumble curses to myself.

"Ah, Manwë in Varda," I say, as the apple shrivels and disappears. It is a curse that I overheard Nelyo whisper to Macalaurë once. I glance quickly behind me to make sure Nerdanel has not heard, but she remains in the bedroom, so I shake myself dry and tuck the proper parts back into their proper places and turn to join her.

She has removed her nightgown and stands naked before her armoire—her back turned to me—contemplating the day's clothes. I feel a stirring, as though my body is trying to reassert all of its sensations. "Fëanáro, really," she says, without turning, riffling through tunics and dresses. I want to come up behind her and fit myself to the curve of her buttocks. "We've been married for sixty years now. Surely you needn't gape every time I disrobe?"

She would not pose naked for my sketches until after we were married and only then allowed it if I promised never to show anyone the drawings. Getting her to consent to a nude statue is a yearlong endeavor, and then it is only accomplished if I send the children to my father's whenever I need her to sit for me and if I swear to make miniature clothes to put on the statue before putting it on display, even in our own bedroom, insisting that, as long as I continue to take people into our bedroom when giving them a tour of the house, her naked likeness will appear nowhere within it. "You should not be ashamed of your body," I tell her, and she insists that she is not. "But my body is not art, and I do not want to have to look at people looking at it," she tells me.

I try to convince her that such regulation is unjust when I am not likewise so prudish. I remind her that her final project for her apprenticeship with Aulë was a nude statue of me, and that we were both underage and not yet married, making it all the more scandalous to sculpt a nude statue of the King's heir for appraisal by one of the Valar. "You have the most beautiful body of any of our people," she always tells me. "You were born to be living art."

I used to argue that, as my wife, she was too biased to honestly make the "most beautiful" argument, just to watch her blush as she admitted, "It is not just me. It is a general consensus, Fëanáro."

"According to whom?"

"Almost every unwed woman in Tirion. And some of the married ones, as well. And," she would blush so hard that her face became indiscriminate from her hair, "the men, as well. Well, those who will admit it."

I come up behind her now—careful to touch her with nothing but my hands, lest we end up staying in bed until the evening—and move my hands along her buttocks as though I am sculpting them. When I make statues of the perfect Elven form, they look nothing like her. I am always delighted by the innovation of her shape. I want to fit her strange curves into stone. "I want to do a statue of you," I whisper into her ear.

She is blunt: "Absolutely not, Fëanáro."

"I have not even told you want kind of statue I envision."

"I know what kind of statue you envision, and the answer is no."

"Why?"

"Well, what will we do with the children, for one?"

"We need not do anything with them."

"I argue that we do. I will no more allow you to make nude statues of me while they're around then I will make love with you in front of them."

"Nerdanel, it is hardly the same thing!"

"It is. Your art is very sensual. And we always end up—" She breaks off, her cheeks pinking, trying not to smile. "Not now," she finishes weakly. "Maybe when we return to Tirion. Although I do not understand why you want another naked statue of me cluttering our bedroom."

"When we return to Tirion? So that we will be interrupted by ten messengers, my father, and my half-brother calling?"

"Your half-brother rarely calls, and if the children are with your father, then he would neither call nor send messengers."

She patiently deconstructs my illogic. I know the senselessness of the things that I say yet I say them still, for my life is full of senselessness and so it is not so odd that my speech should at times be the same. Others—my half-brother, the lords of the court, even my father, at times—grow irate with me in these moments. Delusions, they call them. "People will call you mad," my father said once, when I proclaimed that Indis was attempting to lure Nelyo from my house with her praise of his perfect speech and diplomacy. "Why can you not accept praise for your son for what it is? Praise for your son? Praise for you, for begetting and raising so perfect an heir?" Yet things have come to pass in my life that should be no more than the flimsy stuff of delusion, yet they are not. Who would believe that an immortal Elf could perish in the Blessed Realm and still discount my other notions? If my feelings on Indis and Nolofinwë are delusions, then let my mother's inexplicable expiration also be no more than the fleeting horror of a dream.

Nerdanel understands these things. It is why she only touches my face with a gentle hand and why she responds to my anger with kindness when my own father once bruised my face and bore me to the ground for the senseless, acidic fire of my temper.

She selects a loose, gray dress from the armoire and slips it over her head. I watch it cover her body with regret. She looks at me for appraisal. "It is not an improvement," I tell her.

"You should not say such things to a woman, Fëanáro. You should tell us that we look beautiful in our dresses. Now help me do the laces up the back, will you?"

I do not understand the fashion of women, at times. Laces up the back seem impractical, for one's husband must delay in order to secure them and unmarried women must procure the help of a servant or kinswoman. Yet this is the fashion of women of late, first in Taniquetil, then Tirion, and at my last trip to Alqualondë, I saw that the silliness had spread there as well. I have told Nerdanel my feelings on such things, but she remains unconvinced. I try to breach the subject with her now by saying, "You know, Nerdanel, that laces or fasteners on the front accomplish the same purpose," but she will not be baited, and admonishes, "Just tie the laces, Fëanáro," holding her river of copper-colored hair from her neck so that I may secure them at the top. I catch her around the waist when I am finished and kiss the cream that is the back of her neck, delighting to watch it flush pink at my touch, as she releases her hair and it cascades and covers my face.

"Are the children home?" I ask her.

"Yes," she says pointedly, "they are. Nelyo is making the midday meal. Perhaps he has made enough for two extras."

"You did not intend to dine with them?"

She makes a point to avoid my gaze as she stoops to retrieve a pair of slippers from the bottom of her armoire. "I have not found much of an appetite lately." I say nothing, but she responds as if I do, defensively. "I was worried for you, Fëanáro."

"It is who I am, Nerdanel. I do not find rest as you do."

"I know that. But it is the only time when I cannot feel your mind. It is as though—" She stops and embraces me, burying her face in my chest. "Escort your wife to the dining room?"

Her mind finishes what her tongue will not: It is as though you are dead.

~oOo~

We walk to the dining room together, with Nerdanel's arm strung loosely through mine, our shoulders bumping. We walked this way in the days before we were married, always connected, as though asserting our possession of the other for the world to see. No one believed that our happiness would last, that we would marry: the High Prince and the plain daughter of Mahtan.

It is a beautiful day, with Laurelin's light soaking the land and the sky free of clouds. The windows in the halls have been opened, and summer air floods the corridors. Someone had the ingenious thought to prop open the dining room door with a large chunk of amethyst crystal, and the crosscurrents of air sweep between the dining room and the hall, carrying the sounds of my sons' voices into the corridor.

I pause in the doorway and do not announce my presence, so that I may observe them in their natural states, as one might watch wild animals and marvel at their beauty. So I marvel now. Macalaurë is seated at the table, instructing Tyelkormo and Carnistir how to fold pale blue linen napkins into the shapes of birds. He takes one in his hand and makes it fly and land atop Carnistir's head, who freezes except for eyes that twitch upward nervously. Tyelkormo—on Macalaurë's other side—kneels on his chair and leans on his forearms across the table, laughing, as Macalaurë hops the bird across Carnistir's head and down his shoulder, twittering in the perfect imitation of a wren.

"Careful! It might make a mess on you!" Tyelkormo says, and Carnistir squeals and sweeps the bird away, and it becomes a pale blue linen napkin once more, billowing towards the floor.

I marvel at times at how my sons are such perfect random conglomerates of Nerdanel and me. It is as though I sculpted four versions of myself in clay, then added and took away pieces to modify the end result, using Nerdanel as inspiration: an extra curve to Carnistir's cheek, less a straight line to Tyelkormo's nose, a softer mouth for Macalaurë.

It is Nelyo who holds an interest in the science of life. I flirted briefly with the field shortly before marrying Nerdanel, going to Irmo after my lessons with Aulë, to watch as he dissected the expired bodies of animals and birds to reveal the organs inside. With magnifying crystals, he showed me the components within the components: each cell a tiny body itself, with its own minute organs. I wondered: Do cells prize their lives, as do whole organisms? Do they quiver at the thought of being torn asunder by fingernails seeking to quell an itch? Irmo would laugh at my inquiries but never answered, saying instead that everything around us was a representation of infinity, like two mirrors set to face each other. "There is always something else inside of that which you think is the final, smallest component," he would say, "and always something larger than the vessel which holds them all." He pricked my fingertip with a pin and demystified blood, which I so keenly associated with pain, by showing me the cells that circle endlessly through my veins, bringing life from the depths of my body to the surface. "Do you think they know that they're outside now?" I asked, watching through the crystals as the pinkish pillows drifted about naively on the glass slide he'd prepared. "Maybe they're like us, like Elves. They're happy inside of me like we're happy in Valinor, and so they never really think much of what lies beyond. Maybe when you rinse this slide in the stream, they will go to the sea and start a new life there, one that they never would have envisioned, had they remained and died inside of me.

"Or maybe, they're afraid," I added.

Irmo told me that my thoughts were not those that belonged to Elves, especially of my few years. "You have your mother's way of thinking," he told me, making my heart squeeze painfully, for I could work beside him only as long as I allowed myself to forget that he was the Vala that tended my mother through her weariness, who helped usher her into death.

I did not return much after that. Studying the science of life mostly involved deconstructing beings whose life had drained, and my hands and mind itched to be productive, to create, not ruin. Nelyo, however, plunged into such study with enthusiasm for he—like his mother—prefers to understand rather than change things, and his curiosity is not content as is mine, with stone and metal as its primary companions. Nelyo ruthlessly pursued the understanding of heredity, sketching long, detailed maps to show how traits passed from his ancestors and into him and his brothers. He mated canaries and roses in an attempt to coax nature into perfection. I sought perfection by bending steel and molding stone to my will.

I watch my sons and wonder from where some of their features and habits come, if Nelyo and Irmo are correct and everything derives from something else. Macalaurë's voice, for example, cannot be found amongst either Nerdanel's or my ancestors. Indeed, none of Elvenkind seems to ever have been so blessed. Before my sons were born, I would lie awake at night while Nerdanel slept, my hand on her belly, feeling them moving about inside of her. I tried to imagine how they would look but could only see their brothers when they were born. I could not fathom dark hair on Carnistir but imagined him golden and full of energy, like Tyelkormo. That Macalaurë would be tiny and not a robust giant like Nelyo seemed inconceivable until the first moment I held him in my arms, when it seemed to make perfect sense that my second-born son should be small in body yet so huge in voice that he was made bigger than some of the Valar.

I watch them in silence and Nerdanel stands at my shoulder, rubbing my lower back and resting her head on my arm. Nelyo comes in from the kitchen, his arms laden with serving bowls and Findekáno nearly stepping on his heels. "I see you've gotten much done, Maca—" He sees me and freezes. "Atar."

Three heads swivel at once in my direction, and before I can stoop to catch him, Tyelkormo is slamming into my legs and trying to climb me like a tree. I lift him into my arms, and his arms lock around my neck. His golden hair tickles my face like warm threads of silk. He is speaking to me, but his words make no more sense than the babbling of a creek, being as his face pressed into my neck muffles half of them. I hear mention of trees and Nelyo and squirrels and arrows and discern that he has been hunting and brought home his first game for our table, although I shall have to ask Nelyo for clarification as to what kind of game. I only hope that it is not the squirrels.

There is a small tug on my trousers' leg, and I look down to see Carnistir at my feet, his bottom lip pushed out in a pout and his dark eyes brimming. Balancing a chattering Tyelkormo on my hip, I lean to scoop Carnistir into my arms, and he pushes his face into my shoulder and starts sobbing.

Nelyo comes up beside me and takes Tyelkormo, who scrabbles at my clothing and whines in protest. Nelyo kisses my cheek, and when I turn, the tips of our noses bump. I do not have to look down to meet his eyes anymore; one day soon, I will have to look up. "We missed you, Atar," says Nelyo, juggling a wriggly Tyelkormo expertly, and I try to meet his glance, but he is busy smoothing Tyelkormo's hair and looking into his face.

My arms are now freed to embrace my youngest, who weeps as though his heart has been torn in two. Nerdanel ushers me to my seat at the table, and it is easier to cuddle Carnistir once sitting. "This will not do, little one," I tell him, lifting his reddened, tear-streaked face from where it presses into my tunic. "Whatever is the matter?"

"I thought you were gone!" he wails.

"Don't be silly. Did you not sleep beside me last night?" He nods. "Did you feel my body go cold? Did you hear my heart stop beating?" He shakes his head, spraying his coarse, black hair around his face in a cloud. "Then you knew I still lived, and as long as I live, I shall not leave you."

Everyone is busy again. Nerdanel is helping Nelyo to carry in the remaining dishes—Tyelkormo, who is still attempting to scramble in my direction, hampers his arm—and Findekáno is still on his heels. Only Macalaurë remains at the table, folding the napkins with quick, nimble fingers that always seemed to become shaky and scared during his apprenticeship with me. He smiles at me as I stroke a subdued Carnistir's hair. "Atar. How fare you?"

"I fare much better today than I did when I took your leave, five nights ago," I reply.

Macalaurë is the only one who understands. He has never gone for five days, but at times, I have awakened him in the morning and found him lying among piles of sheet music, his harp close to his hands, unable to be roused. People are quick to proclaim him as the son who is the least like me, for they are fooled by his gentle temperament and quiet manners, but beneath that, where his spirit burns, he is the most like me, for he is the only one of my children who understands what it is to be consumed by something as I am consumed by my art and he is consumed by his music.

Nelyo has prepared a meal large enough for all of us to partake to satiation. The children are busy with their tales of the last five days, allowing Nerdanel and I to eat uninterrupted. Tyelkormo's quarry, I learn, wasn't a squirrel but a turkey that he shot in the forest yesterday. Nelyo intends to cook it tonight in honor of the eve of his begetting day. Last night, Macalaurë and Findekáno played their new song for the others. Carnistir—who is frequently disciplined for talking with food in his mouth—spits out a mouthful of green beans, proclaims the song pretty, and then asks if he will be required to finish the partially chewed green beans. Tyelkormo, it is said, copied two scrolls perfectly during lessons the other day, and Carnistir can now write all of his numbers up to one hundred.

I wait for a lull in conversation to make my announcement. It is long coming, for they are eager to regale me with the news of the lives over the last five days, and I am glad to listen. "Children," I say at last, when enough mouths are busy drinking and chewing to allow me a word. "Your mother has made it known to me that she cancelled our annual trip in honor of Tyelkormo's begetting, due to my unforeseen invalidity. If you interest remains, then I would like to reinstate this trip."

Tyelkormo leaps from his chair with a shriek of delight, upsetting Macalaurë's water glass, and runs to embrace me.

I look at the grins on Macalaurë's and Carnistir's faces and kiss Tyelkormo's hair. Again, I try to meet Nelyo's eye, but he is pushed his green beans around on his plate and pointedly avoiding my gaze. "Then we shall depart tomorrow."

 ~oOo~

After the midday meal, I give the children afternoon leave and retreat to my office. I am restless and eager to go to the forge, but my five days' absence and our pending journey means that much must be done. I throw back the drapes and let Laurelin's splendor pour into the darkened room and leave open the door to allow for cross-ventilation with the windows in the hall. My three ledgers lie on my desk. In each, I keep track of an aspect of our household: the inventory of provisions, the lessons that I teach the children and apprentices, the crafts that I have finished and traded. Each is marked with a red slip of satin, and I open to the last entry to discover that Nelyo has kept the ledgers while I was gone, recording each detail, each provision used, in his clean, meticulous handwriting.

There is a knock on the door, and I look up to see Nelyo standing there, an uncertain smile on his face. "I came to tell you that I kept the ledgers while you were away. I hope you do not mind."

"I do not mind. Thank you, Nelyo." I circle my desk and kiss his cheek in gratitude, but he ducks away, his cheeks flushing. His face, I see, is very pale. "Nelyo?" I ask, and he looks away.

"I did not go into town yesterday, as you would have," he says in a tight voice, "so we do not have many eggs or much cream left."

"No mind. It was serendipity, for if we are leaving tomorrow—"

"I just could not—" he interrupts, breaking off suddenly as though he has said something that he should not. I place my hands alongside his face, and his cheeks burn. He will not meet my eyes. Nelyo is the only one of my children who looks at me when I discipline him. His silver eyes never leave mine, no matter how loud my voice or how harsh my words. He never cries—as do his brothers—as though he knows that his tears will feed my anger. His eyes stay fixed on mine, until my anger cools in their silvery depths like water. But he will not look at me now.

"Nelyo," I demand, "what is it?"

He ducks free from my hands. "Nothing. But I am sorry," he says, a look flickering in my direction, bowing slightly as though pledging fealty to a lord, before turning and retreating down the hall.

I consider pursuing him, then remember the many times that I fled my father's office in tears when I was a child and he followed, and I would resentfully hurl objects behind me as I ran, as though I could deter him from catching me in his arms and witnessing my shameful agony; the only thing I accomplished was breaking many fine and beautiful things. Always he caught me. If only I'd known how hard it is for a father to keep from pursuing his child in pain, then perhaps I would have been more empathetic and I would not have screamed, kicked, and bitten when at last his arms closed around me.

I grip the doorjamb as though physically restraining myself from following Nelyo and watch him stride down the hall, away from me. His back is straight, his shoulders thrown back in a parody of his normal proud, upright stance, but I see some agony lurking beneath it, for Nelyo's elegance is natural, never rigid, as it is now. I step into the hall, wishing for the days when Nelyo was small enough to hold in my lap and naïve enough to have his tears soothed with kisses, and make myself turn away from him and dash up the back stairway to the bedrooms on the second floor.

Nerdanel is coming out of the room that Tyelkormo shares with Findekáno, several children's dress robes draped over her forearm. Before I can ask her about Nelyo, she sighs and says, "Fëanáro, I sent word already to Oromë that we would not be coming."

"No mind," I reply distractedly. "I will ask for the fastest rider in Formenos. Oromë will know by tomorrow."

She sighs. "I wish that you would postpone this for a week—"

"Tyelkormo's begetting day is tomorrow."

"Yes, but I have nothing ready, nothing packed. I haven't even pressed our dress robes." She holds aloft a green robe finished with gold trim that belongs to Tyelkormo to illustrate her point.

"We do not need dress robes."

"Fëanáro, we are going to a home of the Valar. You would have us looking like paupers?"

"I care not how we look," I say, growing frustrated.

"Not care? Fëanáro—" She trades her next words for an exasperated sigh and pushes past me and into our suite, knocking my shoulder hard enough to throw me momentarily from balance. I follow her through the sitting room and into our bedroom, where she is laying the children's robes across the bed and angrily appraising them while massaging her forehead.

"Nerdanel, what is the matter with Nelyo?" I ask her back.

She whirls and speaks in plodding, simple words as though instructing a child. "Nothing is the matter with Nelyo, Fëanáro."

"No, I—"

"Whatever you have heard or witnessed or sensed—or whatever it is that gives you such ideas—would you trust me for once and forget it? It is nothing more than one of your imaginings."

"Imaginings?"

"Do not act stupid, Fëanáro, for we both know that you are not." We stare at each other for a long moment. I feel a million words seething inside of me, but I know that if I open my mouth, they will explode as rage, and we will not stop until we have both hurt the other. I cover my mouth with my hand as though that will help to hold them in and turn away. Please, I beg myself, wishing time to revert two hours, when I lay in bed with my wife in my arms and nothing but love for her in my heart. "Nothing is wrong with Nelyo," she says in a voice that is only slightly more sympathetic, speaking to my back. "Trust me."

I cannot even trust my voice enough to tell her of his strange behavior without fearing that the words might explode instead against her, verbal shrapnel that hurts worse than if I took my hands to her face.

Imaginings?

She makes concessions first. She always does. "Fëanáro, I'm sorry. Really, there's nothing wrong with Nelyo. And I'm sorry that I snapped at you. It's just … you're so impatient. You don't give thought to what other people must endure in order to serve your whims." I do not respond. I do not even turn to look at her. I hear her sigh, this time with weariness, as one sighs at a querulous child. "No mind, Fëanáro. The work will get done, and we will have a great time, as we always do."

I am impatient. I wish that I were not, but like my gray eyes and my black hair, it is part of who I am, and I can no sooner discard it then I can my height or my gender. But unlike these features, my impatience is more akin to Macalaurë's voice: It cannot be traced. Even in Nelyo's most complicated inheritance maps, my impatience is an inexplicable fluke. My mother and my father were both exceedingly patient. Neither felt haunted as I do, as though life will end before I accomplish everything that lies in my future. For many years after my mother's death, I would find unfinished bits of embroidery tucked away around the house, and I would imagine her leaving them to go to my father or tend to me, knowing that they would remain to be finished centuries later, if she chose, not knowing that the infant who took her time and attention had also stolen her life. My impatience is the reason that I wed Nerdanel when we were still children, why Nelyo was conceived only two years later. Why, where most young couples would forestall the physical pleasures of marriage until they were older and ready for children, I could not. Nelyo was born beside a river and not in my father's palace because I was impatient and refused to leave the mines of the north until I had satisfied my curiosity for what lay beneath the earth, until Nerdanel was so swollen with child that we could not make it safely home to Tirion. My wife is only a few years past her hundredth yet wearied already because of my impatience, because my youngest son is no sooner weaned and walking and I am wishing for another, as I wish to conceive my fifth son even now, every time I lie with her.

I feel these thoughts skitter into the air between us, and Nerdanel comes up behind me and circles my waist with her arms. Her face presses between my shoulder blades. "Fëanáro," she says, and I wait—holding my breath—for her to utter wise words—but all she says is "I love you."

~oOo~

The House of Oromë is a three-day ride southwest of Formenos. Nerdanel and I used to make it in one, but we traveled swiftly and lightly—with only one extra set of clothes and provisions to last only between towns—and did not have five children to mind. There is much to be done and—in an effort to appease Nerdanel, who seems to be doing most of it—I resist the urge to go to the forge and instead help her press the children's dress robes.

"You do not have to do this, Fëanáro," she keeps saying, although I feel also her relief that I do.

Like the foundations of the earth shifting before an earthquake, so can I feel a gentle sliding, grinding now beneath the face of our marriage. No one else would see it, but I can feel it as animals sense an earthquake, and the world becomes still and silent, like Nerdanel and I, the only sounds the whisper of our matched breaths and the slip of the irons against cloth. We are listening for the misalignment, waiting for the ground to move beneath us, fooling ourselves that warning can forestall destiny.

I want to stop it, but it has already been set in motion, and it is only a matter of time before the shifts beneath the surface translate into something far more destructive.

Nerdanel sighs as she presses Carnistir's robes. She insists that the best seamstresses in Tirion make our sons' dress clothes, the clothes in which they are presented to the Valar. It was at my insistence that we would take none of the robes on display in the shops for Carnistir but would have something custom-made to suit him—nothing sewn in the whimsical pastels in which most parents wrap their young children—but in dark colors that flatter his hair and complexion. Carnistir's dress robes are red and black, and people usually hesitate when they first see him, as though unsure of how to approach a child who is not clad as one would a dress doll, but I find him frighteningly beautiful, like a thunderstorm.

Misalignment: I can feel our bond, but I can no longer hear her thoughts. Our very presence in each other's lives seems to grind and no longer fit. Like panicked animals, our breaths catch, our muscles tense. We wish to flee. But where?

Nerdanel speaks first. Her voice surprises me; without her thoughts in my head, I forget that she is a being independent of me, that we are capable of speech without first sharing the thought with the other. "I believe that Carnistir will soon outgrow these," she muses, and the lightness of her tone betrays the seriousness of her intent. "Perhaps we should get him new robes when we return home?"

"I'll speak to a seamstress about having a similar design made," I say, not looking up from where I am diligently reattaching a fastener onto the sensible blue and gray robes that Nerdanel picked for Macalaurë, praying to the flames within me not to erupt. Please please please …

"I was thinking, Fëanáro …" She stops and intensifies her efforts. She concentrates on the robes and does not look at me. "I was thinking of having the same design done in a different color."

"You would have him dressed as a daffodil, then? Or a bed of tulips?"

"No, I was considering white, maybe?"

"You want to dress a small child in white? Do you wish to exhaust all of my means on dress clothes for Carnistir? Because the way he eats, he will need a new set after every meal."

"Well, not black and red this time, Fëanáro."

"Why not? Do black and red not suit him?"

"They do. It's not that." She sighs, and I can feel her searching for words. "It's disrespectful."

I laugh. I cannot help it. Since I met Nerdanel, the root of most of our arguments comes down to this, the Valar: her reverence for them and my indifference. Our first fight occurred when I refused to join her family for morning prayers. "The Valar are our hosts!" she yelled at me. "We owe them our gratitude!" To which I replied that hosts who required prayers for good favor did not seek guests but prisoners.

"Stop laughing," Nerdanel demands. "I am serious."

"As am I. You would sooner our youngest son be ugly than dress in colors that might offend the Valar? Fine! We will take no dress clothes at all, as was my original intent! They are too cumbersome on the road. And Carnistir's white tunics and tan trousers will surely please Oromë."

She keeps her voice low, so that the children will not hear, but her tone seethes with resentment. "If you have any idea how disrespectful you sound, more like a heathen than a high prince—"

"I see no reason to put on silly frippery for the Valar."

"You have no problem dressing for your father's festivals!" she snips.

"My father, Nerdanel," I point out coolly, "is the king. My respect for him at our worst moments exceeds that which I have ever felt for the Valar."

There is stunned silence before she speaks. "The Valar brought us here! They have given us the luxuries we enjoy!"

"Perhaps, they should not have done those things. Eru awakened the first Elves at Cuiviénen, in the Outer Lands. If Eru intended us to live in Valinor, the first Elves would have awakened here."

"If not for them, our children would know nothing but darkness and go to sleep each night, fearing capture by Orcs. They provide for us, Fëanáro. I am grateful for that."

"The Valar provide for us? Did the Valar build our home? Do the Valar feed our children? Procure their clothes? See to their education? No, they do not, Nerdanel. We do these things. We provide for ourselves."

"We shall not save ourselves from the Dark Lord."

At this I pause. Our eyes meet over the yards of silk and satin, the silly adornments. I grin. I would laugh but for the ice in my heart at the thought of his name. "Melkor dwells in the Outer Lands no longer, Nerdanel. He dwells in Mandos. In Valinor."

She bites her lip and looks down at Carnistir's robes, pressing them with a ferocity I know she would like to wield against me. "You would have forsaken the Great Journey then? You would have remained in the Outer Lands?"

"I believe I would have. I would be Avarin, and I would make their civilization the greatest on Arda. My talents are not constrained to Valinor."

Tears are dropping onto the cloth in front of her, but she erases them with the hot iron as they fall.

I wish I could feel her thoughts, but her spirit has wisely retracted from mine, from my fire. I look away from the bits of steam I imagine I can see rising from the luxurious red and black satin robes.

"Atar?"

The voice comes from the doorway behind me. I hear Nerdanel sniffle and duck her head to hide her tears. She will not cry in front of the children.

I set the iron aside and turn. Macalaurë stands in the doorway, tense, sensing the blackness between his mother and me, his nervous eyes wide, his strong voice uncharacteristically timid.

"Yes, Macalaurë?"

"Annawendë is here. She wishes to speak with you. I told her to wait in the parlor."

"I will be there in a moment, Macalaurë," I say, and he flees before my sentence is entirely finished. I watch him go with regret.

When did my family begin to fear and despise me?

"We do not fear and despise you," Nerdanel whispers. She has raised her eyes to look at me. They are shot through with blood; she must have been crying harder than I realized. "We love you too much."

I reach across the table and touch her damp cheek. Its curve fills my palm perfectly. In our youth, how we used to search for such petty perfections as evidence that we'd each been created with the other in mind! Now that seems silly, for what is the value of a perfect bodily fit if her spirit cannot bear to abide with mine? She turns her face and kisses my palm.

"Go to Annawendë. I will be here when you return."

I trust this, and I go.

~oOo~

Annawendë waits in the parlor, like Macalaurë told me, as though she is a guest—not a resident—in our home. Yet, for the last few days, she has not been a resident of my home but of the town, where she and the other apprentices are currently assisting the lords in readying for the winter. She does not sit on the furniture—rich brocade, gifted us by Verkaturo when Nerdanel and I decided to build our second home here—but paces the length of the room, avoiding the silk carpet at the center. From afar, she might be mistaken for a man: Her hair is scraggly and tied back roughly, she is clad in the plain tunic and trousers of a metalsmith, and her bearing is neither soft nor graceful. But all of these things are betrayed by her soft curves, curves that never fail to remind me of Nerdanel in our youth, exceedingly impractical and beautiful on one such as her.

I have arrived soundlessly, so she does not note my presence until she turns in her pacing and sees me. "Fëanáro," she says, and she shows not alarm but resignation, as if she knew I would be there. She smiles in the soft, crooked way that is Annawendë. "Thank you for coming."

I do not demand the quaking reverence from my apprentices that some masters do. In fact, when interviewing for this last appointment, I was put off by those who were quick to kneel and call me "my lord." Annawendë was neither. She is rough in the way of Elves from the far south of Aman, those who know how to work the hard heat of the land and little else, whose bodies are accustomed to soaring mountains and scarce rains. I was more surprised by Nelyo's desire for her. Nelyo tends to prefer the manicured, polished daughters of my father's lords, and Annawendë is none of these things. Yet I rejoice, for no one else would I want more to call a daughter-in-law and mother my heir.

"Of course I came, Annawendë. Did you not send for me?"

"I did, but Macalaurë told me that you are leaving tomorrow and are very busy. I will not take much of you time."

"Take what you will. Not much remains to be done. Won't you sit?" I gesture to the sofa, but she shakes her head.

"I am dirty from work today. I do not want to ruin your upholstery."

"We will walk then?"

"I would like that."

We walk outside, both naturally gravitating towards the forge. I like Annawendë too because she does not insist on touching me as we walk, as do the daughters of the lords. She does not need to hold my arm or kiss my cheek or touch my hand. Such affections I reserve for my wife alone. Annawendë and I walk as two men, with three feet of air between us and our arms crossed and kept neatly to ourselves.

Annawendë does not waste time by having me coax words out of her. "I have come to ask for your leave to return to my home, Fëanáro."

I could not have been more surprised if she confessed to have been my stepmother in disguise all along, trying to win my favor by learning the arts of the forge. It is a moment before I can catch the words whirring around in my busy mind that form my response. Even then, the response is sadly inadequate for one usually revered as a great orator. "For … ever?"

"I am not sure how long it will be. I like to think not forever, but possibly, yes."

"May I ask why?"

"Naturally, you may. You are my master. That I should even entertain the idea …"

We reach the forge and stop walking. I lean against the wall, and she stands opposite me, with her arms crossed under her breasts and her face turned gravely to the ground.

"I am in love with your son, Fëanáro."

"I know this, and I rejoice in it. I would love nothing more than to have you as a daughter-in-law."

"Maitimo asked me to marry him. Actually," she says, with blunt, defiant honesty, meeting my eyes for the first time since we arrived at the forge, "we nearly did marry."

I feel my eyebrows pop up as though on their own accord. The whirling thoughts grow more frantic, and I open and close my mouth a few times but can make no reply.

"You are surprised by this? Your son is not innocent. You know this."

"I do." I want to lighten the mood and say that the entire city ofTirionknows it, but I do not. I press my hands together and wait for her to go on.

"I have not been entirely honest to Maitimo. Nor to you, I suppose, although I defend myself in saying that my deceit has been more an error of omission rather than an intentional lie. But I cannot accept his betrothal until I remedy this predicament. And, to do this, I will need to return home."

"I grant my leave, Annawendë, but I wish to know why you fear you may not be back."

She smiles gently, crookedly. "I know not what my heart may find at home. I did not come here expecting to fall in love."

"And you will alert us when you know if you will return?"

She shakes her head. "It will not be a conscious decision, Fëanáro. Surely, you of all people understand this. I will know that I have chosen your son only when my feet carry me on the road to him. Otherwise, I would choose him now. If I am not back in Tirion by the ending of winter, then my heart will remain in my homeland, and Maitimo will have to wed another."

But Nelyo wants no other! I want to cry, but it is not my place to intercede, so I nod. "When will you depart?"

"I will be gone by your return from the House of Oromë."

I force myself to smile and say, "Go with my blessings, then, Annawendë."

"Thank you, Fëanáro. Thank you also for not asking more questions. My heart is sick with the answers. I have given Maitimo leave to tell you, if he desires. And if you do not want me back, then you need only send word."

"Do not look for my messenger," I tell her, "for he will not come."

~oOo~

There was a time when I was making a shield for Manwë, for the Festival of the Trees. I was young—not even at my majority—and not long returned to Tirion, and so the honor was prestigious. For days, weeks, I worked, never satisfied with the results, doing bits of it over and over until even I began not to see the difference. It was Nerdanel who stayed my hand: "It is perfect. Let it go."

Now, I stand in the doorway, having crept there unheard by Nelyo, who stares at a book of which he has not turned a page in the ten minutes that I have been standing here. He might be one of his mother's statues, he sits so still.

It used to be that Nelyo would run to me for every little thing: Every injury or slight, real or imagined, he would tumble into my arms, weeping against my shoulder. But now, when his hurt is such that I cannot perceive it, he does not come, and I am afraid to approach.

Let it go.

But he is not a shield made of silver and gold. He is my child. It is not so easy.

And so even as my feet go to turn and carry me back to Nerdanel, to the work that is still undone, I step into the library.

I have learned that if I leave my hand closed on the rings long enough, then I cease to feel them. The metal presses cold against the warmth of my skin but heats to the temperature of my body until they feel as innocuous across my palm as the folds of my own flesh. I close my eyes and imagine them gone for real. I imagine the love that stings my spirit gone as well, for something joyful is useless in actuality if it wounds in equal measure. But I can no more take the love from my heart than I can make the rings disappear from my hand, although I squeeze both until my whole body seems to ache with the effort.

Lying across my bed, I open my hand and look at them. Such simple artifacts. Two silver rings, one slightly smaller than the other and able to fit inside of it. They are marred by minor imperfections that I have memorized in the last five days, so intently have I studied them, but such is to be expected, given that I have not my father's gifts in the forge and only a passing proficiency. I shift my hand, and the rings shift, pealing lightly against each other. My heart thuds heavily, painfully at the thought of destroying them. I wish I had never made them.

My bedroom door opens, and I make myself sit up slightly in my bed, propping my back against the pillows that I have piled along the headboard, closing my hand on the rings, but it is only Macalaurë. He smiles to see me awake and carries a tray into my room, setting it on my dresser so that he may lock the door behind him. It is late, and he is dressed in the loose clothes that he wears for sleeping—gray, of course, I note wryly—his hair unfettered and still slightly damp from his bath. He carries the tray to my bedside, and although I will myself not to look, I feel my neck crane slightly to discern its contents: a pot of tea and a plate laden with the sweet biscuits Amil makes that I love.

"You barely ate any supper tonight," Macalaurë says. "If we are leaving tomorrow, then you will need your strength." He pours a cup of tea. There is only one cup, I notice.

"You do not intend to join me?"

He smiles and draws a second cup from the pocket of his loosely fitting trousers. "I would not do so uninvited," he says, pouring a cup also for himself and adding a lump of sugar, how he likes it. Into mine, he drops a slice of lemon and holds out the cup to me. I cannot take it, though, not with the rings squeezed inside my right fist.

He sighs and—setting the cup on the bedside table—unfolds the fingers of my right hand as one might an obstinate child who refuses to relinquish a toy. "Why do you do this to yourself, Nelyo?" he asks, letting the rings rattle onto the bedside table and clasping my fingers around my teacup instead. "Why do you insist on dwelling on it? She has not forsaken you."

"Not yet. She will, though." I look at the rings on the table, overlapping slightly, beautiful in the silver light of night. "They will have to be melted," I say, ignoring the love that I have for these objects, these objects of my own devising, into which I poured so much hope.

"No, Nelyo," Macalaurë protests.

"She will not come back, Macalaurë." I make my voice remain calm.

My head is heavy, as though filled with mercury, sliding around through my sinuses in the place of air. How I will survive the trip tomorrow, I do not know. Probably in the same way that I have survived the last five days, caring for the children when I wish that I could be curled up in the warm, black solitude of my bed. But with Atar having one of his spells and Amil distressed by it, it was I who cooked the children's meals, who tutored them daily in the library, who gave them their baths at night. At times, forcing my face to smile in recognition of one of their minor accomplishments seemed akin to lifting an anvil, but I did it. Last night, after Tyelkormo and Carnistir tucked themselves into bed with Atar, and Macalaurë went to play his songs into the night, Findekáno came to me with one of Atar's illustrated lore books in his hands, asking for a story. He curled against my side and fell asleep there as I read, and eventually, I let the book fall to the floor and held his body close like a small child holds a doll, weeping silently into the spill of dark, silky hair on my pillow, feeling more alone and unloved than I have ever felt in my life.

The pressure is building again now, inside my head, and much to my embarrassment, two tears trickle down my cheeks and drop into my tea. I hope that Macalaurë has not seen them, but the two rebellious drops have encouraged their brethren still waiting behind my eyes to do the same, and soon my face is soaked and my hands shake so hard that I scald myself.

"Nelyo!" Macalaurë takes my cup from me, and in the next instant, my face is pressed to his chest, and his arms are wrapped around my head. "Nelyo, Nelyo. Oh, Nelyo." He speaks nothing more than my name—he does not try to offer words of comfort, as Amil would do, nor does he try to stay my tears, as would Atar—but strokes my hair as I sob into his chest with a voice too rough and hoarse to be my own.

My head feels lighter when I am finished, as though the last five days of phony contentment had actual weight, but I am ashamed of how my face must look, streaked by tears and eyes red and swollen, so I leave my head against Macalaurë's chest. He is bony and it is rather uncomfortable, but I can hear his heart beating, and that comforts me. "I'm sorry," I say, and my voice is nasal and muffled by the quantities of snot clogging up my nose. Macalaurë rummages through his pocket and pulls out a scrap of cloth that once might have been a handkerchief. "Blow," he instructs, and I blow my nose while he holds the handkerchief for me, as though I am a small child. When my nose is clear, he tucks the cloth back into his pocket, and his arms circle me again, as though there is nothing strange about holding his nearly adult brother in his lap like a child, especially the brother that everyone names as being strong and regal enough to serve as a worthy heir to our perfect father.

~oOo~ 

I am not skilled in craft. The many years of training that I had with my father were directed to one singular purpose, the fruits of which lie overlapping on my bedside table.

I went to the forge with my father for the first time when I was twelve years old, the youngest of my brothers to do so, but Atar was eager to mold his heir like he would sculpt a piece of stone in his likeness. And I—still stinging from the shock of a new baby brother who could now walk and talk and demand my share of our parents' attention as well as his own—was eager to be molded. I felt pride at dressing like Atar. I took to wearing red shirts—although they did not flatter my hair and complexion—and had to be coaxed out of my apron and forge boots every night for supper. I refused to let Amil braid my hair so that I may later tie it back from my face with a scrap of cloth, as Atar did. I followed closely on his heels, so close that his scent was in my nose all day and I would dream of him at night, compartmentalizing the things he told me as one might sort socks, by design and color, so that they could be retrieved on a whim later. I took pleasure in retrieving the nuggets of information that Atar gave me. This metal is malleable; this alloy is brittle. This tends to take a reddish tinge under the flame, while this remains pure and silver. I was not afraid of the fires of the forge, as was Macalaurë, although I did not relish the heat either, as did Atar. I was content to stand and work for long periods of time, but by the day's end, fresh air was bliss and my body cried for water.

In short, I did not have the inclination for my father's work.

This was a slow realization for both of us. My progress was slow at first. Although I understood the scientific concepts and I had the dexterity for our work—as well as the love of learning—I could not amalgamate these virtues into progress. Atar would grow frustrated and chide my failings, and I would grow frustrated and retort, and I took to spending more time in the library as punishment for my insolence, denying the relief I felt to have a pen in my hand in the place of a hammer. I took Atar's work in metallurgy and geology—fair work, although scant in places, for Atar does not have the patience for long plunges into academia—and added frivolous expansions because I knew that it would irritate him. I argued against his theory that atoms were the smallest component of elements—proposing that something smaller existed within them and something smaller within that too—without any real reasoning besides a desire to force him to hear my voice above the hammers of his forge.

But he was not irritated. My hours in the forge were reduced—in part because Macalaurë was old enough to take my place as the inheritor of our father's skills—and he would assign me harder and harder questions to research, and I relished every time I could walk into his study with an answer.

My days in the forge—limited though they were—became more consumed with articulating scientific nuances with Atar than with actually making things. More often than not, he would give his commissioned assignments to his apprentices and assistants and we would lock the door to his laboratory and become so engrossed in the details of science that Amil would have to knock on the windows to get us to come and eat the supper that she had prepared in Atar's absence.

Once, in the company of Grandfather Mahtan, I lamented about what a disappointment I must be as the son of two renowned craftsmen, as unskilled as I was. Hands like two mud bricks, I said. Grandfather must have said something to Atar because he pulled me aside at supper that night, his hot hand like a manacle around my arm, almost hurting, and hissed, "What is this madness? That I should be ashamed of you?"

When I whispered what I had said to Grandfather, Atar's hand tightened on my arm, and his voice became as hard as the steel that he mastered, and he said, "That we have begotten a loremaster and a scholar is an embarrassment to neither your mother's nor my heritage."

It was only a few months later that a black time came upon my family. Macalaurë and I were whisked away by Grandfather Finwë's driver that day, and were taken to Tirion and placed under the care of Indis, and although we both waited for the inevitable conflagration, Atar did not protest. In fact, we heard naught from Atar, Amil, or Grandfather Finwë, although Indis assured us that they were well when we asked. We stayed for a week, living like the princes that we are in title with our step-grandmother and then-unmarried uncles, and without lessons and chores to clutter our days, I could lose myself in the royal library, learning facts to impress Atar when we returned home.

But the home to which we returned was not that which we had left. Amil stayed in bed all day and the father who cared for us was not Atar. Yes, he had Atar's face and hands but he also had a habit of drifting so deeply into his own thoughts that Macalaurë and I could not rouse him, even when he stared at us with open eyes. Other times, he laughed and smiled in much the same way as Atar, but his voice was different, as though being heard through a thick, wooden door. Macalaurë would not sleep alone, and I dreamt strangely that year, prone to visions where Atar would come to our bedroom in the middle of the night and lift us up to hold us in his lap and weep into our hair and whisper angrily in an ugly language that sounded a lot like the Valarin that he would teach me in later years. During the day, he would sit with Amil, and Macalaurë and I would go to the library: Macalaurë would play songs on the big harp that Atar had been given as a wedding present while I devoured volume after volume of Atar's books, filling my head with information until I thought it might explode. During that year, we were not required to work in the forge, and Atar's apprentices were given leave. Sometimes, as he was cooking our suppers—senseless meals that might consist of only vegetables or four different dishes involving turkey—I would stand close beside him as I had in the forge years prior, breathing his scent—more metallic now, the odor of stress and pain and unwashed flesh—and reciting the words that I had learned from books.

"Very good," he said, after each recitation, staring into the pots as though waiting for his destiny to surface amid the boiling rice and beans we'd eaten for four days in a row now. "Very good."

This was also the time when Atar began forging swords, first repairing those that had belonged to our grandfather in the Outer Lands, then devising his own. He worked at all hours, as though no longer aware of time, no longer making jewelry for our mother or things that he could use in trade but only swords, and soon a forest of slender, deadly blades filled his closets.

Things slowly changed. I came out of the library one day and found Amil in the parlor, asleep on the sofa while Atar knelt beside her. Their eyes were closed, but his lips moved over her face, reverently, as though tasting an exotic dish, and I ducked away, knowing that I was not supposed to see this.

After that, lessons resumed and became more orderly. No longer did we follow Atar to the forge when his whims demanded it or go riding or hunting or spend the afternoon in the library. Now everything was scheduled; even rest was an allotted luxury. The apprentices returned, and Macalaurë and I were given regular lessons in science, language, history, craft, music, riding, oration—not a moment passed unfilled, as though Amil and Atar could no longer bear the idle silence and relied on our busy chatter and recitations to keep it at bay.

No longer did I pass my forge time in the laboratory. No, Atar carefully scheduled our laboratory time too and marked its passing with an hourglass so that he would never again forget supper and leave its preparation to Amil. He spoke now of passing my basic, proficient, and master's exams and gave deliberate assignments. I was not skilled in the forge, but I could make farming tools during my days there or hammer out a basic shape in metal that he would finish. To this day, I spend a half-day beside him in the forge, and although my proficiency has grown with time—now I make axe blades and basic hunting knives—I do so only at his bidding, simple assignments that allow him to spend time on his more complicated commissions and inspirations.

But last week, I stepped into the forge on my own accord for the first time since I was a small child, a parody of Atar, with my dirty red tunic and my copper-colored hair tied back in a strip of cloth.

I went in the middle of the night, when my presence would not have to be explained to Atar or any of the apprentices—especially Annawendë. I have been working in the forge long enough to be able to locate basic materials: the ring molds, crucibles, the bars of silver that Atar acquires in trade with the Teleri. I measured my ring size using the tool that Atar keeps in his desk drawer, but I had to guess Annawendë's. No mind—I had held her hands, memorizing the contours of her body, enough times to be relatively certain. If I was off slightly, then I would have Atar resize it for her. If Atar had made the rings for me, then he would have made them so that they would adjust themselves to our fingers, but I do not possess such skill.

Casting the rings was not difficult, although they were not perfect, and I blistered my fingertips in my eagerness to hold them. Many hours more I spent engraving our names inside the bands, although this I did in the safety of my bedroom, with the door locked.

It is not the first time that I have asked for a maiden's hand in marriage. When I asked Laurewë, it was Atar who made our rings, and they were beautiful: two interwoven bands made to represent our interwoven spirits, engraved with our names and the date I proposed to her. Atar and I pored over his sketches for hours, pondering the perfect design, seeking the ideal style of calligraphy for the engraving, as giddy with happiness as two maidens blushed by first love. There was no way to hide my failure then, no way to avoid telling Atar that she had declined my troth. It was well known that I had been considering engagement to Laurewë for some time, and when our affair ended, my sadness and shame was a spectacle for all of Tirion.

Perhaps, by forging Annawendë's and my rings in secret, I was dooming our betrothal to fail from lack of trust in her faithfulness, inspired by the agony Laurewë had caused me. Perhaps, if I had commissioned Atar, as I had the first time, and my joy had been shared, then things would have turned out differently.

But it was not a secret. Macalaurë knew.

Amil used to tell Macalaurë and me—when we would complain about those things beyond anyone's control—that it serves no good purpose to look back on our regrets and try to twist spurious events into a different outcome. "The result would be no different," she would say, "and even if it was, we cannot regain even a single moment that has passed. It is best to save our laments for that which we might change."

I wonder: Is this one of those times?

~oOo~

It was the night of the meteor shower. Midsummer's night.

When I was still very small and Macalaurë was barely walking, Atar bundled us into cloaks and warm shirts and took us to watch the meteor shower that Varda sends across the firmament each year in honor of midsummer's night. In Tirion, nearer to Ezellohar, Telperion is too bright, and the meteors are nearly impossible to see. That does not stop young lovers from sprawling in the grass outside the city, watching the sky, under the superstition that to see a meteor on that night means that the one who lies beside you will one day be your spouse. (The number of meteors you see after is supposed to be the number of children you will have, but I doubt enough eyes are turned to the sky after spotting the first meteor to maintain accurate count of this.) Away from the overwhelming brightness of the trees, however, the meteor shower is a spectacle to behold, as though Varda has animated the stars and coaxed them into a dance across the heavens. Cocky with assured love, I was certain that we would see meteors that night, confident in not needing to rely upon a superstition to tell me who would be my wife and further certain that our passion for each other would gift us with children beyond count.

Annawendë was eager. I took this as a promising sign. She is not from Tirion but she must have known of the superstitions; she must have known that I intended to propose to her that night. Indeed, she did seem to laugh more readily when I came to her room to collect her, to take her to the stable, where I'd already readied our horses, prompting her to swat me on the arm and scoff at my "chivalrous insult to her ability to tack her own horse."

On the back of my horse, I had tied a bottle of one of Atar's better wines and a roll of blankets, for even in the summer, Formenos is cold at night. I saw her eying the blankets as I tightened her mare's girth, her lip tucked seductively between her teeth and her eyes eager and bright. With my parents, three younger brothers, and three other apprentices as constant installations in the house, we had not found much time for intimacy since arriving in Formenos. Indeed, we even adhered to a strict albeit unspoken rule that our hands should never drift below the waist of the other's body—fearful always that chatty Tyelkormo or jealous Vorondil or sneaky Carnistir will barge in at an inopportune moment—although my newfound chastity did nothing to quell my desire for her. At times, I would have to lock my fingers into the sheets of my bed to keep from undressing her, and once, the unexpected pleasure of a kiss delivered to the tip of my ear as her hips pressed mine brought me to embarrassing and unfulfilling climax inside of my trousers.

We talked of trivial things as we rode, of happenings in the town and in the family, of Macalaurë's girlfriend-by-correspondence and of a maiden in Tirion to whom Vorondil had taken a liking at the last midnight feast. "Perhaps he'll return there," Annawendë conjectured, and I raised protest, crying, "Vorondil is a friend!"

"A rather tedious friend. Better her ears filled with his constant chatter than ours," Annawendë said, and we both laughed so hard that we nearly fell from our horses.

As we neared the hilltop where we would watch the meteor shower, Annawendë said, "Your brother implied that there is superstition attached to the meteors in Tirion?"

So she had not known. "Yes, young couples become betrothed on this night. The falling stars are said to tell their fates."

She looked down at the withers of her horse as she spoke. "It is a shame, then, that you are only forty-seven—too young for betrothal for a prince of the Noldor—and shall not be able to partake in the tradition in its entirety."

I said nothing.

"But your father married young, did he not?"

"My father and mother wed at forty-two. When my father was of marriageable age, I was already six years old," I told her, as though this pardoned my own desire to marry quickly and soon. In actuality, I suppose it does the opposite. My grandparents are all eager to have for me the wedding that they could not have for their own impetuous children, who took to heart the proclamation of the Valar that Eru alone need witness the union of willing spirits.

"In my land," said Annawendë, "the night of meteors is the night when the most unplanned weddings occur." She smiled at me brazenly, as though in challenge. Your tradition says that we shall become betrothed. Mine says that we shall marry.

My body grew flushed at the thought.

We reached the hilltop as the first meteor zipped across the sky. I spread one blanket on the ground, reserving the others to cover us once we lay down, and poured two hearty glasses of wine. We lay upon our backs on the ground with some space between us, although the heat of our bodies mingled beneath the blankets, tempting us to lean into the other's touch as the meteors set the silvery sky ablaze with light.

"Maitimo," she whispered, leaning into me, her head on my shoulder and her hand at last touching me, pressing the center of my chest. My eyes closed to the meteors overhead as her lips brushed my throat and her hand slipped down my belly, nearing the waistband of my trousers that were suddenly unbearably tight in the groin.

I turned to her, and in that instant, the meteors were forgotten and all of Eä might have centered on two young lovers, beneath a blanket on a hilltop. My lips devoured hers, our tongues filling the other's mouth, our teeth nipping at the tender flesh of lips, evoking only bare glances of pain. Our hips thrust into each other in a frantic rhythm, our bodies driven mad by the layers of clothing between us, her leg tossed around my waist and drawing me into her. My hands were restless and could not be sated by the feel of her body through clothing, and they tore open her tunic and pushed the cloth away from her full, muscular breasts, my thumbs pressing nipples hard and proud in the cold night air and slipping down to a flat, firm belly and the laces of her riding breeches, stubborn beneath my trembling fingers.

A thought seemed to occur to me then, as I undid the tie and slipped my fingers beneath the laces to loosen them. I stopped kissing her, pulling away a bit abruptly. "May I?" I asked, for we had not yet touched each other so intimately. My words were breathy and frantic.

She laughed and, taking my face in her hands, kissed my lips. "Maitimo, you are so polite. You do honor to your people. Please, do what you will."

What you will …

What I would do is undress us both and lie atop her beneath the warm blankets, with the meteors zipping overhead, and make her my wife in the tradition of the unplanned marriages of her land. But I am of Tirion, and although I desire to wed almost more than I can stand, I am a prince of my people, and my body is stayed by the fear of retribution that would come to my father's house if another of us came home from the north with a bride on his arm.

I knelt beside her and turned my attention back to the laces, loosening them until I could slip her breeches and her underpants from her hips with a single push. Although I have undressed in front of her before, it was the first time that I had seen her naked, and I had to force myself not to stare and make her uncomfortable. My eyes quickly took in her strong, slim thighs, the bit of dark hair between her legs that hid from me the secret places of her body. A blush was already heating her face and chest, despite the cold air. I lay back down at her side, and she whispered so softly that I could barely discern her words, "I am hardly suitable for a prince, Maitimo."

My body did not know that. My desire was throbbing hard enough for me to count my heartbeats by it. I have lain beside the daughters of lords and nobles, yet never had I felt so compelled, as though the lust of my body was driven by something deeper within me. Even with Laurewë, my desire was not so strong. I took Annawendë into my arms, maddened by the feel of her bare flesh, and whispered back: "No, Annawendë. You are beautiful. I love you."

I had yet to make such an outright declaration of love to her, and she was surprised, her gray eyes wide and frightened in the dark. "Maitimo, I—"

I kissed her before she could finish, our mouths meeting again and again, never tiring. I turned her onto her back and parted her thighs, seeking that secret fold of flesh inside of her that—when at last I brushed it with my finger—made her gasp and buck against my hand, clenching my shoulders and crying, "Maitimo!" I slid my finger back and slipped it inside of her, expecting resistant, tight flesh and finding none.

I kissed her to hide my surprise, slipping a second finger inside of her, waiting for her body to grow tense or for her to murmur with discomfort, but she did not. She is already torn, I realized and—while my mind conjured one hundred innocent reasons why this might be—one thought overwhelmed them all: She has been touched before.

But, of course, so had I.

Her hand had slipped down to the laces on my trousers, to stroke my erection slowly and gently through my clothes. As her ecstasy heightened, her kisses became wanton, bruising the flesh of my throat, biting my ear hard enough to hurt. "Maitimo, take your clothes off," she gasped.

I drew away from her kisses. "My, aren't you demanding! Here, I politely ask you, and you can't even say 'please'—"

"Maitimo, please take your clothes off. I will pay you to take your clothes off."

"How will you pay me?"

She pressed into me, hard enough that I could feel the flurry of her heartbeat. "With any pleasure that you desire," she whispered.

I stood up. The meteors had subsided, and her body was bathed in the light of Telperion, her dark hair crisp and silvery. She was no longer shy of my glance—her arms stretched over her head and her thighs slightly parted—her breath coming quickly and her body damp with perspiration. I smiled down at her as I tugged my tunic over my head, sending my hair in a red cloud of disarray, and began to unlace my own trousers. She must not have expected me to be shy because she stared unabashed at my groin after I had slipped my trousers from my hips. "You are perfect," she murmured. "Your father conceived you in the likeness of a god, Maitimo." She smiled, as though sharing a secret joke with herself.

"What is it?" I was taught never to be ashamed of my nakedness, but her blatant, unabashed scrutiny of my body was making my heart race with nervous excitement. "Why do you smile so?"

She patted the ground beside her, and I lay down but did not allow our bodies to touch. "It is nothing," she said, reaching to draw me close.

I resisted, although my body hated me for it. "I shall put on my clothes again if you do not tell me."

Her cheeks were pink in the light of evening. "I have befriended some of the girls in town," she confessed, flushing deeper. "They asked me once if you were as beautiful without your clothes as with them. I did not know then, but now I shall have an answer for them."

The thought of having a group of maidens discussing the intimate details of my body made my insides feel rubbery, as though filled with gelatin. Such conversations are typical of males, but maidens?

As though reading my thoughts, Annawendë said, "Women are not without desires, Maitimo. It is not only males who desire to see their partner naked before they marry, or wish to hear her name in his voice while he's in the throes of ecstasy."

"I have disrobed before you, Annawendë, before today."

"I was always careful not to look, not because I didn't wish to know what you looked like beneath your clothes—nothing could be further from the truth, Maitimo—but because your father was always intensely curious about whether I would look and your mother always seemed intensely adamant that I should not, and I did not want my first memory of your nakedness to survive in conjunction with your parents' scrutiny."

I imagined myself in her place and had to laugh at the perfect logic of her discomfort beneath Atar's over-bright curiosity and Amil's acidic stare.

"Maitimo," she said, suddenly serious, "you did not let me say it before, that I also love you." Her fingers tucked my hair—still messy from being drawn through my tunic in haste—behind my ears, and her mouth found mine. Our bodies pressed together, only inches away from bonding ourselves to each other forever, both of us aching with desire yet terrified at the same time. I turned her onto her back and lay atop her.

"Are you going to wed me?" she asked in a frightened whisper. I could feel her heart pattering against my chest, as surely as she could feel mine. My body, where it touched hers, quivered with both fear and anticipation.

Was I going to wed her?

I thought of returning home, having taken her to bride. Atar would not mind—he would be happy, even, for he desires us to marry and give him many grandchildren—but Amil would be devastated. As would Macalaurë, who did not want me to come out here tonight and made me promise that he would stand beside me at my wedding. And then there was the return to Tirion. Grandfather Finwë would be angry, I knew. He had been angry at Atar for marrying Amil so young and without his consent, an anger that he hid well out of love and consideration for me, the product of their illicit union. It was only out of love for their daughter, I heard one of the lords of Tirion say once, that Grandfather Mahtan and Grandmother Istarnië accepted Atar as a son-in-law at all, so upset were they that he whisked away their youngest daughter and wed her in a clearing in the forest, without witness and without their leave. I imagined facing all of them, having done the same thing. Grandfather Finwë would not conceal his anger this time, without a great-grandchild whose tender feelings might be hurt by the implication that his parents never should have married, that he should never have been born. And then there were Annawendë's parents, whom I did not even know. I imagined riding south to them, being introduced as her husband and their prince in the same breath. And the wedding that would happen in Tirion: hastily assembled—as was Atar's—and full of hurt feelings by all involved that I chose to marry before even informing anyone of my engagement.

Annawendë waited for my answer, her eyes keen on mine. "I cannot," I breathed at last, and felt her sag in my arms with relief.

I wonder: Would Amil have been relieved if Atar had forgone their hasty wedding to return and be married according to the standards of our people, before Manwë and Varda—as is fit for a high prince—with all of the necessary consents and arrangements made in advance? And I would have been conceived many years later, in a soft bed in the palace—not on the hard ground inside a tent at the mining camp, with my parents holding their breaths for fear of being overheard—and bestowed with the same honors as were my brothers at their births, the eldest son of the High Prince of the Noldor. How would things have changed if this had happened?

I would not be lying with Annawendë beneath the stars, for one.

"We are too young," I whispered to her. "I want to wait. I want to meet your family first, and for you to meet all of mine—"

She touches my lips. "Hush, Maitimo. I do not wish to wed either. I wish for the touch of your body, for our passions to be sated. I wish to sleep tonight in peace for once, without waking from dreams of you, always unfulfilled."

"You dream of me?"

"Do not ask silly questions," she whispered, silencing my protests with a kiss, her warm hand moving along the inside of my thigh to at last take me in hand. Our mouths collided again and again in violent kisses, moaning our pleasure against the other's lips as we touched each other with excruciatingly slow strokes, becoming so impassioned that we kicked away the blankets and lay naked and sweating in the cold night air, locked in each other's embrace, our flesh and wills only inches away from complete union.

I would have lain like this all night, bringing her to orgasm a thousand times and never tiring of the sound of my name in her voice, breathless, her body arching and her face pressing into my chest, her lips over my heart. But her hands were equally expert in wringing pleasure from my body, and when I tried to knock her hand away, gasping, "Annawendë, I'm going to come," she only bore down harder, and whispered, "That's the point, Maitimo."

And ecstasy tore my body, radiating across me like an earthquake from its epicenter, making my fingers and toes burn as though every nerve had been sleeping and she had brought them back to life, the feeling of stepping into a warm room after being numbed by a cold wind. We clutched each other, basking in this moment of mutual pleasure, my fluids spilling across her belly. It sounded as though even the wind sighed her name, but then I realized that it was I who spoke it, that she had exhausted me, and I lay in her arms, suddenly helpless and cold.

She drew the blankets around us and we kissed slowly, languidly, with a contentment for once not marred by the desires of our bodies.

Her head on my chest, I stared at the sky. It was perfectly clear that night, curtains of clouds drawn back to make room for the meteors, a few of which still straggled across the sky. "This was a beautiful night, Annawendë," I said, and my mind flitted to my proposal and how we would always remember the night we became betrothed like this: the spectacular pleasure we gave each other, the sky alive with lights, the future before us as boundless as the sky.

"It was." I felt the delicate touch of her lips on my chest, a kiss softer than butterfly wings. "You were a great lover," she said suddenly, so eagerly that I burst into laughter.

"As were you," I said. "Whoever taught you to—"

In that instant, her body withdrew from mine, and she was wrapping the blanket around her nakedness. "What do you mean by that? Whoever taught me?"

I felt as though I was in freefall, the feeling of one who has stepped from what he thought was a small height and discovered himself still falling many moments after he should have been safely on the ground. She was torn, I thought to myself, frantically, and she knew how to touch me. Had I been wrong?

For many long moments, we pondered each other, the space between us filling with cold air, as she drew the blanket tighter around herself, hiding her nakedness and revealing mine at the same time, to my shame. I covered myself with my hands, defenseless beneath the intensity of her stare. "You have not—" I began and stopped, fearful of the angry agony that blossomed on her face, of finishing my sentence "had a lover before." Instead, I repeated, as a question, the innocuous "You have not?"

Her face flushed. The blanket was bunched up to her neck. "And if I have? What of it?"

"Annawendë, I do not—"

"It is not as though you have not had a lover before." She laughed, a cruel, monosyllabic bark. "Lover? More like lovers. I am not deaf to the tales of you, Maitimo. I have heard what you were doing with that lord's daughter, and if I can overcome my aversion to kissing lips that have done that to someone else's body—"

"Annawendë, I—"

"—touching you when only Eru knows how many other girls have touched you like that, who you've cuddled with afterwards and called good lovers, who you've kissed and told that you loved them, who entertained the foolish thought of marrying you, as though anyone is ever good enough for a Fëanárion—"

"I never—"

"—who did immoral things to you because they thought they'd be your wife someday and no one would have to know, but all you wanted was five seconds of cheap pleasure—"

"I never said I faulted you!"

I sounded so much like my father in that instant that we both stopped and stared at each other. The color drained from her face, the look of a girl who has suddenly and unexpectedly been humiliated in front of a large group by the cruel revelation of a dirty secret.

"You are right, Annawendë!" I shouted, with only slightly less intensity. "I have had lovers! I have done things that make my mother ashamed of me, that would make some girls not want to marry me. I answer to the drives of my body before I answer to the morals of our people. But I've never misled anyone, and I've never seduced a girl with promises of marriage just for the pleasure she might give me. And I didn't lie when I said that I love you. I do love you."

Her face was transforming, the anger wrinkling into doubt, into hope maybe. She looked away, as though meeting my eyes for a single second more would take her to a point from which she could not return, where she would give her whole heart to me. "I am not a suitable bride for the eldest son of the high prince," she said, in a strange hollow voice that did not sound like Annawendë.

"My station was granted to me at birth. My love for you is a choice that I have made in life."

She turned her head away, her dark hair hiding her eyes, as though she did not believe me.

"I love you, Annawendë. I want to prove that to you."

I reached for my discarded trousers and rummaged through the pockets until I felt them: the rings, cold against my hand, cold like the night air. This was not how I had envisioned proposing to her. I had not envisioned kneeling naked before her while she sat wrapped in a blanket and her lower lip still trembled with indignation. I had not envisioned making a proposal in a voice made awkward with unspoken apologies, with hands that trembled with as much residual anger as they did nervousness. "Annawendë, I love you." I opened my hand to her, with the rings lying on my palm. Her head was turned; she did not see. I took her chin in my hand and turned her face to mine. "Marry me? Please?"

The answer I expected did not come. My heartbeat thundered in my ears as her face crumbled. She stared at the rings in my hand. She leaped to her feet and ran to the edge of the hilltop, staring towards Formenos with her back to me, the blanket wrapped tightly around her trembling shoulders.

"Annawendë?"

Please, not again!

"Annawendë, I love you. I want you to be my wife." Silence. "Marry me."

"Maitimo." Her hand had gone to her face, and her voice was muffled. "I—" She stopped.

"You what? Are you telling me no?"

"No, I am not. But I cannot tell you yes either."

At last, she turned to me. Her face was silvery with tears. The night air bit my face and I realized that I was crying too.

"Why not?" I begged. "I love you, and you love me, do you not?"

"I do."

"Then why not?"

"You are a prince, Maitimo—"

"Do not speak such rubbish to me!" I shouted. "You know that matters naught!"

She looked away when I shouted, guilty, caught in a lie. "We should get dressed, Maitimo. We need to talk."

We dressed in silence, with our backs to each other, intimacy shattered. I shoved the rings back into my trousers' pocket, deep, wishing that I could forget their existence. But I could not. Nor could I stop the tears that flowed from my eyes, even as I sat on the ground beside her and she took my cold hands in hers, rubbing them to make them warm again. "Maitimo, there is something that I did not tell you," she said. I watched her face, but she would not meet my eyes, as though my tears were too painful for her to witness. She does love me, I realized. Then why won't she marry me?

"I should have told you at the beginning, but I did not come here expecting to fall in love with you." She smiled at my hands, caressing my fingers. "I remember the day I came to interview with your father. I remember that Macalaurë answered the door and he took me to the library to wait. You were giving lessons to Tyelkormo that day. You smiled at me when I came in. I didn't think I'd ever seen anyone so beautiful. I'd spent the prior night in Tirion, and I'd been told that the eldest son of Fëanáro is exceedingly handsome. They told me that you were tall, that you had red hair. I'd never seen red hair on one of our people before. I thought I'd find it too strange to be attractive, but instead, I found that I could never find anything else half as beautiful. Even your father—people told me that he is the most beautiful of our people; my mother warned me not to develop 'ideas' about him, for he is wed already and very happy, with many children—he could not compare to you. Yes, he is fair. To deconstruct each of his features, he exceeds you in perfection. But you inspire me as he could not, as no one has before, for there is something in you that even Fëanáro—great as he may be—has not, a special beauty, something pure and graceful, that I imagined belonged only to the Ainur.

"Even after I saw you, I did not expect to fall in love with you. I would enjoy looking upon you, to be sure, but to fall in love—such is something that requires more than great beauty. When I received word that Fëanáro had chosen me as an apprentice, I had no doubt that I could resist your charms. I had resisted such before. My land also has people of great and exotic beauty, the likes of which are not found in Tirion, from early marriages between the Noldor and those who would later be the Avari. So I rode to Tirion full of confidence, and there I stayed for the week before my apprenticeship, staying in the inn and speaking with the people of the city, who found a maiden apprentice of the illustrious Fëanáro quite intriguing. To many women I also spoke, and they spoke of you. It is from them that I heard rumors of your behavior with the maidens of the city, particularly with the daughter of Laiquiwë. They told me that you would seduce me and that I would end up in your bed before the summer had passed. I decided that this would not be an entirely bad thing.

"I fully intended to make sport of you, Maitimo, if you would have me.

"I did not then think that I would fall in love with you."

She fell silent, stroking my hands. My skin had warmed with her touch. It could not resist her.

"But why can you not marry me?" I whispered hoarsely.

"My best friend at home, I have known him since I was born. We were born only three days apart, and so we were natural companions. We were each the firstborn child of our mothers, and they shared their woes with each other while they were pregnant, so perhaps we became friends while still in the womb. For as long as I have known the meaning of marriage, I have assumed that I would marry him. It is understood between us. Such is the way of our people: We often become betrothed in childhood. I know this happens in Tirion too, but it is far more common in our lands, in the south.

"When we were forty years old, he proposed formally to me. He is not inclined to the forge—he makes musical instruments—and so I made our betrothal rings. I made them of silver and emerald, for emerald is his favorite stone and he has always loved to adorn me in it. Your mother praised my ring when I first arrived. I told her that I made it myself, and while this is the truth, I said it in deceit, hoping that she would not know it was a betrothal ring. Fëanáro praised it also, as did Macalaurë, and I realized that it drew too much attention, so I stopped wearing it. I told myself that it was for reasons of safety, for I work harder here than I ever have at home, and again, this was the truth, but it was also deceit. I did not want you to know that I was betrothed.

"You might wonder why I desired you when I am betrothed to another. The love between my betrothed and I is deep, but it has never been impassioned. I know his body as well as I know my own, and although he brings me pleasure, I have never desired him intensely, as I do you. I want to bear his children, but I do not delude myself that—after the second or third is born—I will likely desire to lie with him no longer, and ours will be a bond of spirits only. But, at times, I am pained that my youth should pass without knowing the passion that some find. And so I took to you.

"But I fell in love with you, Maitimo."

I looked at our hands, entwined between us. "But you also love another."

She nodded. "My love for you cannot take the love for him from my heart. And while I know that the early days of our marriage would be blissful, I cannot quell the fear that our love would wither when we stopped desiring each other so intensely sexually."

"But that could happen to anyone. That could happen with your betrothed now." How hard it was to speak those words! Her betrothed! My Annawendë loved another.

"It could, yes. It happens all the time that couples grow apart. But I have known him and loved him for my entire life. I have known you for three months and loved you for one. I do not know how much I can trust that.

"Does he know of me?"

"No! It would devastate him to know that I desired another, even if my desire were naught but lust. He has no qualms about my lack of passion for him. He says that if I can muster enough to marry and to beget our children, then that is enough. He does not think that we need much more than that. I know you will give me more than that, Maitimo. Why do you think that I do not refuse you? I believe that you will do all you can to make me happy, to be a good husband. I desire to do the same for you. But my love for my betrothed is ingrained in my heart, like the love one has for oneself. It would require a great trauma to be dislodged, and like any trauma, I might not rise from it unscathed. Asking me to forsake him is like asking me to forsake a part of myself in favor of something that might be better—or that my heart might reject. I do not know what to do."

We sat in silence for many minutes. Finally, I collected her in an embrace and—with tears again soaking my cheeks—told her, "I want more than anything for you to be happy in life, Annawendë. Ride home. Seek your betrothed and learn where your heart lies. If it lies with me, then come back to me, and we will marry, and I will do all that I can to make you happy. If it lies with him, then you need never see me again."

With that, I broke, and I sobbed into her shoulder while she stroked my hair. "I feel as though I am standing on the threshold of perfect bliss, yet I am tempted to turn away," she whispered, "for love of that which is familiar. Am I mad, Maitimo? I must be mad to forsake the only man who has ever offered me his heart and my freedom in the same breath."

Yet forsake me she did. She mounted her horse and rode back to Formenos, and I sat long on the hilltop, while the remnants of the meteors zipped overhead, until Laurelin lightened the horizon. Then I rode home and slept restlessly in my bed until Tyelkormo came to rouse me only an hour later. When I awakened that morning, she had gone into town for the week. When I awaken tomorrow, she will be gone.

~oOo~

The next five days were hard. I stole my tears when alone, in the privacy of cupboards or in my cold bed at night. On the fourth day of my father's "absence," I saw that our stores had grown low, yet I could not bear to ride to the town, as he would have done, for fear that I would encounter Annawendë in the streets and be unable to keep my hand open to her, closing my fist instead upon her freedom as one might around a songbird to keep it from flying away.

I forced myself to bear my misery. It was like keeping one's feet in a fire, for there was still time to ride into town and find her boardinghouse and fall to my knees in front of her and beg her to marry me. My pain was of my own infliction, not hers, for I could have used the gift of words given me by my father; I could have persuaded her to stay. I could have used my station and my birthright to lure her with promises of luxury and ease and any possession that she desired. Or I could have used words like javelins to wound her with accusations, for she had led me falsely, pleading a romantic interest where her only desire lay in pleasing the desires of her body. I could have quailed her with thoughts of a sullied reputation and caused her to fear the scorn of her betrothed and her family upon her return home. I could have brought upon her the wrath of a prince of the Noldor. But I let her go. For even if she married me, every time she looked to the south, doubt would have seized my heart, and our love would be poisoned by unease until the ending of Arda, by the fear that we had forsaken what was right and true for the sake of a moment's whim and a love that was not meant to be.

Over the course of the five days, I hid my pain from everyone. Macalaurë knew of my loss but I did not weep in front of him—until tonight, anyway—and kept a cheerful smile upon my face as I dutifully took my father's place in the house. I cooked the meals and helped Macalaurë divide the chores so that our mother could have peace. The children were dressed, fed, tutored, and bathed daily. Our mother was too distant—worried over Atar's strange behavior—to notice that anything was amiss. And Findekáno and Tyelkormo are still too little and absorbed in their child's world of study and play to suspect that the occasional turn of my mouth might be caused by anything other than Atar's sudden absence. Only Carnistir treated me differently: His tears ceased whenever I drew near as though he knew that they'd be too much for me to bear; he clung to my neck and graced me with kisses—and none of the little nips he likes to sneak when he thinks I won't notice—and more than once I was tempted to clutch him and sob into the warm darkness of his hair.

But I did not.

But Atar—upon awakening—knew almost instantly. I looked into his eyes, as bright as pools of water, and saw myself reflected there, rippled as though viewed through a great heat, agony twisting my spirit as pain might twist my body. My words were of duty and I ran from him as quickly as I could manage and he did not pursue. How grateful I was that he did not pursue.

Until the night, in the library, when I don't remember speaking to him, but yet he knew, and he held me and asked nothing of what I intended to do. For I did not—do not—know.

There is naught to do but wait.

I sleep restlessly, my head lying on Macalaurë's chest as he leans against my headboard and holds me close. My eyes burn with the heavy heat of tears not long gone and my head is weighty, but Macalaurë's hands on me are soft and his heartbeat steady like a metronome, and if I don't find the depths of sleep, at least I find repose from dreams.

There is a knock on the door and it coaxes me from sleep. Macalaurë rises from the bed, laying me gently aside, and goes to answer it. I hear Atar's voice and watch Macalaurë's shoulders dip in deference to our father's command, and I am alone in my bedroom with Atar.

He shuts the door behind him but does not lock it. His long absence has not dulled his senses—perhaps the opposite—and I see him taking in the fact that I still wear my clothes, the abandoned tea tray and our empty mugs, and beside that, the rings. I am ashamed of them and wish to sweep them beneath the bed where he might not scrutinize my folly. As though he knows this, his bright eyes skip across them and away again, like stones across silver water. He sits on the bed beside me, so lightly that the mattress barely bends with his weight.

He touches my hair. Atar's hands are always warm. Yes, they become cold on the surface—as will anyone's—if the climate is such, in the snow or the ice, for example. But beneath, he burns, so hotly that it is easy to think that one might not be able to bear it, but for the fact that he must survive in his own skin, so surely I can bear his touch. In fact, I lean into it; I crave it, like the comfort of a fire on a cold night.

"Nelyo." He says naught but my name for the moment. I close my eyes and he strokes my cheek with the backs of his fingers. "I am not here to force you to relive what you wish to forget. I only wish to know if you will be traveling with us tomorrow. You do not have to go. If you would rather remain—alone or with your brother—then I believe you old enough to do so. I will not demand that you follow me."

I smile, for I have not even begun preparing for the trip. In fact, I had forgotten it until his mention of it in this very instant.

"I would like to see the ocean," I whisper, after a long moment. "I would like to feel the peace in the knowledge that I am small and insignificant again."

Atar kisses my forehead. "It is done then, beloved son. Tomorrow, I shall depart for Oromë's Halls, and you shall leave for the sea. May you find the peace you seek."

~oOo~

They leave the next morning at the Mingling of the Lights, and Macalaurë and I watch them depart from the doorway, staring down the broad stone stairs and across the lawn to where Atar swings into his saddle and heels his horse into a trot without glancing back. We share a heavy cloak draped over our shoulders and sip from the mugs of spiced tea that Atar gave us for breakfast this morning.

The rest of the family follows Atar: Tyelkormo sharing a pony with Carnistir, Findekáno, and Amil in the rear. She smiles back at us over her shoulder, but worry makes her lips stiffen, and she looks quickly away.

It is a long ride to the sea, longer than we have ever undertaken alone, but at this moment, the sea compels me. It calls me, its clarion voice impossible to ignore or resist, and all that fills my head is the thought of cold sand beneath my bare feet, walking towards the water and not stopping, the waves licking higher and higher on my legs, then my waist, then my chest, then my head is filled with the empty roar of water, entwining my red hair with the green kelp, the salt stinging my eyes until my sight goes black.

I cannot picture my return to the surface.

On the fifth day of the week, Nolofinwë and I always meet in the afternoon, before the Mingling of the Lights, for a game. It is supposed to be a treat to celebrate the coming of our days of rest—and perhaps for Nolofinwë it is—but I do it only out of duty to my brother.

We used to play, sitting beside the fountain in the palace square, where the wind occasionally misted us with water, dispelling some of the heat of the afternoon, and during Nolofinwë's long deliberations, I could be entertained by birdsong and the brightly clad maidens walking by, but Nolofinwë pled distraction, claiming that the chatter of the servants going about their duties and the clopping hooves of the lords' horses disrupted his concentration. We play now in his study. I never win, and Nolofinwë used to instruct me after our games, pointing out the flaws in my strategies, until he came to the realization that I do not particularly care to win. I try hard enough to give him a decent game but make no great effort to surpass him. If winning means so much to him—while it means naught to me—then he is free to have it.

Now, walking up the front path to Nolofinwë's door, I am slightly awed—as I always am—by the grandeur of his home. So like a Noldo, I find myself thinking, until I realize—with a start—that I have an equal share of Noldorin blood. Even after sixty-one years of life, this fact still surprises me. Still, the stone mansion in front of me, the tall marble statues overlooking the path, the leaping fountains—such things belong to the Noldor, yet they have always made me feel small. When Eärwen and I married and she consented to move with me to Tirion, I understood her discomfort in the shadows of the towers and mansions of the Noldor and shaped our own home very differently, of a light stone, with natural curves as though sprung from the earth, and with many windows, to allow the winds of Manwë to always bless us and carry our laughter through the halls, to the other's ears.

Now, I pause before the door and ring Nolofinwë's bell, and a maidservant opens the door with a nod so slight it is barely visible. She is new to his household, employed only recently after his last maidservant married and moved to a farm outside the city. She is young with light brown hair and a quiet reverence that my brother prefers in his servants. I imagine that she does not inquire after his day as she pours his wine for supper, nor does she wait eagerly on the stairs for him when word of Findekáno is rumored to have come from the north. She no doubt bustles to her work with her lips set in neither smile nor frown, her feet as silent as she.

She bows when she sees me, although it is less a bow than a slight tipping at the waist, reverent without drawing attention to that fact. "Prince Arafinwë," she says. "My lord awaits you in his chambers."

I bow back at her, then take her hand and kiss the backs of her fingers. Her skin is soft, but I can feel the rough beginnings of calluses at the joints of her fingers. "My lady, you are looking exceptionally lovely today."

She blushes. She is quite pretty with a touch of color in her face. "I thank you for your kind words, my lord. If you would follow me?"

"I would. Across the sea if you'd like." I am flirting with her; the girl must have a smile somewhere in her repertoire of facial expressions. She blushes darker. "I have never seen the ocean," she says quickly. She starts in the direction of my brother's office, but I refuse to move, and after two steps, she is forced to halt and linger as well.

"It is a lovely, great shining thing, just the color of your eyes."

"You jest with me, my lord."

"I do. I jest with all beautiful maidens."

"But you are married, my lord."

"Marriage cannot stop me from admiring beauty when I find it—"

"Arafinwë!" The voice startles me. Nolofinwë stands in the doorway with his mouth twisted into a disapproving frown. I grin at him, and the expression loosens without entirely disappearing. "I had thought you were exceptionally tardy this night." He turns to the maidservant. "You are excused, Isilmaryë," he says brusquely. She bows and hurries silently from the room, although she gives me a tiny smile as way of salutation.

Success. I do not allow my lips the boastful luxury of grinning but rather trap it inside myself and relish it.

Nolofinwë walks briskly to his office, and I have to trot to keep up. He and our half-brother Fëanáro both exceed me greatly in height, and when they walk, they tend to forget that not all can match their hearty strides. I have none of our father's imposing grandeur but, instead, am petite like our mother. I wish he would not hurry so; there is no good reason for racing through one's own halls as though the hounds of Oromë are on one's heels.

We enter his office. The drapes are opened to let in the light, but Nolofinwë's office always strikes me as a dark place nonetheless. The drapes and the upholstery are of heavy blue velvet; the furniture is of sturdy, dark wood. He burns incense—a habit he learned from our mother—and the spicy aroma of it makes me sneeze, earning a reproachful look from my brother. The gameboard is set up already, on a small table at the center of the room, the pieces set meticulously in place. He nods at a heavy chair set on one side of the gameboard, and I dutifully take my seat while he goes to a cabinet, produces a glass, and pours himself a serving from a bottle of wine taken from the bucket that has been set there.

"You should watch your words, Arafinwë," he cautions. "Married as you, with your firstborn imminent, you should not be speaking so to maidens."

"It was only done in play, Nolofinwë," I say. "I only wished to see her smile. I am happily wed, obviously no threat."

"Affections may flower in forbidden soil, Arafinwë," he says gravely. He is fond of sayings such as this, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. Indeed they do! I want to say. If they did not, then neither you nor I would have been born! But I carry the argument no further, and he says, "May I pour you a glass of wine?"

"I would prefer rum." Eärwen's people have honed my taste for it.

"Arafinwë! It is not even the Mingling of the Lights!"

"Wine, then," I say, trying not to sigh.

It is a white wine, nearly as clear as water but deceptively heavy and slightly bitter. Nolofinwë is fond of vintages such as these, where I will take a glass of sweet mead anytime. He sits opposite me and runs his fingers over the game pieces, contemplating me as he might a plot of soil to be turned for a garden. He and Fëanáro share this: the ability to make me feel as though I have been disrobed and am being scrutinized by a healer for dissection, as though they are envisioning my heart in their hands. Perhaps it is a trait of the Noldor. Half-Noldo though I am, I am not often inclined towards the thoughts and motivations of my craftier kinsmen.

I escape into my glass, taking a greater swallow of wine than I should have, perhaps, judging by the way the room begins to list as I lower my glass. Nolofinwë's eyes are still on me, but the ponderous stare has given way to something lighter, affectionate almost, and the left side of his mouth rises into a smile. I set my glass down heavily and say, "Good brew, Nolofinwë," because I know it will make him laugh, and it does.

"A better vintage than that Telerin slop I hear you have taken to drinking," he says. "That rubbish couldn't inebriate an ant."

"Yes, but Eärwen has taken to avoiding heavy drinks since she has come with child, on advice of the midwife," I explain. "That Telerin slop is all that she will drink. I am sure that Anairë is the same."

"Yes," Nolofinwë admits, "she is. I have taken to having two bottles with supper: hers and mine."

"Not me. I like to think that what is bad for Eärwen and our child is bad for me and our child also."

"That is nonsense, Arafinwë. You do not carry him."

"Yes, but at times, I sense him as though I do, especially when Eärwen and I are near. And in those times, I do not wish to be inebriated." I take another drink of wine and hiccup.

"And now?" Nolofinwë asks, eyebrows raised.

"Now I do not sense him," I say, and we both laugh.

Nolofinwë takes another swallow of wine. "I wish that I sensed my son. I wouldn't even know that he was a son but for Anairë, who is certain of it. She tells me little else, however, claiming that I will have to be surprised when he is born."

"Was she like this with Findekáno?"

"No. She was so eager with Findekáno that I knew every time he kicked, every iota of thought that she shared with him. She is far more reserved with this one." He drains his glass. I am impressed; mine is only a quarter gone, although his impetuousness might explain the sudden looseness of his tongue. "Do you think Curufinwë senses his children?"

My mind jellied slightly by the wine, I respond before thinking, "I am sure that he does."

Nolofinwë looks at me darkly.

I speak quickly, seeking to remedy my stupid thoughtlessness. "I just mean that he and Nerdanel share a greater bond than any couple I have ever known," I say. "As much as I love Eärwen, I do not doubt that the bond between Fëanáro and Nerdanel is stronger. He told me once, in a weak moment, that he speaks with her in his mind as though he would with words."

"But we both also speak so with our wives. I believe that everyone does," Nolofinwë argues.

"Yes, but it is difficult to keep even his private thoughts from her the way I can hide things from Eärwen or you from Anairë."

"I do not hide from Anairë," he mutters, spinning the stem of his glass between his fingers.

"But you do not share all either. Can you imagine being responsible for the thoughts of two people? How often have you thought something hurtful—against your father-in-law, perhaps, in a moment of weakness—or thought that a maiden on the street was fair and been glad that your wife knew not such thoughts? I am grateful that I do not have to know what darkness taints the beauty of my wife's mind; I prefer to believe that she is purer than I, although I know such thoughts belong to all. Such is our fate in Arda Marred."

Nolofinwë thinks for a long moment, then pours himself another glass of wine. The chatter of the liquid inside his glass is the only sound in the room, and we both stare at the tumult of wine splashing inside the glass as though it holds some secret that neither of us knows. He tops off my glass without me needing to ask.

I should never have answered a question about our half-brother Fëanáro. Nolofinwë dwells upon him entirely too much, I think. Fëanáro is cruel at times and enigmatic at others, but I have prayed for the strength to understand and forgive him, and the Valar have granted it. And—sensing my passivity as might a wild animal—Fëanáro has slowly grown civil to me, almost a friend, but for the fact that—could he reverse time—he would not have our father marry my mother and would thus erase my existence. We speak kindly to each other, though, and his letters have not the stiffness of those he sends to Nolofinwë. He allows me to embrace him, upon meeting, and I do not feel his spirit recoil as I once did or as it does upon sight alone of Nolofinwë. There is no better way, I think, to reveal one's cruelty to him than to stand, wounded and bleeding and exacting no retribution, while he gnashes his teeth into your flesh and you offer the fatal tenderness of your throat, until your fearless timidity inspires his mercy. Such is how I won Fëanáro.

Not Nolofinwë. He and Nolofinwë cannot remain alone together without getting into a fight, a fact that grieves our father and frustrates their wives, although I understand that it is their very likeness to each other that causes them to despise the other so.

Nolofinwë has slipped into a dismal silence, and I seek to escape from it through our game. I make my voice light, a dragonfly skipping across the water. "Shall we play?" I say, opening my palms to the gameboard, and he shakes his head slowly, as though awaking from sleep. He smiles stiffly. "Of course."

~oOo~

Tomorrow, Eärwen's parents will arrive from Alqualondë and stay with us until the end of summer. Then, her father will return to Alqualondë, to reign over his people, while her mother will remain until our son is born in the winter. Eärwen is excited about their arrival but King Olwë always makes me a bit nervous, as though I must prove why the eldest child of a king was a worthy mate for a third-born, half-blooded prince who lacks in political aspirations.

On the fifth day of the week, we traditionally take a late supper with my parents and Nolofinwë's family in the palace. When I return home after the game, Eärwen is already bathing for supper, the servants have gone home for the night, and the house is quiet. Perhaps because of the conversation with my brother—after which he remained mostly silent, moving his game pieces with great concentration—or perhaps because of my father-in-law's imminent arrival, I am restless and edgy, and I wish that Eärwen were not indisposed. I could interrupt her bath, I suppose, but she likes this time to commune with our son, and to steal this time would be selfish. Instead, I open all of the windows in our bedroom, kneel on the floor, and pray.

I speak with my mind to the wind, where the words will be carried to Manwë far off on Taniquetil. Give me the strength …

For what? I am always praying for strength, yet I seem to need it the least in our family. It is my father who is the king; it is my brothers who aspire to serve as his successor. I would not want even a lordship much less to rule the Noldor in their entirety, a people who remain enigmatic to me and whom I do not resemble in thought or appearance.

Give me the strength for peace.

The words flow from my mind with the inevitability of gravity, and as water tumbles from high rocks, so does my prayer slip into the wind. My body becomes loose with resignation, with relief, for my troubles have been passed to someone more able to shoulder them. Strength be with you, Arafinwë, the wind whispers to me, for to hold peace takes greater strength than rebellion.

I smile and hear the bedroom door open behind me. I remain kneeling until Eärwen's arms slip around my neck, and her rounded belly presses into my back. I feel the light that is the spirit of our unborn son burning gently between us, where our bodies touch, the union of our marriage. Peace stills my heart, and all worries about my brothers' endless conflict and my father-in-law's arrival tomorrow scatter to the wind like leaves.

Eärwen kisses my neck. She smells of the light Telerin soap that she uses. "How was your game?" she asks.

"Meaningless," I say, "but for the time spent in the company of my brother."

I turn to hold her in my arms and stroke her belly, feeling the light of our son rising beneath my hand, as though he desires to know me as much as I desire to know him. We conceived him not long after wedding—by the standards of our people—although I must confess to enjoying the unsuccessful attempts and making them more often than might be expected. "I am thankful that you are like the Noldor in at least one regard," Eärwen whispered to me once, after we wiled away the better part of an evening making love. The Vanyar are notably chaste, even in marriage; the Noldor certainly are not so. Even I was surprised by my enthusiasm for the physical aspects of our marriage. I sense that Eärwen and I will take long in tiring of each other and that we will be blessed with many children in the interim.

We sit like this for a long time, with her head tucked beneath my chin, our arms tight around each other, and my hand on her belly, where I can feel the baby moving. Soon, I will hold you in my arms, my son. Soon, my life will be numbered, not by my own years, but by yours. Soon, I will spend every moment of every day, watching the Trees, waiting for the hour when I may run home to you, lift you from your cradle, and deliver to you the first of infinite kisses. Soon, the purpose of my life will be revealed in you.

~oOo~

We sit together so long that the hour grows late and we have to run down the street, hand-in-hand, while Eärwen holds her belly and we gasp with laughter, to keep from being late to my parents' for supper. Laurelin has faded, and the streets are frosted with silver, and luckily, the hour is such that our hasty passage goes unnoticed by passersby. We pause on the steps to the court to straighten each other's hair and smooth each other's clothing, and I am reminded of the months prior to our marriage, when I would ride to Alqualondë and climb the trellis outside of Eärwen's bedroom in the evening, and when the summons would come for her to go to her father the next morning, I would have to repair her to look as though she'd been doing nothing more scandalous than reading a book of poetry in her chambers.

As though eager to prove our innocence, we walk with exaggerated care across the court, hands clasped loosely between us, which is not a dignified way for a lord to walk but too natural for a husband to deny. At this hour, all of the lords have left—it is my father's decree that all the lords take the fifth night to dine with their families and leave the city's concerns for the next morning—but the palace guard stand and watch us pass with the same gentle smiles that one bestows upon newly opened flowers. As though on command, a porter appears to lead us to my mother's parlor, where he informs us that the rest of the family is waiting for supper to be finished. Unlike my brother, Atar prefers his servants to be friendly, and this one fairly bubbles with inquiries after Eärwen's health and the goings-on of the councils that I have attended this week, and as we are both apt to bubble back, our voices announce our arrival long before we enter the parlor, and so Amil is already standing to greet us when the porter leaves us at the threshold.

"Arafinwë," she says, and she takes both of my hands in hers and kisses me feather-soft on the lips. How keenly I remember such kisses from childhood, when so light a touch has the power to dispel the weightiest of nightmares! "You look well," she says, and I can't help but to catch her in an embrace, which makes her laugh and hold me tightly in return.

She goes to Eärwen next. "You glow," she says, after kissing my wife on the cheek. "Motherhood favors you, Eärwen."

Nolofinwë and Anairë have arrived already, and they rise from the sofa to give us their greetings. Nolofinwë is always early to affairs, and when Amil remarks on Eärwen's glowing complexion, he catches my eye in such a way that I know he suspects that the real reason for Eärwen's flushed cheeks is not her imminence. I ignore him to kiss my sister-in-law and remark how being with child has made her similarly fair before turning to my brother. Nolofinwë would settle for us to grasp hands and return to our chairs, but I force a hug upon him, squeezing around his neck and kissing him loudly on the cheek, which irritates him and amuses Anairë, to my delight.

With the pleasantries over, Amil shows us to another sofa, where we sit side-by-side opposite Nolofinwë and Anairë. "Where is Atar?" I ask, and Amil smiles tiredly and says, "He wished to prepare the meal for us tonight."

Atar suffers from guilt, at times, from the belief that he serves his people better than his family. When we were young, he used to send away our tutors on occasion and attempt to teach us himself, despite the constant interruptions from lords and messengers bearing tidings or requiring his advice on some matter or another. He used to make vague plans to take us hunting or camping outside the city, and we quickly learned not to expect such treats, for a conflict always arose at the last minute that required his attention, and we were sent away with one of his lords instead. Every few months, he comes to the realization that men all over Tirion are cooking meals for their families while he is distracted by matters of court, and he sends away the lords, gives the cooks a night off, and attempts to put together his own supper.

Atar is skilled at many things: He is good with a pen and competent in the forge; similarly, given the ambition and time, he is a decent cook, although—while always in possession of the former—the latter often escapes him. The last time Atar prepared supper, the meat was undercooked because he put it in the oven too late and the soup tasted slightly charred from being left on the stove for too long without being stirred, but his face was so bright with eagerness for our approval that no one had the heart to do anything but smile and swallow it as quickly as possible to avoid tasting it, while mustering our sincerest voices to express our gratitude and delight.

The women begin their inevitable conversation about pregnancy and childbearing—the latter of which inspires me with particular terror—and sensing my unease, Nolofinwë gestures for me to follow him to the cabinet at the back of the parlor where Atar keeps his liquor. Pouring a whiskey for himself and a glass of mead for me, he gives me a look that is both stern and conspiratorial, and says, "You ought to be ashamed, Arafinwë. It takes some audacity to arrive late to your father's supper because you have been fornicating with your pregnant wife."

"Fornicating?" I say a bit too loudly. Eärwen looks back at me, but if Amil and Anairë heard my outburst, then they have the good graces to ignore it. Nolofinwë's eyes widen in horror, and he shushes me. Lowering my voice, I whisper, "We were doing no such thing!"

"Then how else to you account for arriving late, damp beneath your robes?"

"We were sitting together and lost track of the hour. We had to run down the street to make it as promptly as we did."

Nolofinwë's look at the thought of his younger brother—a prince of both the Noldor and the Vanyar—tearing down the street with his pregnant wife in tow, no doubt passing in front of every influential lord's home on his way, makes me wonder if he mightn't have preferred me to be fornicating. At least that is accomplished in the privacy of my home and need not be made into a shameful display that would reflect poorly on him. He takes a large swallow of his whiskey. "Arafinwë, if I did not know better, I would think that you had been raised in the home of the heathens outside Tirion."

By that, I know that he means our half-brother. Indeed, Fëanáro is not similarly obsessed by the formal graces that so consume Nolofinwë. I see him more often than not in the streets in a plain tunic and trousers, lacking the adornments for which he is famed, looking more like a farmer than our father's heir. His sons, for the most part, are more akin to peasants than princes: Macalaurë is awkward, Tyelkormo is obnoxious, and Carnistir is mystifyingly mean. Only Russandol approximates the grace that Nolofinwë expects from royalty, and although Nolofinwë can find nothing about our eldest brother-son about which to disapprove, I sense that he does not like Russandol, nonetheless, probably because he has inherited the innate grace of our half-brother that makes no one doubt he is a prince, despite his windblown hair and dusty boots.

Luckily, before Nolofinwë can inflict further chastisement upon me, Atar appears in the doorway to announce that supper is ready. We—his sons and daughters-in-law—are each greeted with embraces and kisses, and we follow him to the dining room, where salads and breadbaskets have already been set out on the table.

Nolofinwë and I each make offers to help, but we are silenced and pushed into chairs by our father, who is beaming with excitement at being able to serve us supper, so much that when he pops the cork on a wine bottle, it ricochets frighteningly around the room for a moment with the fury of a bumblebee trapped in a jar, until colliding with a glass vase that Fëanáro made and knocking it onto the floor, where it fortunately lands on a thick carpet and doesn't break. Atar laughs, running to right it, before returning to the table to pour hearty portions into our glasses—waving away our wives' refusal and pouring them each a touch in the bottom of their glasses—claiming that a sip of good wine never does anything but good for one's constitution. "It's a supreme vintage," he tells us. "Fëanáro sent it to me from the north with strongest recommendations."

At this, Nolofinwë, who'd taken a hearty swig, wrinkles his nose and sets his glass down hard on the table. I sip it and flavor explodes in my mouth. It has a complicated taste, like a raspberry eaten before its prime, both sweet and tangy. Deciding that I like it, I sip it again, ignoring Nolofinwë's reproachful glance, and delve into the first course.

The salads are bitter greens scattered with soft cheese and sweet raspberries, so ripe that they nearly pop in the mouth, with soft buttered breadsticks wrapped, still hot, in linen. I do not let my hopes get too high, however, for it is difficult to ruin a salad, although Atar has been known to become distracted when selecting lettuces from the storeroom, choosing those that would perhaps be best fed to the rabbits belonging to Lord Laiquiwë's two small children. When we are all scraping the last bites from our plates, Atar pops up, disappears into the kitchen—after again waving away Nolofinwë's and my offers of assistance—and returns with a tray loaded with tureens of soup that he proclaims is "spring vegetable."

"But it is not spring," Nolofinwë says.

"Do not be obstinate, Nolofinwë," Atar says lightly, as he clears our salad plates. "It is always spring in Valinor."

As far as I can tell, "spring vegetable" soup starts with a basic stock and ends with Atar dumping in as many different vegetables as he can find in the storeroom. With Atar absent and unable to have his feelings hurt by our reluctance, no one but Amil has tried it. I spoon through it, counting the number of different vegetables I can identify, and reach twelve before noticing that Nolofinwë is giving me a stern look to stop. The door to the kitchen opens, and we all hastily stuff the first bite in our mouths so that we may praise Atar as he takes his seat at the head of the table.

The soup actually is not bad—a bit bland, perhaps—but the ingredients are fresh and properly cooked. I suspect that he might have gotten the recipe from Fëanáro, judging by the number of spices that he added; almost as many, I suspect, as he added vegetables, although the amount of each is inadequate to create much of an effect. (Fëanáro is nearly as creative with spices as he is with metal and gemstones and delights in complicated and bizarre combinations. Even when Atar uses Fëanáro's precise recipe, however, the finished product rarely approximates the original.) Before any conversation has a chance to thrive, Atar is on his feet again to bring out the main course: a potato-cheese casserole, honeyed carrots, artichokes, saffron rice, and a huge roasted goose.

Eärwen is unaccustomed and not too fond of game meats, so I carefully arrange for her to get the smallest piece so that she neither has to eat what she does not like and so that Atar's feelings are not hurt. I am impressed by the array of foods he has prepared—he must have taken leave of the lords early today—and am pleased to note that it is all rather well cooked. The goose is oily, but this is the nature of such meats, and the carrots are a bit crisp but not to the point where they are unpalatable. With the main course on the table, we can at last settle into conversation.

"Your parents will be arriving tomorrow, Eärwen?" Atar asks.

"Yes. They will travel through the night and hopefully reach Tirion by midmorning," she says. "My father is bringing his fastest driver."

Everyone is pleased by this announcement. Amil and Anairë wish to see Eärwen's mother, who knows of dress styles far more innovative than anything that can be found in Tirion. Nolofinwë desires to speak with King Olwë, for the allegiance between the Noldor and the Teleri has always been strong, and he wishes to negotiate to have the Noldor continue building in Alqualondë in exchange for Telerin pearls. And Atar, of course, has held King Olwë in confidence as his closest friend since Cuiviénen.

Naturally, I am also pleased. As Eärwen's pregnancy has progressed, she has become more nervous about the childbirth, and I know it will comfort her to have her mother present. She holds confidence in Anairë, but Anairë is a typical Noldorin lady, prim and vague in her assurances. Nerdanel would be frank enough to put Eärwen at ease, but she is a many-days' ride away in Formenos, and her letters do not come frequently enough. But along with my pleasure at my parents-in-law's imminent arrival comes a faint misgiving, for—although my father-in-law has never expressed anything but the sincerest warmth to me—I wonder sometimes at the fairness that the least promising of my father's sons should marry the most noble of his daughters.

~oOo~

We stay late at my parents,' conversing long into the night, and I expect that when we return home, Eärwen will be ready to retire, for we must rise early in order to be prepared for the arrival of my parents-in-law tomorrow. But, instead, she is in a playful mood and is kissing me before I have even fully closed the front door. By the time we reach the bottom of the steps, she has undone my robes and is tugging at the tunic underneath. I start to lead her up the stairs, but she resists. "No, Arafinwë, I want to be taken somewhere that is not our bedroom.

And so we visit each room of the downstairs, leaving a trail of clothing to mark our passage, stopping occasionally to collapse on a couch and ending on the soft carpet in the dayroom, with the warm evening breeze billowing the gossamer curtains over our heads. The night insects fiddle their simple melody, and Eärwen and I lay in silence in each other's arms, facing each other, the tips of our noses touching and our breaths mingling. I stroke her silver hair, as weightless as the wind but warmer. When I first saw her, I expected her hair to be cold, like metal, the only silver to which I was accustomed. But upon plunging into its depths, I learned that it was warm—like Eärwen—like the sea at Alqualondë at night, warmer than the air on my bare skin, making it seem a treat to drown.

As I appraise her with my touch and sight, she closes her eyes and listens to me, listens to my breathing as she once listened to the lap of the waves on the shore outside her home. After we married, she confessed that she had nearly turned down my quest for courtship because she thought I'd be too stern. She and Fëanáro had grown up together, she said, and she always marveled at the discipline of his silence: the way he could walk without being heard, the way she could never hear his breathing when they sat close, as though every moment of his existence was a triumph of his will over nature. I have since noticed the same about my brother, about my father even, who—for all his cheer and easy laughter—nonetheless possesses a great control, as though his spirit is tied tighter to his body than is mine. "Fëanáro and I used to make plenty of noise together, when we were little," Eärwen told me. "We used to run and scream at the sea, to make the birds rise from where they floated offshore, and we used to dance over the wooden planks on the piers to hear the hollow drumming of our feet, but yet I could never hear him. I could never hear him like I can hear you."

"Such is the way of the Noldor," I told her. Everything to them is disciplined. Building, forging, and even art is disciplined. They seek learning through books, tutors, and apprenticeships, trusting not the simple wisdom of years. Councils are never consigned to the haphazard gathering of friends but planned and held in rooms built just for that purpose. They celebrate on festival days and work on all others. Perhaps sensing my thoughts, Eärwen whispers, "I am glad you chose me."

"I had little choice," I reply, letting her hair spill across my hands. "My heart claimed you before my mind had time for anything so mundane as a choice." She smiles without opening her eyes, presses her mouth to mine. "I believe that we were chosen for each other," I whisper against her lips.

My faith—that of my mother, of the Vanyar—is not shared as strongly by her people, but she never argues with me. It is as though she knows that the way our spirits sing together is greater than any harmony we could contrive from our own cunning.

We lay in silence once more. A nightingale calls his mate outside our window. Our hearts beat and—between us—our son's heartbeat completes the perfect rhythm of husband, wife, and child. At last, Eärwen speaks: "You did not ask, Arafinwë, my reasons for tonight, for asking you to lie with me here instead of in our bedroom."

"I do not require a reason for everything," I tell her, "least of all for lying with my wife."

She smiles at this. "But this is a special night for us, for it is that last night that we shall spend in the house alone together for many years to come, until all of our children have grown and married, perhaps." She draws me close and presses her face into my neck, until the lengths our bodies are touching, and it is as though we are one person in body and spirit. "It is a happy night, but I wish it to be long in ending."

~oOo~

We awaken on the floor of the dayroom at the Mingling of the Lights the next morning, with warm breezes caressing our skins, Eärwen's head on my chest and my hands tangled in her hair. The servants will be arriving soon, to ready the rooms for Eärwen's parents and to begin preparing the late breakfast that we will share with them, and although this will hardly be the first time that they would have found us lying together in an unexpected place, in an uncompromising manner, we have much to do this morning and little time to dally in our last moments alone together.

On my way to the bedroom to bathe and dress, I pick up the trail of clothing that we left on our way to the dayroom, pausing each time to savor the memory of the kiss or the touch that marked that point the night prior. Today, we have stepped into a new room in the endless corridor that will be our lives together—much the same as we did on our first day of marriage and as we soon shall on the first day of our son's life—and while the feeling in my heart is one of happiness, there is a little sadness too, as though the next time we have the luxury of such freedom, it will be darkened by sad times. As though the room we have left will never permit us to re-enter. When I greet my parents-in-law and welcome them into my home, it will be as if the door has been nailed shut.

I entertain the briefest thought of taking Eärwen and fleeing the city altogether—of leaving the house and its string of rooms and corridors, some dark, through which we will walk—abandoning this place in our future for the wide-open lands of Aman, where sadness need never separate us from those we love.

But such thoughts are folly, and as quickly as they darken my mind, they flee to the sky like the crows that scavenge upon growing things left to rot, and I gather the last of our clothing in a ball and go to meet my wife in our bedroom.

~oOo~

My day quickly becomes too busy for such dark thoughts. Eärwen and I shut ourselves into our bedroom just as we hear the first servants rustling busily in the guest suite across the hall. She allows me to bathe first—knowing that I will want to ponder my choice in raiment longer than will she—and I change robes three times before she emerges from the bathroom and calls, "Stop! You are wearing just what you have on right now!"

I had just removed the third robe and stand in my tunic and underpants. I cock an eyebrow at her playfully. "Really?"

"Well, you may put on the robe that you just took off," she says.

"I'm not sure if the color suits me."

"Arafinwë, do you honestly think that anyone will care how you look?"

She has a point there. Her parents have not seen her since we rode to Alqualondë last spring, to surprise them with the news that we were expecting a child. Only my parents, my brother, and Anairë knew at that point, and Eärwen's belly still remained deceptively flat. I don the third robe—it is pale blue—and fasten it without further argument, while she chooses a dress from her wardrobe with remarkably less rigmarole.

Upon moving to Tirion, Eärwen took to wearing dresses more typical of the Noldor: heavy cloth; tight at the waist and sleeves to prevent excess cloth from interfering with one's work; solid, bold colors; laces and clasps that did not require great thought or effort to fasten in the morning. Now, however, she chooses a Telerin dress, sheer and so light that it must feel like wearing nothing at all. It is a straight sheath that she binds to her curves with a complicated system of cords and laces, leaving the sleeves free to stream from her forearms. The cords at her waist she tightens only to the bump of her belly, leaving her skirt to fall from there and swirl about her legs. The dress is cut low in the font and bares the tops of her breasts, made fuller by her pregnancy, and I feel desire whispering through my body, instructing me to lay her across our bed and undo all of the complicated ties she has just tightened, cast aside my robes again, and claim her beautiful body for my own.

I remember being in Alqualondë once for a festival honoring Ossë. It was a rare instance, where all three sons of Finwë stood together in relative peace: Nolofinwë and Fëanáro on either side of me, tall and resplendent in their festival clothes, the jewels at their throats and their wrists winking in Laurelin's splendor, the circlets on their heads denoting them high princes of the Noldor, brothers, no matter what their inclinations. And then I, in the middle, much smaller than they but noticeable for my golden hair and fine features and tendency to laugh quickly to fill the silences, a slip of gold foil lying prone between them in hopes of stopping the hammer from smiting the anvil.

We stood together, the three of us, without our wives or father for once, while the Telerin maidens danced in the square in gowns with all the substance of mist on the water, clinging to their bodies as they danced. "To think you wed one, Arafinwë," Nolofinwë mused. "They are certainly more liberated than the Noldor."

"Of course they are," said Fëanáro with bland smugness, as though it was a well-known fact and not one of his conjectures formulated after hours of intolerably lonely study that would be unbearable to Nolofinwë or me. "Their customs are derived in part from those of the Avari, who flaunt their fertility as part of their survival."

"Survival?" Nolofinwë scoffed. "Sport, perhaps."

"The Avari have not our carefree life, Nolofinwë," Fëanáro answered back. "They have more pressing concerns than procuring beautiful jewelry or perfecting urban architecture. The Avari know death far more keenly than do we, and so beget their children young and in great numbers to protect their bloodline. The women—and the men—display their bodies in hopes of showing their strength, their ability to produce children, for the survival of all."

In Nolofinwë, I could sense the jealous hurt that always accompanies such patronization from Fëanáro. How does he know the customs of the Avari, he who is an Elda? How does he speak with such certainty about something he's never even seen?

I sensed the hammer falling upon the anvil and so I spoke, something inane and meaningless enough to have been forgotten in the interim, something about being blessed to be able to enjoy both the practicalities and sport that such a woman offered. Whatever it was, it made them both laugh and forget the other long enough to become distracted by a new topic, one less inflammatory, until their wives appeared, giddy with Telerin wine, to drag them into the square to dance.

When Eärwen and I married, she defied the approval of my people and wore a Telerin gown, and I remember dancing with her in my arms—with little thought besides the ease with which I could feel each curve of her body through the flimsy cloth—and realizing that I was not alone in my discomfort in the rigid, intentional kingdom of the Noldor.

Eärwen's voice interrupts my thoughts: "Do I look well?" she asks, and I sense that she is nervous, wishing to appear happy and healthy to her parents and leaving them with no doubts about her decision to marry a prince of the Noldor.

She turns slowly, and I appraise her. The pale cloth of her gown streams away from her body as she turns. Her silver hair lifts from her back, fans slightly. She wears it free except at the sides, where she has plaited and bound it with silver clips in the shape of scallop shells. She might be a Maia of the sea, a servant of Ulmo, risen to bless me.

"You are beautiful," I tell her, and she lets her momentum carry her into my arms, where I kiss the perfect softness of her skin. She twines one of my braids around her finger—ignoring my protests that she will ruin my hard work—and asks me, "How do you think our son will look? Will he look more like me or you, do you think?"

"I do not know, Eärwen. I do not know that ours is a pairing that has ever been attempted since the Eldar came to Valinor."

"My mother tells me that the Vanyar and the Teleri sometimes paired in the Hither Lands, and that the children were usually blond with gray eyes. But the blood of your father seems to be exceptionally strong: All of Nerdanel's sons look most like their father, and Findekáno more resembles Nolofinwë than Anairë. So perhaps our son will also be the likeness of his father."

Hand in hand, we at last exit our chambers. The hour grows late, and Eärwen's parents will arrive shortly. The house rattles with the sound of the servants making busied, last-moment preparations. Many of them greet us as we pass; we reply warmly in return.

"Yes," I say, as we walk, "but I do not much resemble my father, so perhaps our son shall be more equitable in expressing our endowments." She laughs uproariously, making me hesitate with a share of confusion. "What is so funny?" I ask, at last, when her mirth shows no sign of ceasing.

"You sounded like your brother just then."

"Which one?"

"Whichever you prefer, Arafinwë. It is not enough to say that our child shall look like both of us, he must be 'equitable in expressing our endowments?' You are more a Noldo than you think."

Realizing how silly I must have sounded, I grin.

We reach the vestibule. As though sensing that the hour of Eärwen's parents' arrival draws near, the servants have retreated into near silence. Eärwen fills the silence with her singing, taking me into her arms so that we may dance lightly across the pale mosaic that marks the entryway into our home. I can feel her excitement fluttering inside of me like a butterfly trapped in cupped hands, eager to taste what the future has to offer. When the guards posted at the upper gates cry, "All hail King Olwë!" and the sound of brisk hoofbeats ring on the cobblestones of our street, she squeals with delight and does not leave my arms in that moment, pausing to squeeze me close and share in her moment of happiness.

"They are here!"

I open my arms and release her to run down the path to meet the chariot drawing to a halt in front of our home. I feel a smile touch my lips as I turn to follow her in a more dignified manner—one that befits a prince of the Noldor—letting the door to this room of our life slip closed behind me, knowing that I can never go back.

It is the last night that we will sleep in the wild before arriving at Oromë's Halls, and I am so excited that I cannot sleep. We have traveled steadily southward, and the nights have become warmer, and so we sleep in a clearing in the forest, without a tent. I lie on my back and gaze at the stars. There is minimal wind that barely teases the sparse tree branches over the clearing. I share a bedroll with Findekáno—as I have grown accustomed to doing this summer—and he lies with his back to me, lost in silent dreams. Findekáno never mutters in his sleep and barely moves, usually lying the whole night in the position in which he settles. It is abnormal, I think, for everyone in my family at times grows restless with dreams. On my other side is Amil, sharing her bed with Atar, and Carnistir curled up tiny beneath the blankets at Atar's side.

Nelyo and Macalaurë do not journey with us this time, a fact that was sprung upon us at breakfast on the morning we left. I heard Atar and Amil arguing in the kitchen while I set the table for breakfast, arguing in loud whispers like they did not want us to overhear, yet could not fully contain their anger. Carnistir hid under the table, wrapped Atar's cloak around his head, and sobbed. Findekáno made a point of staring at the floor, as though his lack of eye contact was enough to convince me that he did not hear my parents arguing in the next room. Amil appeared a moment later, pushing out of the kitchen with her eyes reddened and her expression firm, to straighten our work. Atar brought the breakfast out a moment later. His eyes were bright and clear, but his face was hard like Amil's—or a statue carved from stone.

"Where's Nelyo?" I asked, as we took our seats and Amil handed us bits of lembas for energy on our journey. I had set two places for my older brothers but they stood empty, although Atar had poured water in both of their glasses.

"Nelyo and Macalaurë will not be going with us today," Atar said. He was cutting an apple for Carnistir and did not look away from the knife.

At that moment, Nelyo and Macalaurë came into the dining room and took their places behind the empty plates. "I apologize for our tardiness," said Macalaurë, and I looked to Nelyo in alarm, for he is usually the one to ask for forgiveness. His natural grace makes it logical, and his station as the eldest brother demands it. But now it was Macalaurë—the awkward second-born—who made such a pronouncement.

Nelyo took a piece of lembas without a word. His face was very pale and the skin beneath his eyes looked dark and bruised. Macalaurë used to smear soot from the forge around his eyes and chase Carnistir and me to scare us, and he had looked much like Nelyo did then. Nelyo only ate half of the lembas before setting it on Macalaurë's plate without a word. He took nothing else. Amil and Macalaurë both sent wide-eyed looks, as though begging for something, in Nelyo's direction, but he sipped his water and did not look up. Atar was busy trying to get Carnistir to eat a slice of apple, and I don't think he noticed.

After breakfast, Nelyo and Macalaurë were excused, and Findekáno and I were sent to clear the table and wash the dishes. Nelyo and Macalaurë scraped back their chairs and left silently, looking at no one, not even each other, although I sensed that they were in communication nonetheless. Atar followed them and scooped up Carnistir and took him upstairs to dress. Amil stacked her plate with Macalaurë's, then hurried from the room as though she'd just remembered that she had to do something elsewhere and had to hasten to the task or be too late. None bothered to bring their plates into the kitchen.

It was my begetting day, and already I'd set the table for breakfast and now had to clear everyone else's mess, after they lacked the consideration to even take the dishes into the kitchen, as Atar expected all of us to do. Furthermore, my two elder brothers had decided to desert my special begetting-day trip, probably to stay home and gossip and go to picnics with other young people from the city. Angry tears blurred my vision, and I chased them away by banging the plates until I thought they might break. I didn't care. I wanted them to break. Maybe, then, someone would notice me.

Findekáno followed me, gathering the napkins for the laundry, walking silently with his head down. I slammed the plates on the counter beside the sink, returned for the glasses and slammed them down too. Findekáno was preparing a rag to wipe the table, and the bitter urge rose in my gut to kick his shins as I passed so that I might not be the only one who felt pain today.

But I did not, for fear of my father's retribution that would surely result, and instead, pumped the sink full of water, added more detergent than was necessary—causing bubbles to rise in a precarious mound—and pushed the dishes into it. Let one break, I found myself hoping, envisioning a plate shattering beneath the bubbles, where I could not see it as I reached into the water, leaving it to slip across my unwitting fingers in a blaze of pain, filling the basin with blood, making the soap bubbles pink. I wouldn't empty the sink when that happened but would wash all of the dishes, leaving them streaked with red that would dry brown while we were gone, eagerly awaiting the satisfaction of hearing my mother scream with the discovery.

Porcelain—even the heavy plates Atar had commissioned for daily use—should shatter easily inside the marble basin, but none did. None were even chipped so far as I could see.

Findekáno took his place on the stepstool next to me, drying the dishes as I clunked them on the counter. We did not speak and I made it a point not to look at him, although I felt his eyes sliding over me like slippery fingers appraising a token. Behind us, the kitchen door whooshed open. Probably Amil or Atar, I figured, and bit my lip and did not turn, but it was Nelyo—dressed in traveling clothes—who came up beside us and kissed Findekáno on the forehead before turning to me.

"I failed to wish you well on your begetting day, Tyelkormo," he said, and I could hear in his voice that he was trying to sound sincere, although his voice was rough, as though he'd just run a great distance and was winded. "I apologize and hope that the stars smile favorably on you this day and all others." He kissed my lips and hugged me. Standing on the stepstool, as I was, my face was pressed into his chest, and I could hear his heart beating. I expected it to sound light and quick—like one who has just run for many leagues—but it thudded ponderously instead, as if a stone were beating against the inside of his chest. I gripped him around his waist as though letting go would mean sentencing him to some terrible fate.

But he peeled my arms away so that Macalaurë—who had entered behind him—could likewise wish me well and give me a hug and kiss. Macalaurë wore his traveling cloak and smelled dusty, like the unscented soaps we use to keep bugs from bothering us on the road. "We are not journeying with you this day," he said, "so Nelyo and I would like to give you your begetting day gifts now, when the dishes are finished."

Nelyo came to stand beside me, and Macalaurë stood beside Findekáno, and the four of us finished washing and drying in no time, and I felt guilty for the thoughts that had filled my mind earlier, of streaking Atar's plates with blood. Nelyo helped me to empty and dry the sink, then led me to the wooden kitchen table and sat me on the bench between him and Macalaurë, who held Findekáno in his lap, and from beneath the table, drew out two packages wrapped in parchment that he'd hidden there.

Macalaurë's gift was large and bulky—an awkwardly wrapped lump with no discernable shape, bound with a red silk ribbon—and I opened it first. Inside were new riding boots, made from soft, flexible leather with a pattern of leaves tooled at the top. They were beautiful, and I gasped. "Yours now have begun to pinch your toes, have they not?" Macalaurë asked, and I nodded. "Well, then, these should fit perfectly. The finest cobbler in Formenos made them for me." I looked at him with astonishment, for Macalaurë has not Atar's gift for producing tradable commodities, and as though sensing my thoughts, he laughed and said, "Even craftsmen of renown appreciate a bit of music with their supper."

"And naturally, a voice as precious as Macalaurë's is held dear indeed," said Nelyo, handing me a smaller bit of parchment. "This is my begetting day gift to you, beloved brother mine."

Nelyo's parchment was folded into an envelope and sealed with red wax bearing his seal: our father's star, wrapped in the banner of our grandfather the king. Because he is not yet of age, Nelyo does not often use his seal, and I did not want to break it. I hesitated until he nudged me and said, "Go on. It is meant to be broken."

I broke the seal and poked my fingers inside the envelope. I felt the chain first: It was coarse, made of large links. Not our father's work; this I could tell just from the touch on my fingers. I drew it out, and it fell across my palm: a silver chain with a silver pendant that—when I turned it over—was revealed to be leaf-shaped, inlaid with slivers of colored stone in green, red, gold, and brown, each segment a different hue. The leaf's stem curled around the chain and held it in place. I looked up at Nelyo, confused, for Nelyo usually gives practical gifts, like books and quills, never anything so valuable. He smiled at me and took the chain and slipped it over my head. "I fashioned the chain, long ago, as part of my apprenticeship with Atar," he said, guiding it gently around my ears with well-practiced fingers. "It is not graceful, and Atar will make you one more beautiful, but I didn't have the time to ask him for it, and I hardly thought it right to give you a pendant without a chain on which to wear it."

"And the pendant?" I asked. Nelyo settled it around my neck, slipping it inside of my tunic to press against my breastbone. Like sunlight, I could feel it resting there, but it was as weightless as air. "Did Atar make the pendant?"

Nelyo chuckled. "No, little one, Atar outgrew such awkward notions long ago. I made the pendant. It is not beautiful, but I had the stones blessed by Yavanna before we came here. It will allow you to pass through the forest with ease, and as long as you wear it, no plant shall hinder your journey."

Not beautiful? It was not as flawless as Atar's work, but I could sense the many hours that Nelyo had spent making it and was more grateful for that than I would have been for one of Atar's perfect pieces that he made easily in less than a day and traded in the city for grain to feed the horses.

I tried to imagine passing through the forest without tripping over an exposed tree root or being snagged by vines and scratched by thorns and could not. I held the pendant in my hand, and it glistened at me, as though smiling. I smiled back, then tossed my arms around Macalaurë's neck first, then Nelyo's. "I love them both; they're beautiful!" I said, and I might have been talking about my brothers and not the gifts they gave me for the happiness that soared suddenly in my heart.

But still, they stood in the doorway while we departed, with one of Nelyo's heavy cloaks wrapped around both of their shoulders, and despite the happiness I had seen touch Nelyo's eyes only an hour earlier, his face had darkened once more.

The journey has been uneventful. Perhaps because of the pendant around my neck, even the tree branches seem to lift like arms to keep from tangling in my hair, and my pony has yet to slip on a moss-covered rock. Nonetheless, I am eager to leave the trail and join the company of the Vala Oromë, who was so kind to me those weeks ago, when in my unwisdom, I attempted to flee my destiny as my father's son.

And so I lie sleepless in my eagerness, beside my cousin who might have died for the depth of his silence, listening to my parents' breathing mingling with the sounds of the night. I feel the scratch of tiny insect-claws on my forehead and resist the urge to slap it away, sensing benevolence, and instead cup the creature in my hand and place in on my chest, where I can see it. It is a field cricket, small and brown, and he rubs his legs in a nocturnal lullaby almost as beautiful as the songs Macalaurë sings, until my eyes drop closed and I fall into sleep.

~oOo~

We awaken early the next morning and take a cold breakfast of berries and lembas before returning to the trail. My cricket has left me in the night, but the trees are filled with bright-feathered birds whose songs coax me awake. Carnistir is fussy this morning and won't ride with anyone but Atar, who looks invigorated but acts sullenly, barely speaking to anyone. For hours, we plod along the trail in near silence, kept company only by the soft thud of our horses' hooves on the mushy forest floor and Carnistir's whimpering. After a while, even the birdsong and colorful butterflies that cross our path becoming mundane, repetitive, a perpetual motion machine set to replicate the same set of motions over and over again. It is Amil who senses Findekáno's and my boredom first, and she leads us in a few rounds of trail songs. Atar remains silent and, as though attempting to overcome the new noise, Carnistir raises his volume to cover ours, so we do not sing long.

At last, as the morning fades and the golden light of afternoon wraps around us, we reach the edge of a meadow and Atar stops. The meadow is green without a brown spot upon it and studded with flowers of every color, rising into a gentle hill at the center. It is Valinor, and I had forgotten its beauty during our months in Formenos; it is as though, sifting through the mud, a bright jewel has suddenly been revealed. The wind plays its hands over the fronds, rippling them in the wind like the waves of the sea. In the middle of the meadow stand two deer—a stag and a doe—and at sight of us, they dash away and over the hill, out of sight.

"They are Maiar," Atar says suddenly. His voice is clear, not roughened by irritation, as I would have expected, as though he has been silent all morning not from surliness but only because he had nothing to say. "They serve Oromë. They will tell him that we are here."

The world falls still around us suddenly, as if nature is bowing in reverence. A moment later, a huge silver steed crests the hill, running nearly silently across the meadow. On its back is Oromë, his pale brown hair the color of an animal hide whipping the air behind him. The grasses of the meadow part to make way for him. Amil and Findekáno dismount simultaneously as he comes to a stop in front of us, kneeling in the grass in reverence. Atar also dismounts—as do I—but Atar doesn't bow. He shoves Carnistir into my arms—leaving me to remain upright and feeling suddenly disrespectful for it—and approaches Oromë.

Oromë and Atar grasp hands, and it is like watching two wildfires meet in a field: It is hard to tell which will first consume the other. "My lord Oromë," Atar says, bowing his head slightly, low enough to be respectful but defiant nonetheless, given that his wife still kneels behind him with her knees in the dirt.

"Curufinwë Fëanáro Finwion," says Oromë, and his voice sounds—as it always does—like it might boil into laughter or rage in an instant, and a split second could be the determinant of which, "the High Prince of the Noldor. I welcome you and your family to my home."

Over Atar's shoulder, Oromë's eyes alight on me. Carnistir is squirming in my arms—I am still too small to hold him easily—and so I cannot be certain, but my insides hum with a sound like a voice: I am most glad for your presence here, Fëanárion.

Carnistir stops wiggling and looks into my face, like a bystander watching a party in a conversation for a response. I lower my eyes and am struck by the thought that I should be on the ground with my mother and cousin, but I am conscious also of the weight of my father's eyes, as if he waits for my response, and I know that he would not look upon such a display favorably.

So, like Atar, I nod, although I let the secret thought warm me: I am overjoyed also at being here.

Oromë smiles.

~oOo~

Oromë escorts us to his Halls, and at first, I do not see them, thinking that we must have been farther away than I thought. But then we stop, before the arching entrance to a forest, and I realize that these are his Halls; that he has crafted a mansion so like the forest around it that I have at first mistaken it for nothing more than a beautiful stand of trees. Tree trunks twist and bow to form the contours of the rooms, their boughs curtaining the windows so that all light is filtered through green, dusty and smelling of life. The floor is wooden and the fixtures are of stone, with water spilling from fountains like forest streams, graced by flowers of every color and variety, for the wife of Oromë is Vána the Everyoung, and flowers grow wherever she desires.

Two Maiar in cloaks and clothes like hunters take our mounts to a stable deeper in the forest; two more appear for our luggage, whisking it away to rooms hidden deep in Oromë's Halls before Atar can even protest. "You are hungry from your journey," Oromë says, and it is not a question but a statement, and I feel my stomach constrict as though on command, grumbling with sudden famishment.

Even Atar does not protest as Oromë leads through twisting halls that seem to culminate logically in a high-ceilinged dining room with a large, raw oak table at its center. A beautiful woman stands at one end of the table, giving an instruction to a servant, and when she turns to greet us, there is an innocent light on her face that makes her seem younger than Carnistir, despite the fact that her body is that of a grown woman. Her gown is light silk, with flowers twined at the neck and sleeves—and throughout her hair also—and her feet are bare. Her hair is golden like mine, but hers shines with the light of Laurelin. She offers her hand to Atar, and he takes it. "Curufinwë, it has been many years since we last met, yet you are as fair now as ever. I welcome you and your family to our home."

"I thank you, my lady," Atar says softly. "May I reacquaint you with my family?"

"Your wife, Nerdanel, I shall know until the ending of time." My mother attempts to bow before her, but Vána catches her hands and kisses her cheek. "My dear, there is no need for one such as you to bow to anyone. I have known you through converse in your prayers; meeting you is like meeting an old friend. And your children?"

Amil introduces Vána to each of us in turn. Findekáno bows before her, and she laughs. "Such a proper little child, not that I'd expect anything else from the scion of Nolofinwë." She lifts Carnistir into her arms, and he gazes at her as though enraptured, for once not caterwauling, biting, or drooling, and she fawns over him for many moments, seeming as lost in his big, dark eyes and he is in her bright blue ones. Finally, she hands him back to Amil and comes to me last, and it is only when she is before me that I notice how tall she is. She must crouch to greet me. "And you, little one, are the reason that we have the honor of hosting your family. I remember riding to see you, only two days after you were born. A more beautiful baby might never again be born to the Eldar. Such fire burns in your spirit, Turkafinwë! I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice. Your father has blessed you, little one, with powerful gifts."

She kisses my forehead, and my skin beneath her lips feels as I always imagined the earth must feel here in the north, with the first warm rains of spring. I feel enlivened, as though I might run forever without stopping or leap from the cliffs and take wing like the birds. And when her kiss leaves me and she rises to invite us to sit and partake in the many dishes set out by the servants while she greeted us, I feel fragile and bereft, a leaf parched by drought and too easily broken by the wind.

~oOo~

The meal set before us that afternoon is akin to the feasts served at the festivals Grandfather Finwë holds in Tirion. I am deemed the guest of honor and seated to Oromë's right, opposite Atar. There are several game meats—turkey, goose, and wild pork—and an endless rainbow of fruits and vegetables, mostly served raw, crisp and cold from being washed in the frigid water delved from deep beneath the earth, and spilling forth from wicker baskets adorned with flowering vines that trail from the table and to the floor. There are blocks of cheese, many of which I have never tasted before. The bread is hot, as though just taken from the oven, and served with cold pats of butter shaped like leaves that melt upon touching the bread and drip from my chin. The wine Oromë serves is thick and strong, and when Atar and Amil are distracted by Carnistir, who is caught feeding bits of pork to one of the large hounds that lie beneath Oromë's table, Oromë gives me a wink and pours me a second glass.

When we are filled to bursting, the servants appear again as if by magic, and in a single minute, the table is clear. Dessert is brought out next: fruit ices served in quartz crystal goblets, roughly hewn as though just taken from the earth and chilled so that they bite unwitting fingers like ice. The fruit ices are finer than snow, flavored like raspberries, and drizzled with just enough chocolate syrup to take the bite from the berries. Despite the fact that I can't recall ever having eaten so much—even at Grandfather's most extravagant feasts—I am quickly scraping the bottom of the goblet with my spoon and licking away the last of the raspberry and chocolate from my lips.

"I wish that Nelyo and Macalaurë could have been here for this," I declare loudly, when the pleasantries my parents have been exchanging with Oromë and Vána cease long enough for me to speak.

Amil and Atar both laugh. They have finished a bottle of Oromë's wine between them, and I recognize the light flush that inebriation brings to my mother's cheeks.

"Perhaps it is for the best," says Atar, pouring himself and Amil another glass. "If Macalaurë knew that such feasts were the daily custom of the Valar, then I might never hear his songs grace my home again, for surely he would never leave your Halls, Lord Oromë."

I wait for Oromë to inquire after my brothers, to ask why they are absent when the letter Atar sent said that they would be in our company, but he does not. He laughs and raises his glass to my father. "May Curufinwë always enjoy the blessings of his sons' talents, but may he also lend them to us on occasion, so that the Halls of the Valar may be made brighter by the gifts that Ilúvatar's children bring the world."

All of us—even little Carnistir—raise our glasses, in honor of both Atar and the Valar.

The servants clear the table shortly after, and Atar retreats to Oromë's study for counsel while Amil asks if Vána would show us to our rooms, as our journey was long and we desire to refresh ourselves and rest. "Naturally," Vána says, sounding mildly surprised. "I apologize, for I do not often come among your people, and I forget that this is your way. Perhaps I should have done so prior to inviting you to the meal."

"I would not have minded, but I do not think the bellies of my little ones would have been keen on bathing while such a feast waited, untouched," says my mother.

Vána leads us up a staircase that curls around a tree trunk bigger than any I have ever seen before. Silver fronds hang from the branches like curtains and hide chambers and hallways from us. I do not know how high we climb before Vána parts the fronds and leads us down a hallway that might be from our house in Formenos except for the fact that flowering vines have taken the place of what adornment Atar would create along the walls. "You and Curufinwë will stay in the main guest chamber," she says, gesturing to a door at the end of the hallway. "The little ones, I thought, would do well in here, but as your elder sons are not in attendance, then perhaps two shall share the chamber I have prepared for them, if one does not mind sleeping alone?"

"Yes," says Amil, "Carnistir cannot sleep with anyone but his father. I will give him Nelyo and Macalaurë's room, so that he may be closer to his father and me, and Tyelkormo and Findekáno shall share this one."

Vána takes her leave of us, and Amil leads us down the hall to the room that she will share with Atar. Carnistir is in her arms, his eyes closed and his head on her shoulder. Findekáno's eyes are drooping heavily, and he is staggering, perhaps only avoiding a fall because Amil holds his hand. "I know that you are sleepy, little ones," she says. "Just let me bathe you and give you fresh clothes, and I will tuck you into your beds for a nap."

I do not want a nap! I want to explore the many-tiered hallways of Oromë's Halls, but Amil will hear no complaints. "I will bathe Carnistir and Findekáno first, as they are most wearied," she tells me. "I want you, Tyelkormo, to wait for me in here."

She leaves me in Atar's and her bedroom. There is a wide window behind their bed, giving a sweeping view of the forest canopy, suggesting that we must have climbed quite high, although the climb was effortless, and I feel as though I could race along the treetops for all of the energy quivering in my limbs. The furniture is crafted of natural wood, and for decoration, there are numerous wooden statues of wild animals in motion, running and springing, so realistic that they might be miniature versions of the actual creature. The bed is wide and covered with furs so soft that they feel like air when I run my hands across them. I kick off my boots and roll to the center of the bed to stare at the ceiling, which is higher than our bedrooms at home, with wooden rafters strewn with flowers that do not wither or fade.

On Atar's side of the bed is a wooden statue of a hawk, his wings outstretched and cupped slightly around his body, as though he is ready to alight. The statue is wooden but rises from a quartz base that makes it look as though it is actually flying. It looks familiar, as though I have seen it before, and when I lift it to check for an artist's signature on the bottom, it is my mother's neat script chiseled into the base: Nerdanel Mahtaniel. I do not remember seeing this statue before and realize that it is probably older than I am, that Amil may have made it before she even married Atar.

"I do not understand why Oromë so loves that piece," says Amil's voice behind me, startling me so that I bobble and almost drop the statue. "It is awkward compared to that of which I am capable."

I set the statue gently onto the table. "I like it," I say and turn. Amil holds Carnistir, wrapped in a fluffy bath towel and sleeping on her shoulder. She lays him gently in the middle of the bed, tucking the towel around him. "Will you watch over him?" she asks me, and I nod solemnly, as though I am agreeing to a promise that will last well beyond this moment, this day.

I must have done as I was told, and I must have been bathed, but both memories are dimmer than dreams when I awaken in a wide bed in unfamiliar chambers, my hair damp, wearing a clean nightshirt. My head lies like a leaden weight on my pillow and my eyes might have been heavy glass orbs for the effort it takes to roll them in the direction of a second bed opposite mine, where I see a lump shrouded in blankets that I assume is Findekáno. The wine, I realize, recalling the thick, drowsy taste of the vintage and Atar's comment to Nelyo at a feast we once attended in Manwë's palace in Taniquetil, to drink sparingly the wines of the Valar, for they exert great potency on unaccustomed Elves. On the table between our beds, Amil's statue stands, as though brought to me through a wish alone. As I fall gently into slumber, I dream that I am the hawk, and I feel the cool winds of Manwë bearing me ever higher, until the trees are a green fuzz beneath me, and Varda's stars are near enough to touch.

I do not know for how long I sleep after, but when I awaken again, Amil is setting Findekáno's circlet atop his head. He is already dressed in deep blue robes trimmed with silver embroidery, and as I sit up, he catches my eye in the mirror, and for a moment, he is not the young, silent Elf with whom I have been forced to associate in the past few months but someone much greater, with courage and wisdom in his eyes that equals what I see in Nelyo's.

But that moment passes quickly, as Amil hears my bedclothes rustle and turns to meet my eyes and give me a smile. "Look who's decided to awaken," she says. "We will be joining Lord Oromë and Lady Vána for the evening meal, Tyelkormo, if you would help me by putting on your good robes."

My good robes are the color of pine trees with gold- and ruby-colored thread twined at the hemlines. Amil has laid them out along with a light silk tunic and breeches to wear underneath. My limbs are still heavy but the weight pressing my eyes is lifting a bit, and by the time I have the robes fastened and am ready to have Amil braid my hair, I am invigorated once more and ready for the evening's festivities.

Normally, Amil puts my hair in single, simple plaits at each side, fastening them at the back of my head to keep my hair from my face, with very little aesthetic enhancement. But tonight, she takes a long time to weave my hair in an elaborate series of braids, tiny enough that a good deal of my hair is left to spill freely over my shoulders, and carefully nestles my circlet atop it. In the mirror, I meet my own eyes and see a different Elf than stares back at me each morning, one that looks like a prince from Tirion. I feel silly, though, as if I am playing dress-up, like I used to do when I was as small as Carnistir, wearing Atar's apron and boots and pretending to be Aulë.

Amil kisses my temple. "You are beautiful, Tyelkormo," she says, and a thought flashes through my mind before I even realize that I am thinking: Of course I am.

~oOo~

We wait in a parlor alongside the hall, a hall that roars with voices. Oromë's people have gathered here tonight, to welcome the High Prince of the Noldor and his family, so we will be formally presented and seated at the head table, with Oromë, Vána, and their most loyal Maiar. In the meantime, we nibble on cheese and sip sparkling wine. Amil looks beautiful—her hair arranged in gentle waves down her back—but nervous, sitting on the edge of a settee with awkward dignity. She is a princess, I know, for she is Atar's wife, but it is hard to think of her that way, even now, when she wears a splendid gown and her silver circlet. Atar is much easier to think of as a prince, even though he acts the least dignified of us now, as he paces around, bouncing Carnistir and singing him silly little songs to keep him from crying.

I lean over onto Amil's leg. "Amil, are we going to eat soon?"

"Very soon, my little one," she says, handing me another piece of cheese in an attempt to keep me quiet. I consider raising further protest, but Atar gives me a stern look over the top of Carnistir's head, and I make myself be content to eat my bit of cheese in silence.

Besides Atar, only Findekáno looks at ease. He sips at the bit of wine that Amil has given him and reads a book of Nelyo's that he has brought, spread open on his knees. His nonchalance is no surprise, though, as he is accustomed to such a fuss being made on his behalf. I imagine that he must be honored at feasts all the time in Tirion, as the eldest son of my half-uncle, the other High Prince of the Noldor. We would be given such honors too, but Grandfather Finwë says that his eldest is stubborn and prefers to bask in the light of his own creations rather than the admiration of his people, and so we live outside the city and do not often enjoy such luxuries.

A steward appears and glasses are abandoned and hair smoothed and clothing straightened before we follow him down the hall, where the doors open to a fanfare and we are presented as the family of Curufinwë Fëanáro, High Prince of the Noldor.

Other lords and Maiar have been presented before us, and they join the people in rising and applauding our arrival. The hall stretches almost as large as Grandfather Finwë's hall in Tirion, and from wall to wall, all I see are sunny Vanyarin heads, filling the room. We hold no lordship over them, but they rise out of respect for us anyway. Amil hurries us to our seats, her face flushed with distress at having so many eyes pinned on her, but Atar lingers and nods carefully in thanks to the people, who take it as their invitation to sit down. Atar will speak later, but for now, he is the last to be seated as silence descends on the room in anticipation of the introduction of Oromë and Vána. A fanfare explodes against the silence, and Oromë and Vána step through the doors through which we just passed. Oromë wears white robes trimmed in leaves; his crown is a garland of golden branches. On his arm, Vána wears a gown of many layers of trailing silk, with flowers spilling down her back as if they grow in the rich luster of her golden hair.

Like iron fillings rising to a magnet, everyone in the room pushes to their feet. The roar of applause is greater than thunder or the roar of the sea; the light in the people's eyes at the sight of their lord and lady is akin to that which lights Atar's face in the forge. Amil has to nudge me to get to me rise, while Atar hauls Carnistir to his feet. We bow our heads in honor of the Valar as they take their seats amongst us, and I touch my golden hair as I do. In these halls, I might be mistaken for one of their people—and, indeed, my spirit does glow with love for Oromë—but also, there is unease in my chest, as though I do not really belong here and, try as I might to remain, my presence here will be as fleeting as a dream.

Oromë and Vána take their places but do not sit. Oromë motions for the people to sit, and with a great clatter of scraping chairs, they do. Amil tugs my robes and I sit as well. "People of Oromë," says Oromë, in a voice that projects around the hall as though the walls themselves speak with his voice, "your effusive welcome is as always most generous and appreciated. You join me tonight to celebrate my guests, the House of Curufinwë, of the Noldor, who have journeyed here to honor the begetting of the third-born son of Curufinwë, Turkafinwë Tyelkormo."

Many heads swivel in my direction. They are made curious, I see, by this golden-haired Noldo who would choose to celebrate his begetting in the company of the Valar. Unlike the Noldor, their curiosity is short-lived and quickly replaced by warm smiles, eyes crinkling in welcome. No matter what my circumstances, I know that I will be made welcome among them.

Oromë is nearly finished speaking. "I would like to invite High Prince Curufinwë to say a few words, if he will. And perhaps, Curufinwë, we may impose upon you to speak the blessing?"

Beside me, Amil goes rigid as though seized by a sudden pain, and even her well-honed decorum cannot stop her eyes from flying to my father. He does not return her glance, however, and rises carefully from his seat beside Oromë.

It is not often that I hear my father speak publicly. He speaks at major feasts and festivals in Tirion, but he never speaks for long, and it is easy to forget that the man who recites historical texts with Nelyo and sings songs to my baby brother and yells at me for tracking mud across the vestibule does so in the same voice with which he now speaks to the people of Oromë, a voice like wine that flows into even the most reluctant spirits and kindles a warm glow. I watch as Atar speaks and the eyes of the Vanyar drift from their lord and to the face of my father, where they remain, as though entranced. He speaks of gratitude and of his honor at so rich a welcome; his spirit is warmed, he says, by the generosity of the people of the Vanyar, as though they have done much more than stand in his honor. I watch lips flicker open into smiles, across the room, like the stars emerging at night. "I thank all of you for your hospitality: Lord Oromë, Lady Vána, People of the Hunter," he concludes, "and may light smile ever upon you." There is nothing special about his words—they are typical words of gratitude spoken at such occasions—but the people cheer, as though Atar has given them gifts of gold and not plain words spoken in his voice.

"All rise for the giving of thanks to Arda and the Valar," calls Oromë's herald, and the people are once more on their feet.

And the Valar. That explains why Amil looked so alarmed and why, now, her clasped hands tremble. Atar will not kneel before the Valar; he says he owes them no loyalty. The Vanyar speak praises of the Valar each morning and before each meal. They credit the Valar with their very existence, speaking gratitude for every vague inspiration and blessing that touches their lives. To imagine such words in Atar's voice is inconceivable. I wonder now if he will rebel, if he will speak against that which he is being asked to do; I watch for the sparks of insolence in his eyes, but his face remains calm, his expression flat. His hands are loosely clasped in front of his rich red robes; his bright eyes remained lifted to the ceiling, to the expansive sky beyond, even as a golden ripple passes among the people, as heads bow piously and hair spills over shoulders. Beside me, Amil's hands are clenched and her long, red hair brushing the tabletop as she bends her head. Atar's palms press flat atop the table, and his face remains lifted to the sky.

"To Arda and Eru Ilúvatar, we give thanks for those gifts we are about to enjoy. And may the friendship between the Ainur and the Eldar remain eternally strong, and may both forever enjoy the blessings the other provides."

The people of Oromë remain standing for a long moment after Atar has finished, their bowed heads motionless, and it isn't until Atar silently takes his seat that I detect motion among them: Heads tilt and shift to exchange small glances with neighbors, as though silently questioning my father. I imagine they wonder: Is this a tradition of the Noldor, to so deftly avoid the Valarin influence in our lives? Surely, Grandfather Finwë has spoken many times before them, and his blessings are as lavish as those of his wife, the princess of the Vanyar. It is Oromë who sits first, then Vána, and the rest of the people follow, although the conversation fails to rise as it usually does with the subsequent arrival of the breadbaskets and tureens of soup. My parents—Atar to my right and Amil to my left—however, start speaking right away: Atar and Oromë begin conversing about the mining prospects of a town north of Formenos and Amil attempts to coax a spoonful of soup past Carnistir's tightened lips. Never, though, over the course of the meal, do they acknowledge each other.

~oOo~

Later that night, Findekáno and I play a board game in our room, sitting on Findekáno's bed. It is getting late, but neither of my parents has come to help us out of our fancy dress robes and into our nightclothes. Findekáno is half-lying across the bottom of his bed, watching me ponder my next move, and his circlet is crooked on his head and his robes are becoming wrinkled. I'd hate to see how I must look: The tight hairstyle Amil gave me makes my head ache—I am accustomed to having my mass of hair unencumbered and free to fly weightlessly where it will—so I have slowly tugged the plaits free and thrown the clips onto the floor, along with my circlet and all of my jewelry, except the pendant Nelyo gave me. I jump my piece over one of Findekáno's and claim it for my own. He scowls, and I loll onto my back to watch what his next move will be.

We do not speak much as we play, for there are few matters worthy of conversation that exist between us. We strive silently, as though more is at stake on the game board than a few carved stone pieces. I free the last plait in my hair as I lie and scatter the clips on the floor between our beds. My restless fingers begin to untwine the braids as Findekáno's fingers skip over the game pieces indecisively. He starts to move one piece, then realizes that that move—which will claim one of my pieces—will allow me to claim three of his, and withdraws his hand and nibbles on his thumbnail. His forehead wrinkles and his teeth click down on his nail, then stop; he stares at the board, frozen, for a long moment, then his hand shoots out and skips one of his pieces over three of mine.

He tries to look nonchalant about taking the lead over me for the first time tonight, but he betrays himself when his eyes flicker to mine to observe my reaction. I make my features remain stiff. When he first came to stay with us, he would jump the first piece he saw, and I beat him easily every time. He must have learned something during all the hours he spends studying with Nelyo—patience, perhaps. I appraise the board, seeking the most viable possibilities among the pieces, but my stomach gives an impatient flutter that means I am losing and desperate to regain my lead. I swallow hard and try to regain my control, but I only betray myself: With a lift of his eyes, I know that Findekáno has perceived my unease.

"Do you think your parents have forgotten us?" Findekáno asks.

"No, it is Atar's turn to tuck us in tonight. He would not forget."

Secretly, I think that he is probably not here because he and Amil are fighting. They said nothing to each other through the entire meal, and fifteen years as their son has taught me that the words they withhold in anger have a tendency to explode tenfold later. I strain my ears to listen—their suite is next-door to our room, after all—but I hear nothing. It is as though our room floats alone, high above the trees, for all the sounds that I can hear from the rest of the house. It is so quiet that I can hear my own pulse soughing in my ears.

I begin to wonder if Findekáno was right: Maybe Atar did forget us. He sometimes works so intently that he will not answer us when we call him for supper. Perhaps he has descended to that place inside of himself now, where he is unmarried and childless and free to go with his mind, where it wanders.

As though sensing my unease, the bedroom door bangs open, but it is Amil, not Atar, who enters. Carnistir is wriggling and shrieking in her arms, and past his senseless keening, I discern the words: "No, no bath! Had bath already today!" One of his legs breaks free of Amil's grip, and he begins bludgeoning her hip with it.

"Where's Atar?" I ask. "Atar's supposed to tuck us into bed tonight."

"Well, I will have to suffice," she says, speaking loudly to overcome Carnistir's wailing. "Your father rode out into the forest, and I do not know when he will return."

I feel a stab of hurt inside me for not being invited to ride with him. Everyone is suddenly taking these private journeys—first Nelyo and Macalaurë, now Atar—leaving in secret and abandoning me to suffer with the mediocrity of Findekáno's company.

Amil sets Carnistir onto my bed, where he burrows beneath the blankets, effectively becoming just another lump in my ruffled coverlet. Carnistir is very good at hiding, I do have to admit. He will be a fine hunter one day, if he ever learns to shoot an arrow farther than four feet.

"Look at the two of you," Amil says, but she looks at me when she says it. With a whooshing sigh, she bends to pick up the clips and jewelry that litter the floor. Findekáno's eyes are wide with guilt—even though the rubble on the floor was not his doing—and his fingers are twitching over his hair, smoothing it, straightening his circlet, so when Amil rises again, all that remains of his disarray are the wrinkled robes. I, on the other hand, must look like a heathen.

Amil inspects the bits she has retrieved from the floor and, finding that they are all mine, dumps them into my lap with stern instructions to put them in their proper place. I have never seen Amil this irritated before—except maybe with Atar, but never with us—and I have never seen her limbs jerk like she can't wait for them to be done with her tasks so that she may escape somewhere else. I feel an apprehensive twinge: Maybe she will leave us too? Maybe she will ride away from us, as Atar and Nelyo and Macalaurë have already done? I scamper to my bureau and put away my things without another word; Findekáno is likewise sweeping away the game pieces and folding up the game board, so we will never know who won, but that seems unimportant now.

I walk as quietly as I can, back across the room, and sit on my bed, avoiding the lump that is Carnistir, although he squeals when my weight shifts the mattress, as though I have plopped directly atop him. Findekáno is sitting likewise on his bed—we are the portrait of obedient children, although Carnistir spoils the image—and Amil is searching our bureaus for our nightclothes. Oromë's servants put them away, and they did not place them as we have them at home, and she is grumbling about this.

She finds Findekáno's nightshirt in a drawer with his underwear and relaxes a bit. "Why have you all gone so quiet?" she asks, and she sounds like Amil now, her voice gentle and a bit playful. "I grow suspicious when my three babies become too quiet."

"I thought you were angry with us, Amil," I say.

"Not with you," she says. "With your father, perhaps. I apologize if my irritation with him has been conveyed to you unjustly." She finds my nightshirt too and smiles at us. The smile is tight, though, a mechanism much strained and trying not to break, to function as easily as it once did. Behind me, Carnistir wriggles and moans.

Once, when Amil and Atar argued, I went to Atar and asked him why, and he told me that he and Amil are both too obstinate for each other. Full of fear I asked: Did that mean that I was going to lose one of them? That Amil or Atar was going to go away and not live together anymore, and full of tenderness, Atar took me in his arms and assured me that the bond between a husband and wife—especially one sealed with as much love as was his and Amil's—took much more than a little fight to sunder. I asked, then, what did it mean? And Atar told me, his voice light, as though joking, "Nothing more except that it might be a bit longer before you get another baby brother."

After that, whenever Amil and Atar would fight, I would go to Atar and ask, "Does this mean that I have to wait a bit longer for my baby brother?" and he would laugh, and I would feel as though things had returned to a fraction of normalcy.

I try it with Amil now. "Does this mean that I have to wait a while longer for another baby brother?" I ask, and Amil shoots me a puzzled look, so I explain, "Atar says that when you are mad at him, then it keeps him from being able to give me another brother."

She stares at me for a long moment, during which time Carnistir wriggles more furiously and kicks at my back, as though he wishes to be free of the blankets. But there is a second side to the bed, and he is free to escape from there. Now, I am wondering what Amil will say, and why she has grown so quiet.

She breaks the moment, jerking in the direction of our vanity to retrieve a hairbrush. "I wish your father would not tell you such things," she says, and her voice is strained again, and I wonder why it makes Atar laugh but makes her angry.

Carnistir kicks me hard enough to hurt, in the center of my back, and I yelp and slide off of the bed. At that moment, the smell hits me—like the ammonia that Atar keeps in his laboratory mixed with the heavy-grained salt that we sprinkle on popcorn—and I shout, "Amil, Carnistir wet in my bed!"

I expect Amil to run and pull Carnistir out of the bed, but she turns her back to us, and her hands tear at her hair as though it has angered her. "Why must you be so difficult?" she shouts, to no one in particular, and her voice breaks, and I can hear her ragged breathing. This is how I breathe, after I have hurt myself and lie crying in the safe comfort of Atar's arms.

She whirls and, in a second, has crossed the room. I am bumped out of the way, and Carnistir is drawn—screaming and kicking—from my bed. The bottoms of his good dress robes are soaked, and my sheets are ruined. "Play amongst yourselves," she orders Findekáno and me, and a bucking, gnashing Carnistir is carried into the bathroom under his arms and away from her body, like Macalaurë carries compost to the garden when Atar has prepared a reeking Telerin dish for supper.

I consider my bed, which is spongy and wet, and go to sit beside Findekáno's on his. From the bathroom comes the sound of running water and Carnistir's wailing. Now would be the time that Atar would storm into the room and demand to know the reason for the ruckus, and the threat of his anger would calm Carnistir. But Atar is away, riding, and Amil is angry with him and cannot control Carnistir alone.

"We are supposed to play," says Findekáno.

"At what shall we play?" I ask.

"We could resume our game."

And so the game board is drawn out again, and we each take cares to arrange our pieces exactly as they were. I watch Findekáno carefully for treachery. His pieces are arranged; he had fourteen left on the board when we were interrupted earlier. Now, I count carefully again and see fifteen.

"You put on an extra piece," I say.

"I did not," he retorts, and I am surprised by both the speed and strength of his reply. It seems to imply guilt and the anticipation of my anger, and it angers me more.

"You did," I say, and I choose a piece and remove it from the board. His cheeks pinken and he puts it back. We fight like this for several minutes, removing pieces and replacing them; soon, he is taking away my pieces with the same speed that I am taking away his, and we are slapping each other's hands, and accusations are pouring from our mouths like water. I sweep a handful of pieces—both his and mine, whatever I can grab first—into my palm and hurl them at his face. They pepper his cheeks, forehead, and eyes, and he pounces across the game board and knocks me backward on the bed, his bony knees digging into my belly and his hands throttling me with strength that, until recently, he did not possess.

But I am still bigger and stronger, and I piston my fists into his small shoulders, and he cries out in pain, and we both tumble from the bed and onto the floor. My forehead collides with the thick wooden corner of the nightstand, and black spots flit before my eyes as I crash on top of him. I struck with enough force to move the nightstand, and my mother's statue—the eagle with his wings spread, coming to land on the watery quartz base—teeters and falls onto the floor with a crash.

But I heed it not, for Findekáno and I are scrabbling with each other: My hands tear at his hair, and he scratches my face, helpless beneath my weight, hollering with rage. His dress robes are torn at the throat; his circlet is lying on the floor beside us, and it has been bent, although Atar will be able to repair it. I take a wad of his hair in my fist and it frees itself from his head with surprising ease, and he screams in pain, wildly convulsing in an attempt to free himself from me, scratching at my eyes even, until I feel hands seize the back of my robe and throw me aside. Amil takes Findekáno in her arms. He is sobbing, and he squirms when she touches his scalp, and her fingers come away, pink with blood. Carnistir stands in the bathroom doorway, having crawled out of the tub on his own, and he is naked and dripping wet, making dark spots on the polished hardwood floor, and he is sobbing too, adding his voice to the melee.

I try to go to Amil, to explain what happened, but she cradles Findekáno protectively in her arms and snaps at me, "Be gone, Tyelkormo! Get gone from here!" and so I run from the room and do not stop until my lungs burn for need of breath.

~oOo~

I end up in a room I do not recognize. It has a fireplace and a fur rug on the floor, and so I collapse onto the rug and sob into the fur, until my swollen eyes grow heavy, and I sleep.

When I awaken, I am not sure how many hours have passed, for the fire burns with the same intensity and the light through the windows is pale silver. It is always like that here, I know, in Valinor: Fires don't die and light is eternal. I hear Oromë's Maiar singing somewhere, and it is the song of the birds. I sit and listen for a long while, unsure of how much time passes before the singing stops and the silence draws me to my feet, as though it had offered a hand for assistance. I am still wearing my dress robes, and as I walk through the extensive halls of Oromë's home—wandering at random, for I do not know where I am—I imagine that this is how Grandfather Finwë must feel, always resplendent in dress befitting a king, in a palace of grandeur enough to marvel his own. I wonder why Atar does not like this life, why he—who has such great love for beauty—cannot understand the appeal of feeling one's feet whisper through soft carpets, of feeling stately, akin to the Valar in appearance. Of hearing one's praises sung. I wonder if, when I am grown, I will have halls like this.

As though guided by a hand along my back, I find my way to my family's apartment, and I slip into my bedroom, but my bed has been stripped of bedclothes, and the mattress will have to be cleaned. Findekáno sleeps silently, curled beneath his coverlet and a fur blanket that Amil must have given him for comfort. Strange, blue-flamed candles cast wavering light onto the walls, and I am reminded of being underwater. There is a rubbish bin standing beside the door and in it are the remnants of my mother's statue, and regret tugs at my heart, for sight of the splintered wood and shattered quartz. Without thought as to why, I gather the pieces and wrap them in the ample cloth of my dress robes.

I depart the room, houseless, for my bed has been abandoned, and I have been given no place to sleep. I go to my parents' room, wondering if Atar has returned, but Amil sits alone by the window, her hands open and futile, lying on her lap, a parchment and quill forgotten on the table beside her. She gazes out the window, over the canopy of the forest, as though waiting for something.

"Amil?" I say, a tiny voice in the wide silence of Oromë's halls.

Her fingers go to her cheeks and press there for a moment before she turns. She holds her arms out to me, and I clamber onto her lap, forgetting that I carried the remains of her statue in my robes like a sling, and some of the pieces bump to the floor. She does not seem to notice, as she holds me close, breathing in the scent of my hair as though it were as rich to her lungs as oxygen.

"Findekáno confessed to me that he struck you first," she whispers. "I am sorry that I doubted you, Tyelkormo."

My stomach twists with guilt, then bile burns the back of my throat at Findekáno's insolent honesty for, although I overpowered him physically, his courage remains greater than mine.

~oOo~

Amil lets me lie in the big bed that she shares with Atar, although she still wears her dress and lies atop the covers with her shoes on her feet as though she might rise at any moment and stroll off into the forest. Stroking my hair, she coaxes me back to sleep, and I awaken as the first golden beams mingle with the silver light of night. Amil sleeps fitfully beside me, her brow furrowed as though in distress, her warm hand still atop my hair. I slip from beneath her hand, careful not to awaken her, and she mumbles and stirs but then relaxes. She must have dressed me for bed because it is nightclothes that whisper against my skin, and my crumpled robes lie across the settee.

In the rubbish bin are the pieces of the statue, as though Amil has forsaken hope of its repair.

I walk silently down the hallway to the room that I am supposed to share with Findekáno. He has barely moved during the night, and except for the golden light stretching through the windows, the room is exactly as I last saw it. Even the blue-flamed candles have not diminished, although I watch as Laurelin's light touches each in turn, and they sputter and go out as if by magic.

I pass my bed, which smells faintly of urine, even with the bedclothes stripped, and pause at the bureau, where Amil laid the game board and discarded pieces. There are eleven ruby pieces like blooms of blood, but these do not concern me, and I sweep them aside to count the blue pieces—Findekáno's pieces—crafted of milky star sapphires. One by one, they slip from the board and click into my hand. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

Fourteen.

I stop counting because there are no more to count. He had only fourteen pieces on the board.

My little ones are happy here, and that should be enough for me, but I am selfish in my heart, as is the tendency of all living beings, and I cannot escape my own vexing self-interests. I look at the light upon Tyelkormo's face as he rides with Oromë and the Maiar or the peace that smoothes my little Carnistir's brow and allows him to sleep without dreams, and I am happy, but then I lie alone and cold in the wide bed in the room we have so generously been given and I begrudge them this joy. Or I wander the halls alone during the day and wonder how I could forsake my youth to give life to my children, yet they so easily turn from me, and I am jealous.

Such selfishness twists inevitably into guilt, and then I envy Fëanáro, who does what he will with no thought to the needs of others—even his own wife—and is without guilt. I haven't seen him in weeks now; the day of our intended departure draws near with no sight and no word of my husband.

Tyelkormo has passed most of his time with Oromë, and Oromë is glad to take him on hunts, and they disappear for hours or days at a time. Tyelkormo wishes to stand one day in his father's image, but I knew him before he was born, when his spirit was raw, before he learned to hide the truth in his heart from my perception, and I know that his hands were not shaped with his father's purpose in mind but, rather, one uniquely his own. I have seen him in Fëanáro's forge, and he emulates confidence with ease—he is, after all, a Fëanárion, and just as he taught his sons the proper way to speak, Fëanáro has taught them the proper way to act, with shoulders squared and chin lifted in insolent confidence—but Tyelkormo cannot mimic joy, and his smiles are painted and phony. The same I saw on Nelyo's face, then Macalaurë's, before they and their father accepted the realization that their destinies would be very different and that it needn't sever the love of father and son.

I wonder how long it will be for Tyelkormo to do the same; longer, I think, for he is more stubborn than his elder brothers and he is also more enamored with his father. But with Fëanáro's absence, he goes to Oromë and—although he barely reaches the hips of the Vala and the Maiar who pursue quarry on big steeds, using bows taller than my little Tyelkormo—his stance is proud and his voice is loud and a bit brash, so like his father in his youth that I stood out of sight, around a corner, and recalled the same small voice made big by pride, arguing with Aulë about the strongest steel alloys, and touched my cheeks to find them damp.

~oOo~

I knew that Fëanáro would return without warning or fanfare: a fresh breeze that flows through a door swung quickly open, to circulate the stale room beyond, blending easily with the air languishing there as if always present. Such is how he entered my life, after all.

Tyelkormo is away this night, hunting with Oromë, and so I tuck Findekáno into bed, kiss goodnight my little Carnistir, and retire to my room. I do not think I will sleep tonight; sometimes, in the homes of the Valar, I do not require it. My body sizzles with inspiration. But not now; Fëanáro has doused that fire with his behavior at our son's begetting day feast and his hasty departure soon after, and my insomnia stems from dread of having to slip alone into a bed that was made for two. As a child, I never slept in a bed wide enough to accommodate anyone more than myself. (That did not stop Fëanáro from climbing like a spider up the wall of my father's house and lying beside me anyway, for when we lie together, we are close enough to be as one person.) Now, the wide bed is covered with furs and clearly made for lovers, and I feel like an imposter in it alone, akin to a servant who dons her lady's gowns and holds rich feasts on her lord's china while they are away. Fëanáro grew up sleeping in the lonely expanses of his wide bed, in a suite made for a prince, in his father's palace, but I always fear such big beds when I am alone, as though I might become disoriented, without Fëanáro to anchor me at the center, and roll onto the floor.

And so I have avoided the bed and have passed recent nights writing letters long neglected, to my mother and my sisters, casual news of Nelyo's studies and Tyelkormo's recent growth spurt and Macalaurë's imminent trip to Alqualondë, until there are no words left to say. I write about the children so that I do not have to write about myself, about the recent spate of fights I have had with Fëanáro, about my growing weariness and discontent, about my fears that I will not be able to conceive more children and that we will grow apart as we once did, during the dark part of our marriage, and that he will take our sons and I will not be able to live without him or them. That I will one day share the fate of Míriel Þerindë. These fears are unfounded but, in the depths of night, while all others sleep, anything seems possible. Fëanáro and I used to stay up all night, before we were married and in the days before Nelyo was conceived, because we believed that our thoughts separated from our inhibitions then, and we were more apt to find inspiration in the unprobed depths of our brains. Fëanáro still does this and has books full of notes that I tried to read once, only to find that they were written in Valarin, and this is an ugly language that I do not care to understand. My thoughts twist now into the realm of the unexplored but they no longer bring inspiration of beauty; they catalyze dwellings on the improbable and cultivate fear.

When the letters were written, I burned them and began anew, for surely, my desperation was revealed in the wieldy length if nothing else, and my next batch were short and chipper and contained only good news. These I likewise destroyed, for my unfailing happiness was a beacon to my misery, and wrote a third set, full of good news punctured by the occasional small tragedy: spoiled milk used by mistake and sickened stomachs and an important dinner with the lords of Tirion missed, entirely fictional stories, the likes of which Fëanáro and I used to tell each other, in whispers, during our forbidden meetings at night, each trying to outdo the other in terms of outrageousness and foulness, trying to coax dangerous laughter from the other, as though begging to be caught together, lying pressed close in my bed, down the hall from my parents' room, perhaps hoping that such a discovery would lead to a sanction of the marriage that we both so desperately wanted but that tradition forbade until Fëanáro came of age.

Finally, I deserted my letter-writing attempts altogether and started instead on lists: lists of what I needed to do when we returned to Tirion, lists of topics I needed to teach my apprentices, lists of guests who would need to be invited to Carnistir's begetting day feast this autumn. I filled many sheets of parchment with lists, until I fell asleep sitting at my desk and did not awaken until I felt Findekáno gently shaking my shoulder, blue eyes wide with apology, telling me that breakfast was being served, and asking: Did I want to attend?

Now, as I let myself into my suite, I am trying to conjure more lists I might write tonight. Lists of what? I have parchments full of them already. Lists of foods Carnistir will actually eat? Lists of songs that I want Macalaurë to play at his begetting day feast? Lists of reasons why I love the most stubborn and difficult Elf ever born, so much that I want to stop breathing at the thought of our marriage ending? A breathy laugh bubbles into my throat and escapes as a wheeze that rises and twists into a scream, chokes into a yelp, caught inside my hand, slapped quickly across my lips, for it is unreasonable to scream at the sight of one's husband in one's own bedroom.

He is sitting on the chair, at the desk where I have been writing unsent letters and crafting meaningless lists, removing his boots. His eyes flit to mine with the noise of my entrance; his fingers do not stop moving over the laces of his boots. "You've returned," I say, trying not to gasp, feeling immediately silly for the obviousness of my answer, like going to the window, throwing back the curtains, pointing outside, and proclaiming, "Light."

"I said I would return, did I not, in a short span of days?" he asks.

"Yes, but you have been gone for fifteen."

His slips his boot from his foot, peels away the soiled sock beneath, flexes his toes. Everything about my husband is graceful, even grubby feet caught in the humid confines of muddy boots for fifteen days. He glances at me again before beginning work on the laces of the second boot. A flicker of a smile—more like a spasm—touches his lips. "In the endless days of our life together, Nerdanel, the fifteen days for which we have been parted will be but a twinge of pain."

The second boot joins its brother on the floor; Fëanáro is standing. He still wears his travel clothes; even his rich brown cloak still cascades from his shoulders. There is a leaf caught in his hair, I see, and it ruins his perfection; it betrays that he has been sleeping on the ground, without shelter, like an animal whose nest has been destroyed in its absence. His eyes are very bright, feral, and again, I think of wild animals, crouching in the brush, their eyes pale lanterns in the flash of light from a lamp. I cross the floor and take the leaf from his hair; it crumbles in my hand. He has been made perfect again.

I try to be angry, but my anger is like a preserve made from an exotic fruit, in short supply, and spread thin over the last fifteen days; I can barely taste it anymore. The fingers that removed the leaf twine in his hair, touch the delicate cup of his ear beneath, trace the lines I have sculpted many times to its tip, to the soft, warm skin beneath. He closes his eyes; he is weary—I can see that now, when his face is no longer overwhelmed by the light in his eyes—the skin beneath his eyes tight and darkened, as though bruised. Perhaps he has slept as poorly as I have. I kiss his mouth; he tastes of cold water, of the mountains; he smells of rocks basking in midday brilliance. The kiss deepens. His tongue is inside my mouth now; he is hungry and none too gentle; he sucks my bottom lip until it hurts. He pushes me back onto the bed. My gown is low in the back, and the furs are soft and cold, silken, like the river water when spring thaws the ice in the north. He pushes my gown open, kisses my breasts—hard—leaving bruises. I feel teeth. They hurt, but in a moment of passion, pain is almost indiscernible from pleasure. I feel a last whimper of anger rise and clench weakly around my stomach. My hands clasp his arms, between his elbows and his shoulders, like the armlets he had worn to the summer festivals in our youth that accented his slender strength and drove me mad with lust for him. I mean to push him away, but my hands ripple up his arms instead, beneath the short sleeves of his tunic, to his shoulders, pulling him towards me.

~oOo~

We lie awake together for a long time after, with the breeze from the open windows behind us cooling the sweat on our bodies. The furs on the bed are soiled—hopefully not ruined—clotted now with our fluids. Tomorrow, it will worry and shame me to think of the servants cleaning our rooms and removing the furs with disapproval in their eyes: Just like the proud Noldor, to casually ruin that which is gifted them. Just like the proud Prince Fëanáro and his seedy wife. But tonight, Fëanáro is primary in my thoughts, and the whole house could be ruined, and I would smile to lie in his arms and twist his hair around my fingers and tell him eagerly of our goings-on over the last fifteen days.

He stops me as I begin to report how improved Findekáno's archery has become under the patient tutelage of one of Oromë's archers. "Enough of the children," he says. "What of you? You have told me nothing of yourself."

"There is not much to tell. I wrote letters and lists," I tell him. "What of you? You smell of distant lands."

He grins. "Perhaps that is an insult? A kinder way of telling me that I should have bathed more carefully before returning to you?"

Actually, he smells fresh, of brisk winds, and the hair at his neck is damp, reminding me of how the little ones feel upon awakening the morning after a bath. I know my husband well enough to know that he doused himself in the last river passed before returning to me. I know that the furious passion between us was not a spontaneous conflagration—he intended it, and he prepared adequately—angry or not, I would have succumbed. He knew that.

"You smell cleaner than Tyelkormo will upon his return tomorrow. Perhaps you should give him fewer lessons in the forge and greater advisement about the virtues of bathing, even on hunting trips."

"He aspires to smell like the game he hunts, less the chance of detection."

"He will never court a lady much less marry if his odor is that of a bison."

"Perhaps, when a young lady catches his fancy and becomes his quarry, he will take to smelling more like her. Like rosewater and spring rains."

We giggle like we used to as adolescents, heady with the nearness of each other.

"What of you? Where did you go to make you absent for fifteen days?" I ask.

"Ezellohar," he says, and I start.

"Ezellohar?"

"Inspiration seized me, and I pursued it. I thought I would find it in Ezellohar, at the Mingling of the Lights."

"Did you?"

"No."

He is perhaps the only Elf who could stand beneath the mingled lights of the Trees and remain uninspired. I am about to say this, half in jest, half in dismay, but he speaks again before I can craft my words. He says, "Not yet."

~oOo~

After nights of voluntary insomnia, sleep falls upon me like a black rock. One moment, I am with Fëanáro, feeling his arms close around me to draw me into the tehta-curve of his body, feeling his warm lips moving along the back of my neck, tickling, laughing, then I am waking to a room filled with syrupy golden light.

Fëanáro is lying beside me, atop the covers, and he is dressed already, in a light tunic and trousers, fancier than what he wears at home, where such finery is easily ruined by his work or by the antics of two young sons. He is barefoot, and his hair is combed but not braided. He takes my hand in his. "Good morning, Nerdanel," he says, turning my hand to the ceiling and kissing my palm. The nobility of Tirion kiss the backs of a lady's fingers for greeting, but Fëanáro has always kissed my palm, my fingertips.

He closes his eyes and works his way down my hand, ministering each knuckle with its own kiss, each pad of flesh between. My arm hangs heavily between us; I let him support it; I like the pressure between our hands that it creates. I study his face, unobserved. It is like watching him sleep. Without knowing that he is being observed, all arrogance and pride melts away; he looks as helpless as the little boy I imagine he must have once been, in the days before I knew him, before his father's controversial remarriage introduced his spirit to anger. All traces of exhaustion have been wiped from his face in the night; his long eyelashes form a velvet shadow over perfect, unblemished skin. His lips reach my fingertips, and he slips them inside of his mouth and I shiver. His eyes open. "Cold?"

"No. Quite the opposite," I whisper.

"Did I tell you how much I missed you? In Ezellohar, thoughts of you tormented me in my dreams." His eyes are bright and earnest, and such an intimate revelation makes my skin flush warm. He touches the blush in my cheek with amused delight. "You are still so much the young maiden who captured my love, when the thought of marrying you seemed an impossible dream. So innocent, more like a girl yet to be kissed than the mother of four children."

It is less to do with innocence and more to do with the thought of him lying beneath the mingled light of the Trees and still inspired only with thoughts of me. I once may have felt blasphemous, to be elevated to such importance, that of a goddess, but cannot deny the twinge of flattery. He feels it too. He smiles at the triumph.

~oOo~

It is nearly Laurelin's zenith before I finally rise and dress, and when I emerge from the bathroom, Fëanáro has assembled an impressive spread on the balcony, complete with chilled wine and an arrangement of flowers colored like flames: red, orange, and gold.

I gasp in surprise, as he offers me his hand and asks, "Would you do me the honor of joining me for a meal?"

He has forgotten nothing. My husband who detests the brittle formality of Tirion has set out the full array of utensils; he has five courses waiting on a cart, kept warm over a portable flame; he has folded the heavy linen napkins into the shapes of stars. He pulls out my chair for me and pours a glass of wine from a bottle left open to breathe. There is even a breadbasket, and I am not sure whether he begged one of the Maiarin servants to bake it for him or took on the task traditionally belonging to a woman. The latter option seems just as viable.

"How did you do this?" I ask, as he arranges himself opposite me. The balcony is shrouded in green and silver boughs; the light that pours between quavers like the light on the crests of waves. It makes patches of gold on his black hair. The birds are singing graceful arpeggios that might have been made for us. Fëanáro's eyes seem lit from within, like the hot blue base of a flame. "I had all of this ready when I came in to wake you," he says. "I had only to assemble it while you dressed. I wished to surprise you."

"What of the children?" It seems unfair to enjoy this splendor while they eat whatever cold meats and breads the Maiar find for them.

"Carnistir was quite heavily under the spell of Vána, last I saw him. She wishes to keep him for the day. And Findekáno is off on a ride with one of Oromë's loremasters, to study trees."

"Study trees?"

"Yes, apparently there is knowledge that he wishes to collect for Maitimo, about a subject they had been discussing prior to our departure." He smirks. He does not take Nolofinwë's son as seriously as he does his own, but I know that he is pleased, nonetheless, by the progress that Nelyo has made in Findekáno's instruction. "So today, my love, is for you and I to enjoy, as we never have."

Indeed, it is strange: Five children we had—four of our own—only a few weeks ago, sharing our time. Rarely had we been alone without them; even at night, Carnistir often required Fëanáro nearby before consenting to sleep. Now, the three youngest pursue their own recreation and Macalaurë and Nelyo ride on their own. I feel a pang at the thought, for it makes keen the fact that they are both approaching their majorities and will soon marry and leave our home, to return as guests, for whom I feel the need to dust the floors and order special foods. I would like to have them here now, on either side of us, even if it means having to share their father. Of course, even had they accompanied us, they likely would not be here: Nelyo is not one to turn down the chance for scholarship and would be tight on the heels of Oromë's loremaster; Macalaurë would be lying in a grove somewhere, attempting to match his voice to those of the birds, which are more splendid even than we have in Tirion.

Fëanáro sets before us a fruit salad, glazed in honey. The fruit is perfectly ripe and nearly melts in the mouth with never a sting of tartness, practically candy except for the explosion of juices that make the wine obsolete for a spell. Fëanáro and I are quiet; we do not need to speak. We are feeling each other's spirits as one might appraise the face of a new friend for clues to his mood. Fëanáro is light, but there is a thread of dark heaviness too, that which accompanies his deepest thoughts. I have tried to follow such veins but can never find their source. They are like rivers that begin in the depths of the earth, away from the curious eyes of those of us who are doomed to live on the surface. It is only when he brings a wondrous new creation to my attention that I know the reason for the tenebrous meanderings of his thoughts.

He speaks suddenly, over the soup: "What if, Nerdanel, you had a thought but not the ability to effect it?"

"I doubt, Fëanáro, that there is much beyond your abilities."

One side of his mouth twitches into a crooked, wry grin. "If I wished to add to Varda's stars a measure of my own, would you still believe such words?"

Yes, I would. He feels the thought; he looks away and plunks his spoon into his soup.

"Should I abandon the thought?" he asks. "Or do I store it away and allow it to torment me, the proverbial carrot on the stick, leading the dumb, hungry horse?"

"Can you really abandon a thought, Fëanáro?" I ask.

"I suppose that I cannot." He sips his soup.

~oOo~

Our bellies full, Fëanáro and I lie across our bed and nap through the afternoon, a luxury we are not usually afforded, with Nelyo appearing every five minutes, having unlocked some new chemical secret, and Macalaurë howling that his brothers are disturbing his study, and Tyelkormo and Carnistir never more than a step away from trouble, and a forge full of wonders still able to enthrall Fëanáro.

The servants must have been in our room while we dined because there are fresh towels in our bathroom and the soiled clothes I took to the laundry are hanging, clean and pressed, inside our armoires. The furs, I note with a start, remain on the bed, and I wonder if their soil escaped the notice of the keen-eyed servants, and run my hands over them to find that they are unmarred as though Fëanáro's and my careless romp atop them last night never happened.

Fëanáro does not sleep but lies in that hazy place between sleep and wakefulness, and I know that his thoughts dabble still on this ability he does not possess. I attempt to discern what it is but can see only thoughts of light, as often occupy Fëanáro.

While he is so engaged and unable to perceive me, my thoughts skitter about like a mischievous child behind a parent's turned back. I think about our luncheon, an extremely pleasant meal, a more overt attempt at romance than Fëanáro usually makes. I wonder: Is it some complicated, convoluted way of apologizing to me? Neither of us has spoken of what passed before he left—supposedly to pursue a sudden inspiration but oddly correlated with our disagreement—but I have sensed thoughts of it within him and know that he feels the same within me. It is better forgotten; such is our view on our disagreements, which admittedly, are not infrequent. After all, our love is greater than a few differences in opinion, no matter how irking they may be, and we still have four children to raise.

But should I so easily forget his transgression? It is one thing to maintain his odd, insolent—at times blasphemous—beliefs. It is another thing entirely to come before Oromë's followers as the High Prince of the Noldor, a representative of his people, and so blatantly dishonor their customs. It does not set a good example for Tyelkormo and Carnistir, who still believe that their father is greater than the Powers.

I wonder at times how my children's beliefs compare to their father's—to mine. Nelyo, I know, agrees with his father, and I suspect that Macalaurë feels much the same way. I heard him bragging to Nelyo and Vorondil once—unfair to dwell upon, perhaps, given that it was a typical show of male adolescent swagger, as each attempted to best the other's purported triumphs—saying that one day, his voice would surpass that of Melian the Maia, whose voice no Elf has ever heard but is rumored to reverse the curse of death. I felt a twist of betrayal, like a blade in the back, that the son most like me should sound so like his father. It is my own fault, I suppose, for allowing Fëanáro to wield nearly total control over their education, for including none of the lessons I was given at their age, about legends of the Valar, about the Vanyarin traditions that honor them. I should have insisted, but now it is too late, and my anger should be aimed at no one but myself, for I was duped into believing that Fëanáro was somehow delicate, that to make such a demand would invoke tormenting thoughts about his Vanyarin stepmother and the death of Míriel Þerindë.

But he is not delicate; he is clever and shrewd, and he lies now with his head on my shoulder and, having slipped away from his preoccupations for a time, perceives my thoughts as clearly as though they were his own. And he says nothing. I try to gauge his reaction, but all I see is many-colored light.

~oOo~

We set out that afternoon for a river that we know in the forest that has deeply lacerated the earth over the long years of Arda, exposing deposits of rose quartz. I do not know how the inspiration seized me; I was lying beside Fëanáro when the words erupted from my throat, "Have we rose quartz at home?"

"I used the last of it, constructing the collar your sister commissioned for the spring festival."

"And we've none in Formenos?"

"That I used also."

"I desire it suddenly."

And so we dressed in traveling clothes heavy enough to keep the brambles from scarring our arms but light enough to make for comfortable traveling in the humid forest, taking only a coil of rope, a lamp, and a pickaxe, relying on distant memories of trees and game trails to find the river.

We travel hand-in-hand, as we used to do in our youth, when all of Aman was ours to explore, before the arrival of our children modified our priorities. Fëanáro's hand burns in mine; he uses his greater strength to help me scramble up hills and over rock formations. Once, we would have remained side-by-side; I would have equaled him; we would have competed with only a fingertip determining the winner. This is how it will be forevermore, I think, as Fëanáro helps me scramble over a log nearly as tall as I am. He will flourish while I languish.

I stand beside him now, trying to control my breathing so that he does not know how hard a task that scramble was for me. "Are you well?" he asks. He senses it anyway; perhaps he feels a bit of weariness in his bones, like the sympathetic shiver that comes from watching from the window of a warm house as another toils in the cold rain.

"I am well," I assure him, keeping my words bold, and he does not meet my eyes to see if it is the truth, although I prepared to steel my gaze against his. He takes my hand and we walk the incline that the tree has made from the ground to a cliff that would have been difficult for him to scale and impossible for me.

The forest here is thicker than any other I know; the leaves clot overhead, blocking the light, and it is nearly dark. Fëanáro brings out the lamp and a hazy aura of white light encases us. Small animals, made curious by our arrival, skitter for the safety of the darkness. Fëanáro laughs. "It's strange, isn't it, how they feel safe in the darkness while our people have always sought comfort in the light."

The moss beneath our feet silences our footsteps. If not for the light, we might pass unnoticed, but deer crash away from us, into the brush, and angry squirrels skitter into the heights of the trees, chattering their reproach. I envision how it must look from above, with animals darting away from us like opposing magnets. Creatures of the light and the dark have never mixed well.

Sometimes, the trees groan and branches lower, trying to block our path, but Fëanáro raises the lamp to them, and they see us for whom we are. He always whispers his gratitude as we pass, bowing to acknowledge the trees in a way that he will not bow to the Valar.

"Why do they do that?" I whisper. To speak loudly in this forest—where the only sounds are the occasional trill of birdsong and the joyful muttering of streams—seems sacrilegious. "Their ancestors were the trees of the Outer Lands," says Fëanáro, softly, reverently. "Oromë brought them here because he loved them, but they had already learned to block that which is evil from walking among them."

"They think that we are evil?"

"We bear the same shape as the evil that once passed between them. But we carry a lamp, and no creature that is evil bears light."

~oOo~

We reach the river at the Mingling of the Lights. Beneath the deep canopy of the forest, the change in light is barely discernable, but we can detect it in the air, which seems to dance as though with song and tickles our ears like a distant melody.

We sit by the river and drink the water with cupped hands. This is how it was at our people's origin, I think. My father was born in the Outer Lands, during the Great Journey, and he told me often of the Outer Lands. How I used to sit eagerly at his feet and listen! And, when I was older, and Fëanáro would visit our house, he would listen more keenly than I, and my father's tales always inspired in him a wealth of questions that poured from him with shameless eagerness. He wished to know of the tools constructed from rock, of the early weapons and the humble habits: of eating and drinking with one's hands—for metal could not be spared for utensils—of dressing in all one owned, to lessen the burden upon the mules, of the primitive medicine that was based, not in science, but centered on incantations and herbs mixed in precise proportions, although from where such knowledge derived, no one knows, although Fëanáro inquired. Fëanáro's lust for knowledge slowly sapped the romance from this distant life, with his questions about where and how one performed bodily functions. "Was it not a beacon to detection from your foes?" he asked once. "So many Elves voiding themselves in a single place?" Another time, when Atar told us of the glories of sleeping in the open air, beneath the stars—bodies strewn across the meadow—Fëanáro looked quizzical and said, "So, given the number of children born on the Great Journey, is one to then assume that open fornication was not taboo?" and Atar laughed to hide his surprise at such a question from an Elf of Fëanáro's meager years—he probably assumed that we did not even know what "fornication" was, although our nascent love had seen to our education—and when the brightness in Fëanáro's eyes did not dim, answered at last, although reluctantly, for he always lectured us that no curiosity should go punished, even should it burn down his forge—or introduce lascivious topics to his youngest daughter.

Such topics still enthrall Fëanáro, who I know wonders what our life would be like over the sea, without the Valar watching over us and without the stiff traditions that demand so much of his time. I know that he desires to fight the challenges such a life would present, to pit his strength against that of a raging storm or a stubborn mountain, the likes of which we do not have in Aman. He is skilled with a sword but its use never transcends art into practicality. His ability is like dancing: joyful to the body but essentially useless. I detect in my husband the desire to baptize his sword with the black blood of our people's foes, and the thought makes me shiver, as though a cold wind has touched its hand upon a warm spring day.

Fëanáro and I remove our boots and he leads me down the river. Here, it has cut deep into the soft flesh of the earth and no discernable bank remains, only sheer cliffs at either side. The rock is gray in the darkness, but when Fëanáro raises the lamp, pink spangles dance in the plain rock.

We visit each, dwelling long in appraisal. Fëanáro places his hands on each and knows its size, depth, and purity the way he might know the contours and temperament of an old friend. I am not so blessed, and many pieces cause me to gasp in wonder of their brilliance, only to have Fëanáro pronounce them flawed deep within the rock, beyond my sight.

The piece he selects is small, but before I can raise protest, he is gently chipping away at the gray stone that surrounds it with the pickaxe, until the piece is revealed to be much bigger beneath the rock, suitable for my project, although I have not yet spoken to him of my intentions.

~oOo~

Fëanáro and I were young and still under the tutelage of Aulë when he came to me in a state of agitated excitement one day, interrupting the blissful calm of my workshop to drag me by the hand to the forge, where he placed in my hands a small, pale stone, perfectly round and slightly warm.

"It is nice," I said, and I was confused, for he had shaped the earth's stones into marvels that were breathtaking to behold, yet he expected me to praise this rounded bit of unidentifiable rock.

He led me outside then, and it was late, and the stars prickled through Telperion's silver sheen. His face hypnotized me: It was alight with a burning joy I had yet to perceive in him, and his beauty was at its zenith, his eyes bright like silver flames. I still held the strange stone clasped in my hand, and he stood before me and peeled my fingers away from it so that it lay across the flat of my palm, but I was mesmerized by his face, by the fire in his eyes and the dark halo of his hair, stirred by the wind, that acted as a bed of black velvet to a gem of particular brilliance; his face was like a beacon of flame to me, and I could not look away. Then I realized that he was lit from below, with a strange blue light, and I followed his gaze to the stone on my palm, which seemed to have swollen in the seconds we had been standing in the starlight. It took me a moment to realize that the increase in size came not from a change in actual proportions but from the glow: It had taken the meager starlight and reflected it back one-hundredfold, until it was a fuzzy ball of light that filled my hand.

I waited for the searing agony of blue flame, but it never came; the stone remained cool, like a sphere of water in my palm. Fëanáro's kiss, when it happened upon my surprised lips, burned far more intensely, and my hand closed on a stone much smaller than it looked, fully aglow, silver-blue light darting between my fingers as though I held a star there. We kissed long that night, beside Aulë's forge, until I didn't think I could tolerate the touch of his body against mine for a moment longer without exploding into supernova.

If I'd known what greatness my husband would later craft, then the small bluish stone would not have impressed me, but just as a child's first word delights his parents, so the tiny trinket thrilled me. In later years, they would come to be commonplace, gracing the lamps we used in our homes—indeed, the lamp we carry now—for Fëanáro selflessly shared his knowledge of their devising until many could craft their like. Even I learned the skill, although my own stones glowed feebly compared to his, and the exercise in creating them was not a pleasurable one.

For the forty-fifth anniversary of our wedding, Fëanáro slipped onto my finger a ring of adamant brighter than any I'd seen, so bright that it drank the light of his father's hall and threw it forth in greater brilliance, creating a spangle on the ceiling overhead like stars. Our people celebrated with us in a festival of three days, like they might have done had we become betrothed before them in the manner traditional for Noldorin nobility: We stood on a flower-draped dais when he slipped the ring on my finger and our kiss met with applause like a rush of water. I was heavy with child, only a few months shy of bearing Carnistir, and those days were some of the happiest of our marriage: I had brought three healthy sons into the world already and survived the ordeal of bearing the third with strength enough to conceive again, ten short years later. The adamant on my finger expressed the tenacity of our marriage and its beauty; it was only after the festival, lying warm and exhausted in the bed beside Fëanáro, that he revealed to me that it was not adamant at all but a stone of his devising, stronger and more brilliant than anything the earth could yield.

I remembered a poem from the primer I read in my youth: Varda scattered stars of light, and Aulë made the gemstones bright. Suddenly, that was no longer true, for those Fëanáro yielded were more brilliant than anything delved from the dust of the earth, and the Valar spoke their words of praise to him—Aulë, particularly, was ecstatic with joy for the accomplishments of his greatest pupil—but the brothers Irmo and Námo were silent, their gazes heavy upon my husband.

Our people are divided on this issue: What is greater for use in our art, the stones of Aulë, from the earth, or the stones we ourselves create? Fëanáro and I stand on opposite sides when this debate takes hold, arguing most keenly with each other while the others watch, using punchy sarcasm and jokes to distract from the reality of our conflict. I wear the stones my husband forges but I will not make them myself and my work uses only the gifts from the earth. Fëanáro has taken to using Aulë's stones only when commissioned. The brilliant projects he undertakes solely for the joy of creation use only the bright, false gemstones born in his forge.

~oOo~

This he holds in his hands now, a stone of Aulë's devising, but he caresses the last of the dust from it with the same tenderness as he touched our sons when they were infants; he wraps it in a swath of silk that I did not even know that he carried and passes it to me. "Is this adequate?" he asks, and I nod.

He takes many more chunks of quartz from the cliff, as many as he will be able to carry, wrapping each in silk fine enough to grace the shoulders of a king.

He carries the stones back to Oromë's halls for me, held in the crook of his left arm like he once carried our children on journeys while his right hand clasps mine.

~oOo~

It is the depths of Telperion's hours when we emerge from the forest, and I am momentarily disoriented, for it was in the blazes of afternoon that we entered, and without the perpetual light filtering through the canopy, it felt as though time had stopped. Not so: It has gone on without us, and with the silver light to cue my body, I am suddenly weary and very hungry.

Back in Oromë's halls, I let Fëanáro lead me to our bedroom, where I undress and wash, emerging from the bathroom to find that he has set up a table for us with a spread of cold meats, bread, and cheeses, even a decanter of sweet strawberry wine. I am too tired to think of words to adequately express my gratitude, so I suffice to kiss his mouth and embrace him as tightly as my weary arms will allow.

He speaks throughout the meal so that we need not eat in silence and I need not be burdened with the effort of making suitable conversation. He speaks of quartz and the properties of the many varieties and the inspiration that each might provide, and I let his words ripple over me like water, soothing my mind and keeping it from wandering into troublesome thoughts, and every now and again, something he says catches in my brain, and I put it away for later reference.

When the meal is finished, I stand and fumble the dishes, trying to help Fëanáro with the clearing, but he takes my hands and leads me to the bed, where he unties and slips off my dressing gown for me as though I was a small child and lifts me into bed. My arms loop loosely around his neck, and for a moment, I think that he will undress too and we will make love, but he kneels beside the bed, arranging my arms and my hair across the pillow as though he intends me to pose for a painting.

"My beautiful wife," he whispers, and he kisses the palm of my hand, pressing it next to his chest, where I can feel his heart beating through the thin material of his tunic.

"And I always thought you to be a better judge of beauty, husband mine," I tease.

His fingers are on my lips, shushing me. "I am a great judge of beauty, better than those who would declare you unworthy." His mouth replaces the fingers; I feel his heartbeat quicken.

I say no more, but he knows my thoughts: A glance in the mirror is all it takes for me to question his judgment, and I do.

"When I was young, I never thought I'd marry," Fëanáro says. "I could never imagine that anyone but my father could love me unfailingly until the ending of Arda. The history of our people is still in its infancy; the world's end is still a long time away. A long time to spend with someone; a long punishment if you are mistaken in that single moment when that pledge is made. Then a marriage for prosperity or status becomes intolerable. But the sincerity of your love is in your eyes, Nerdanel, and I have never gazed upon something more beautiful, and I have never doubted that, alone of the Eldar, ours might be the only marriage to exist forever in love."

I fall asleep, lying in his arms while he kneels beside me, my hand upon his heart.

~oOo~

I awaken with a start from a nightmare I cannot remember, only that my heart races in fear for my sons. All of my sons. All

seven

four of them, although I cannot fathom why; all I remember was how beautiful they looked, bathed in perfect white light.

I kick free of the bonds that the blankets make upon me and stand. Fëanáro is not in our bed, but I sense that he is not far from me. He has left the stones on the top of the vanity, and I see now that one is missing, its swatch of silk fallen onto the floor. I walk over and pick it up. I let it slip through my fingers and even raise it too my face, sniffing it, as though it will give some clue as to Fëanáro's intentions. I cannot see his mind; I only see myself, as I must have looked to him after falling asleep, my hair an auburn fan across the pillow and my palms upturned and helpless upon the bedclothes.

My dressing gown lies in a pool beside the bed, where Fëanáro let it fall, and I slip it on—conscious that I am not in my home and must put modesty before my desire to feel the warm Valinorian breeze on my bare skin—and step onto the balcony.

The night is veiled in silver. I push aside platinum leaves to lean over the balcony until my hips become a precarious fulcrum, and I am only a tiny shift from falling. I cannot see the ground, only endless silver and russet-twined branches and leaves like flickering mirrors. I imagine that—were I to fall—they would cradle me like a net, suspending me harmlessly above the ground until Fëanáro returned to our suite and found his foolish wife lying in a tangle among the leaves.

I lower my feet back to the safety of the balcony. The wooden planks appear to be rough, raw, but my feet never feel the stab of a splinter, and I might be walking on a carpet silk. Such is the magic of Valinor.

I walk. The balcony meanders as the house does, senselessly and seemingly at random, but always carrying one's feet to the place she most desires. In places, the curtains of leaves part long enough to allow breathtaking views of the canopy; the gentle warbles of early-morning birds tickle my ears, and after a while, I realize that I am following the sound of gentle singing and that the birds add their voices to it as a chorus. The voice rises and plays in the air. As light as a strand of hair caught by the breeze from one's fingers, it twists through the silvery darkness of early morning, playing on the warm breezes that make the trees dance as though in rhythm to the song.

My feet ascend a winding staircase that twists into a turret so high above the trees that it is shrouded in mist, and the world below is blurred as though by a distant memory. Vána stands here, her many-colored raiment rippling in the breeze, and in her arms lies my youngest son, my little Carnistir, whose sleep is made miserable by nightmares, the origins of which I cannot explain.

She hears my footsteps and turns, though she does not stop singing, and I am as mesmerized as my small son in her arms, whose dark eyes are lifted reverently to her face. At last, the song becomes torn on the breeze, a delicate cloth left too long in the wind, and Carnistir's eyes drop closed.

I open my mouth to apologize for my intrusion: How dare I come here uninvited, and in my dressing gown no less? But Vána curtsies slightly and motions her head to indicate that I should stand beside her. "I wish for you to join me, Nerdanel, if you please."

Carnistir murmurs in his sleep, and Vána presses a soft kiss on his forehead. "I did not mean to make a burden for you, my lady," I say, "but when I returned I was utterly exhausted and succumbed to sleep before I could retrieve him."

She smiles. "You need not apologize, Nerdanel, for he is naught but a pleasure. How I wish Oromë and I could have a child of our own," she says, and her voice is wistful and a bit regretful, "but it is not the way of things. Eru will not grant children to the Ainur, and so my bond with my husband must be only a part of each of us and never shall there be a child, a product of that union that represents it in its fullest. Such is the way of things." She stares into Carnistir's face; her fingers trace the roundness of his cheek; his face is smoothed of all distress, as though he sleeps in a place where there are no dreams. "So you see, the Eldar speak always of our superiority in matters, but there are things in which even a Vala envies an Elf."

I look down at my feet. I wish that Fëanáro could hear those words.

A gentle hand lifts my chin, and I am staring into Vána's deep blue eyes. "Do not distress, my dear," she says. "Do not begrudge your husband his desire for freedom."

"But he is blasphemous," I whisper, and it is the first time I have said such words aloud, and to a Vala no less.

Blasphemous. The word hovers like a stinking green monster in the air, a sour belch of truth that I did not want to escape. But there it is, and Vána's hand on my face does not change except to tenderly slip a tendril of my hair behind my ear.

"Fëanáro is no such thing," she says. "He is the greatest Elf who has or ever will be born on Arda. His sentiments are fierce, but they are the desire of all: to live free."

"But we are free. The Valar place no impositions upon us," I say.

"One man's freedom is another man's cage. Fëanáro's father—indeed, your own grandfather—made the choice to follow my husband because freedom, to them, was the luxury of living free from fear and danger. Your husband has a strong spirit and such things do not stir him to dread. Freedom, to him, is the ability to go where he pleases, when he pleases it, to unleash the full potential of his thought and ability, to make a difference in a place where it matters, where his gifts may change the quality of one's life instead of acting as mere trinkets for casual delight."

"I fear for him," I whisper, another thought that should never have been expressed, but Vána does not loathe me for it. I feel her sympathy like a warm blanket around my shoulders; my son, in her arms, stirs in his sleep, as though such fears plague him too.

"Of course you do. He defies what you know, and that which is unfamiliar can be frightening. Fëanáro wishes nothing more fiercely than to be free of us, of all he fears we will press upon him, but," she laughs, "he is more a Vala than any other Elf born in Valinor. Ainur endless were there before Eru created Arda, yet only fourteen Valar descended to it. Why? Because we wanted to live free, in a world of our choosing, and while we love our father and still delight in his friendship and counsel, we love also to see the fruits of our abilities lighten the lives of others, of your people, the Quendi. But Námo foretold that not all of the Quendi would seek us, and so Fëanáro neither surprises nor grieves us, and we delight in the beauty that he has given our world.

"We do not seek servitude, Nerdanel. We do not ask that your people construct elaborate traditions in our honor or even that you kneel before us. We wish for your friendship, and that is why we have brought you here. Your husband is the servant of none but the friend of many; indeed, Aulë counts him close to his heart, almost as a son."

She smiles and holds Carnistir closer. "Do not grieve, my dear. Were we to resent Fëanáro's sentiments, then we would justify his fears. Your husband will one day soon find his happiness here."

~oOo~

I stand with Vána until the Mingling of the Lights, and she sings a hymn to this blessed event, and as Laurelin waxes, I take Carnistir from her and return to my own suite.

I do not know the way I have walked but my feet carry me through the maze of balconies as though they were as familiar as my own home. The leaves now are gently gilded at their edges; the sky fades to a pale eggshell blue. Carnistir awakens as I walk, only he doesn't chatter or wriggle, as are his ways, but sits peacefully astride my hip, chewing a strand of my hair.

His eyes are drooping again by the time I reach the familiarity of our stretch of balcony, so I carry him into the big room that Nelyo and Macalaurë were supposed to share and tuck him into the vast bed before returning to seek my own respite.

I stop in the doorway to our bedroom, however, startled: Fëanáro has returned. He lies across our bed, fully dressed, even with boots upon his feet, although he is in the depths of slumber, curled on his side, as is the way of our sons when they are young. Something rests in his arms, protected by the curve of his body. I gently lift his arm and ease it away from him; the silk in which he has wrapped it drifts to the floor and I am looking at my likeness, done in rose quartz, so perfect that I might have been shrunken and frozen in pink-stained ice, lying with my hair fanned across the crystal base, my palms upturned and helpless.

It is Nelyo who sets the pace on our journey to the sea, and he rides hard, so hard that it is impossible to hear anything but the wind roaring past my ears. I am not naïve to his reasoning: It is not Nelyo's way to ride like this; he prefers to savor the landscape and the fellowship of his companions the way some would a fine wine. He does differently now because it allows him to avoid conversation. Or even avoid his own thoughts.

I fear that my palomino mare will not be able to keep up with Nelyo's mount, a stallion culled from the best of Grandfather Finwë's herd and presented to Nelyo as a gift for his fortieth begetting day. I expect snorting, head tossing—resistance—but she surprises me by lowering her head and keeping easy pace with Nelyo's stallion, as though she seeks to prove herself, knowing that my own fortieth begetting day—and her possible replacement—draws near.

Nelyo rides through the time when we would normally pause for a midday meal, but I don't dare stop him, although my stomach grumbles at me for it. We ride too quickly to even allow me a handful of the dried fruit I carry in the satchel at my side. Finally, just after the Mingling of the Lights, he reins in his horse near a copse of trees that will give us shelter for the night, with a brook running through that will give us water for a much-needed drink and washing-up.

We have made in one day the progress that I expected to make in two. Had we headed in a more southerly direction, we would have surpassed our family and would be nearing Oromë's Halls by now. As it is, we are still another two-day's ride from the sea, although if Nelyo insists upon the same ceaseless flight tomorrow, I might fall asleep at night with the soughing of the ocean in my ears.

I have packed a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, and four dark red apples, enough for a midday meal for both of us, after I saw Nelyo put nothing in his satchel but spices. I expected that—after eating—we would ride slowly and gather some berries and shoot suitable game for our supper, but Nelyo's pace thwarted that idea. Resolutely—and more than a little crankily—I unpack the apples, bread, and cheese, portions that looked ample when my stomach only nipped me with hunger but now look meager.

"What are you doing?" Nelyo asks, the first words he's said to me since we left this morning. "Save that. Game might be scarce at the seashore and neither of us are accustomed to fishing."

"What are we supposed to eat then, Nelyo?" I ask, as he removes his bow from where he strapped it to his saddle.

"I will find something. Unsaddle our horses, get a fire going, and look around for some fruit." He straps his quiver onto his back and jogs away, into the silvery dusk.

I do as instructed: I remove the tack from our horses, dry them with a soft cloth, and tether them where they have access to expanses of lush, green grass. Nelyo's horse will return loyally on his whistle, if allowed to roam free, but my mare has a habit of wandering off until the mid-afternoon, so I am sure to tie her tightly. I gather some tinder and start a fire; I have no trouble hitting the flints together hard enough to make sparks, as my irritation with my brother is burgeoning in proportion to my hunger. Soon, there is a roaring fire going, and I traipse into the copse of trees and gather some blackberries, grabbing at them hard enough that the thorns tear at my hands. When I return from the creek, having washed the insects from them in the rush of cold water, I am muttering. I undo our bedrolls beside the fire: I am tempted to spread Nelyo's over the rockiest patch of ground but do not because that would put him right next to the soft patch of grass that I have chosen for myself. I settle for putting him opposite the fire from me, on a spot littered with sticks.

"What am I, his Valar-forsaken wife?" I mumble to myself. "Expected to have his horse cleaned and his bed prepared by the time he gets back? His minion?" I mutter some obscenities to myself that are bad enough to get me into trouble even with Atar—they are derived from no Elvish language that I have heard but come from the Outer Lands, dark, guttural syllables, ugly enough to suit my mood—but it feels good to say them out loud; they crack the air like thunder. I walk over to the berries, stomping my feet extra hard across Nelyo's bedroll and leaving plugs of mud from my boots across it. He'll know that I did it, and there will be wounded looks and sour words later, but now, I don't care. "Am I some fruit-basket woman, gathering berries so that my hands don't get bloody? If he had children, he'd probably want them fed and bathed and the babies diapered by the time he got back. He'd probably be surprised that I didn't have a tit they could suck."

From behind me comes the rustle of furtive laughter, and I turn to see Nelyo standing there, with two good-sized hares and a cloth full of sweet potatoes in his hands. I yelp with surprise, and his snickers become a roar, and he has to set aside the hares and hunker to the ground with his hand over his face, his shoulders shaking with mirth.

"Varda's stars, you are funny when you're angry!" he manages at last.

I walk over to him, exceptionally angry at him now that he has starved me for the better part of the day, left me behind like some incompetent child, then had the nerve to laugh about it. I kick dust on him and shout, "Manwë's britches, you are a pain in my ass!"

This—even the dust, which I regret as soon as I see it settle in a brown film on his riding breeches—makes him laugh harder, until he tips backward hard, onto his backside, and tears squeeze out of his eyes. I glower at him and take the sweet potatoes, which I bury at the edge of the fire to bake slowly. They won't be ready until we're finished the rest of the meal, probably, but the thought of their sweet, tender flesh drowned in butter from the salted lump that I tucked into my satchel yesterday makes my mouth fill with saliva.

When I am finished, I turn to see that Nelyo has overcome his hilarity and is cleaning the hares. I am glad that he does this instead of me: I hate skinning and cleaning freshly killed meat, still warm with the life that I took only minutes before. I turn my back and rummage through my saddlebags for the two tin cups that I have brought, which I will fill with water from the brook. "I am sorry, Macalaurë," Nelyo says, from behind me. "I assumed that you would resent me more if I sent you to shoot my supper. That's why I asked you to stay. I didn't mean any implications by it."

I realize the truth of his words: I would have resented anything that he asked me to do. My resentment isn't that I am expected to help at our camp at night; it is the ceaseless galloping, the silence between us this day. It is the fear that he only brought me along to appease Amil, who thinks that he is still too young to journey alone. "I forgive you," I say, "and I apologize also, for my words and for kicking dust upon you."

"What of the mud tracked across my bedroll?" he asks, and I feel my face flush. How long was he behind me, I wonder?

"That too," I mumble.

He laughs. "Do not fret, Macalaurë; I was only joking. Did you know that the tips of your ears turn pink when you're embarrassed?"

I do know this—Atar teased me enough about it when I used to grow ashamed of my work in his forge—but I cup my hands over my ears and deny it anyway. "They do not," I say, reaching for the tin cups and realizing that my ear is left uncovered, and finally realizing that I must choose between escaping for a few moments or covering my ears and settling to cover my ears with the cups, stomping loudly through the brush to drown out the sound of Nelyo's laughter behind me.

When I return, Nelyo has put the hares to roast over the fire, sprinkled liberally with the spices from his satchel, and is mashing some of the blackberries together with spices to make a glaze that he slathers onto the meat. I grimace at the thought of eating rabbit coated in blackberry, all the while knowing that Nelyo shares Atar's intuition for such things and that it will be delicious.

I set the cups of water on the ground, and Nelyo gulps his. "You're refilling it!" I chide, but he wipes his mouth with his hand and grins. "I am not drinking any more water this night," he says, and opens a flap on his saddle to reveal a bottle of wine, safely swathed in his heavy cloak.

"Shouldn't we save it for the sea?" I ask, dumping my water onto the ground so that he may fill both of our cups.

"I have set our course so that we will go through a town tomorrow. We will get more there," he says.

"How can you be sure that they have good vintages?"

He scoffs. "I can't. And I don't care. All I want is something that will get me blind-drunk." He raises his cup to me. "Cheers!"

I raise mine to tap his and sip the wine. It is Atar's wine, so naturally, it is an excellent vintage, grown in the vineyards of Taniquetil. But Nelyo is right in that it is hard to get drunk from it; it is more apt to lighten the feel of one's head on one's shoulders while conveniently inspiring suitably intellectual conversation. It is no wonder that the Noldor—especially my father—love such wines. Myself, I suddenly have a taste for the cheap, thick brews of the north, a single glass of which will knock you onto your backside as quickly as would a glass of whiskey.

But this wine will do for tonight, when we still have half of our journey ahead of us and cannot afford to awaken tomorrow morning, feeling as though our heads are being squeezed in one of Atar's vices. Nonetheless, neither Nelyo nor I hesitate in pouring a cup of wine into our empty stomachs before our supper is ready, and my mood is soon lightened as a result. Nelyo laughs when I ask if we should use utensils and drops my rabbit directly onto a tin plate, which he shoves into my hands. "Who are we to impress?" he asks. "Each other? Macalaurë, you ceased impressing me the first time you messed yourself while sitting in my lap."

I am too busy picking at the meat, ravenous, to do much more than give him a quick glower. The meat is leathery and tastes gamy, but the glaze covers it, and soon I am sucking on the bones and tossing them to the ground. The meat is raw near the bones, but I am hungry enough that I don't care, and I chase the distasteful bits with large swallows of wine. Nelyo is similarly engrossed, and the only sounds are the crackle of the fire, of frogs singing by the brook, and our teeth tearing at tough rabbit-meat. I lick the last bits of glaze from my fingers, even nibbling at my nails to get the traces from beneath, and look over to see my graceful, proper brother doing the same, grinning at me while he lifts his plate to lick it like a dog, tossing it aside with a rattle and giving a loud belch.

Despite my earlier irritation, I can't help but to laugh.

The sweet potatoes are finished, nearly exploding in the hot ashes at the edge of the fire, and we both burn out fingers in our haste to devour them next, using our hunting knives to cut them open and scooping out the soft insides with our fingers, popping them quickly into our mouth to ease the burn, which slides instead across our tongues, down our throats, and into our stomachs.

We toss aside our plates and cups and Nelyo slides his bedroll next to mine. We drink the dregs of wine, straight from the bottle, as Amil tells us disreputable people do. It is fun being disreputable, I think: eating with one's hands, drinking straight from the bottle, and using our tunics as napkins. We lie side by side on our bedrolls, passing the last of the wine and the berries between us, hungry for neither but simply enjoying the sweet explosion each brings to our tongues.

I lounge on my side, with my head resting on my arm stretched over my head. The fire is still robust and warms my feet. Nelyo lies on his back with his knees steepled and his legs splayed and the bottle resting on his chest. I let him have it; he needs it more than I do.

"We should bathe," I say. With my arm raised along the ground, I can smell my odor: sweat, dust, smoke from the fire. Nelyo has opened the neckline of his tunic, and I can see sweat glistening on his chest. He must smell worse than me, like all those other things and blood too.

"No, we shouldn't," he says languidly. "The creek will be cold. I'd rather smell your stench than leave this fire."

After a moment's thought, I agree, although I am startled by his refusal. Nelyo cannot tolerate dirt on his skin. He says it makes him itch like a thousand spiders are crawling upon him.

He jabs the wine bottle in my direction, and I take another swig. My whole body feels lighter now—not just my head—as though I would float up to the stars if I took off the pesky clothes weighting me down. Maybe Nelyo doesn't itch because the spiders are drunk too and have floated away to live in the stars.

I look at Nelyo and giggle, without knowing why. His head rolls in my direction; his eyebrows are raised, inquiring. He reaches for the bottle, and after a few jabs, I manage to get it into his hand. "You look like you're about to give birth," I tell him, and he looks down at his body—his knees raised, his legs spread—and after a moment laughs with me. "I suppose I do," he says. He rolls onto his side, facing me, and lets the bottle fall between us. It tips, but my hands don't quite respond when I order them to catch it. After a moment, I realize that it is empty anyway. "Thank Eru we are males and don't have to do that," he mutters.

I think about it: All the times that I wished to be the daughter that Amil and Atar wanted so badly, I never considered that aspect of things, of being taken by a male and bearing his children. I grimace, and Nelyo laughs.

"Just imagine having Carnistir inside of you for a year. It's a wonder he didn't chew his way out," he says.

"Amil didn't seem to mind." My eyes are growing heavy; sleep is not far off, although I haven't even removed my boots yet.

"Yes, but now she sleeps all of the time." Nelyo is twirling his hair; his eyes are alert, although slightly unfocused. He is bigger than me; it makes sense that the wine should affect him less. "Do you imagine that you'll have a lot of children, Macalaurë?"

My eyes slip closed. I dream of Vingarië pregnant, although she has told no one else but me, but when I try to imagine further, it is like imagining walking until I stand on the horizon and squatting down to see what is underneath of Arda. "No," I mumble, and sleep rolls atop me, a stone dropped from a great height.

~oOo~

My sleep is tormented this night by wine-induced dreams, the illogical, ceaseless variety. I dream that Vingarië and I are married and it is our wedding night, and I am trying to bond to her in a bare, drafty room in Grandfather Finwë's palace. Nelyo keeps interrupting us, though, asking me to clean his boots for him, and finally I get angry and throw his boots at him, striking him in the head and leaving clods of mud caught in his hair. "If I can't marry than neither can you!" he screams, and every time I reach the verge of bonding with my new wife, there is another knock on the door and Nelyo on the threshold, boots in hand.

~oOo~

I awaken far too early, at the Mingling of the Lights, before remembering that I went to sleep early too. I awaken because I am cold: The fire has died to embers in the night, and Nelyo's bedroll is deserted, the covers tousled like the nest of a restless beast. I slept the night on my outstretched arm, and now my neck is sore and my hand is cold and tingling. I touch it, and it is limp and cold, but momentarily, sensation returns in the way of burning pins, as though my own blood scorches my flesh from within.

My mouth is dry and tastes as if it has been washed with sawdust. I look regretfully at the overturned tin cups, realizing that I haven't had water since leaving home yesterday morning. My head pounds with dryness, and even the gentle, mingled light of the Trees needles my eyes. I dread Laurelin's hours and hope that Nelyo will let me spend them in cold darkness under a rock.

I walk to the creek, stretching sore limbs as I go, longing for the panacea of cold water on my parched throat. Nelyo kneels by the stream, cleaning a grouse. My footsteps are none too graceful and he looks up and gives me a wan smile. "Good morning," he says, and I grunt a reply. He jerks his head to his left. "Drink upstream from me or all you'll taste is blood."

The grouse has a neat hole in its breast. Its red-brown feathers are matted with blood. Nelyo is pulling them from its skin with swift nonchalance, and they swirl downstream like tiny Telerin ships. I plunge my face into the water to overcome sudden nausea. The water is good, and I let my nose and eyelashes dip into the creek until a splash of water from my right makes me sit upright, a bolt of pain shooting through my sore neck.

Nelyo is grinning at me, half-plucked grouse clutched in hand. His face is white, like parchment; underneath his eyes, the skin is grayish, the beginnings of a bruise. Next to his pale skin, his hair is nauseatingly red. I glower at him. "Leave me be, Nelyo, I have a headache." I dip my face back into the cool relief of the stream.

"You had too much wine last night," he tells me. "You were snoring like a monster."

Suddenly, many things fall together in my head, as though I've dropped a jigsaw puzzle and all of the pieces happen to fall into place: the rumpled bedroll, his blanched face, his knowledge of my mid-night behavior. He didn't sleep last night. I ponder this while the cold water tickles my nose.

He stands. "Don't drink too much of that cold water or you'll vomit," he warns, ruffling my hair affectionately, before I hear his footsteps crunching back to our camp.

When I return, he has poked the fire back to life and is roasting the grouse over it. At the thought of eating the greasy meat, my stomach turns a slow somersault. As though reading my thoughts, Nelyo quickly says, "I'm cooking it for later, for tomorrow. I figure we'll take our midday and evening meals at the inn."

"Why did you shoot it now?" I ask, although I know why: He was restless. But he says, "Opportunitypresented itself. I took it."

We cut slices from the loaf of bread for our breakfast. Nelyo eats his slathered in butter and garnished with the remnants of last night's berries, but I can barely chew it dry. I choke down one slice and, at his insistence, begin another. "You'll need your energy," he tells me. "We still have far to go."

We douse the fire and pack up the camp. I catch Nelyo yawning several times, but he makes his face break into a grin in an attempt to deceive me, as though spending the duration of my life with him hasn't taught me better. Laurelin is beginning to blossom into fullness as we saddle our horses. I thought that the harsher light would hurt me, but with my belly full again and my thirst quenched, the light soothes my skin, which didn't seem to realize that it was chilly until now. Still, I hope that Nelyo won't ride as fast as yesterday. I don't know if my skull can tolerate having my backbone rammed into it for the better part of the day.

Luckily, Nelyo's weariness makes him slacken the pace, and we ride for most of the morning at a light jog, counting the number of different creatures we see on the way. As midday approaches, I sing and manage to coax Nelyo into a half-hearted accompaniment. Nelyo operates under the delusion that he is a terrible singer when really his voice is rich and full, like chocolate. As we ride, I notice the wilderness being tamed and compacted: Civilization approaches. Soon, the weeds bend away from our path and the wildlife becomes scarce. Above the forest to our right, a tendril of smoke curls and oscillates into nothingness. Soon, the trees are planted in rows—orchards—and the fields are plowed and contain only a single type of plant. The lumps of stone, borne at random from the earth, disappear and are replaced by the rare, squarish house. The trail becomes a path; a path becomes a road, and a sign chiseled into the flat face of a rock greets us: Osto-Ehtelë, ½ league. It is decorated with curlicues at the borders and presents the final sign of civilization: art.

I have never been to this town but I have heard its name mentioned. A few years back, an infestation of aphids attacked the apple trees in Formenos, and Atar and the lords rode to neighboring towns to take what each was willing to spare. They came back with multitudes, more than the people could eat, and the lords told us the next summer that even the horses had apples that winter. Nelyo and Atar ride here sometimes too—Atar often receives commissions and attends councils—on their private journeys that I pretend never to want to attend because it lessens the sting when I am not asked. Atar pronounces their metalworking superb and Nelyo pronounces their maidens passable, earning sharp looks from Amil. Not far beyond the sign, I can hear the sounds of civilization, of hammers ringing and voices calling to one another. We round the top of a hill, and the town is spread below us: squat, gray houses and shops set along four narrow streets enclosing a square with an impressive fountain at its center. Like a mirage, it shimmers—a many-colored scintillation—and my puzzled eyes are forced to skip away.

At the edge of town is a stable. Nelyo slows and dismounts, so I follow. I am not sure how one behaves in a town. My experiences are limited to Tirion and Formenos, and both are cities where I am recognized and treated as royalty. Here, in my dusty cloak, with my oily hair tied back in a strip of cloth, I am an ordinary traveler. I take care to tuck my tunic around the star pendant at my throat, lest my father's symbol give away my identity.

A groom emerges from the stable, his face split into a wide grin. "Russandol!" he calls, and I start, for I have never heard anyone but family call my brother by that name. They clap each other in quick embraces; the groom is nearly a head shorter than my brother but the trail of three children that follow him from the stable reveal that he is older, probably older than our father. Nelyo stoops and greets each child in turn, by name, presenting each with one of our father's crystals. They hold them in the darkness of cupped hands and dance when blue-white light pokes between their fingers.

"Roquenwë, I present to you my brother, Macalaurë," Nelyo says. He is standing beside me again.

I take his callused hand in mine, in greeting. My own hands are soft in comparison, except at my fingertips, where the abuse of the harp strings has toughened my skin. "Laurelin shines upon this hour," I say, and the groom grins and says, "Indeed it does. I see you—like Russandol—have your father's manners."

Nelyo laughs, but I am puzzled. I give Nelyo imploring looks as we follow Roquenwë into the stable, but he is busy telling the news of Formenos and Tirion. It is a good thing, I always think, that Nelyo is the one that everyone asks for news because, if they asked me, I doubt I could discern the important things from that about which no one cares. I would remember the births, betrothals, and marriages—both of my aunts are expecting in the next few months, and the eldest daughter of lord Merkurya of Formenos is finally considering betrothal to her suitor of forty years (although she might waver again once she learns that Annawendë has left)—but I doubt that I could accurately report the minutia of our lives. I didn't even know, for example, that Formenos and some of the towns along the road to Tirion are currently debating whether they should send engineers to improve and upkeep the southern road. I knew about but wouldn't see the importance of reporting the excellent wheat harvest that the Formenos farmers have had this summer. But Nelyo prattles on endlessly about such things and Roquenwë occasionally adds stories of the town, which I know Nelyo will relay to our eager father upon our return home. As for me, the name of Osto-Ehtelë's midwife and her newborn daughter are no sooner in my ears then they have been squeezed from my brain.

Nelyo and I leave the horses behind and walk the rest of the way into the town. There are no gates or guards; no way of telling when one actually enters the township proper. One moment, the ground beneath our feet is hard-packed dirt with the occasional brave weed poking from it; the next, crushed gravel rattles beneath our feet and Nelyo is greeting the people that we pass, many of whom stop him with a touch to his arm and regale him with a tale or another. Some scrawl hasty messages to our father, which Nelyo folds neatly and tucks into his satchel.

"What did Roquenwë mean when he said that we have our father's manners?" I ask Nelyo as we walk. Nelyo looks at me quizzically. "Why, Macalaurë, it is obvious, I should think, that you are I have the bearing of Tirion royalty, as does Atar."

I have never thought of Atar as having a royal bearing before. To me, Atar acts ordinarily—slovenly even—with his clothes always dirty from the forge and his hair a mess and his blunt, merciless manner. At Grandfather Finwë's festivals, he acts properly enough, I suppose, but I have always figured that this was done for no reason other than pleasing our grandfather, who attaches great importance to grace and manners. Atar also has natural grace—as does Nelyo—but he seems to work harder at hiding it than he does expending the minute effort it would take to flaunt it. I convey as much to Nelyo, who nods knowingly. "You are rarely along when he meets the people of the north. They admire him for a reason, Macalaurë."

I have been along occasionally when we walk among the people of Tirion, and there, Atar is distant, cold almost. Nelyo smiles when I say this, and says, "That is because he knows the loyalty of the people of the city is more with our uncle than with us. It is simple resentment; that's all."

I can't believe that Atar would be prone to such a childish emotion. "He is human, Macalaurë," Nelyo adds, as though reading my thoughts. I have to wonder sometimes.

"Atar says that we go to Formenos because summers in Tirion are too hot for efficient work in the forge," Nelyo tells me. "Haven't you ever wondered, Macalaurë, why our father—of all people—would complain of the heat? He relishes it. That is not the reason. He loves the north; he is important here."

"But he is important in Tirion too," I argue. "He is the high prince."

"Yes, and that is why he is important in Tirion. Here, he is important because his skill and his work are valued. The people care little for his title. Grandfather Finwë and Uncle Nolofinwë generally come here every few years. Our grandfather, of course, is always remembered, but Uncle Nolofinwë was angry that people would not remember him here. He eventually stopped coming, and Grandfather brings Atar now.

"These are our people, Macalaurë," Nelyo adds, "not those who live in Tirion."

I suppose that I have thought little about my station and the power it confers. Atar is adamant that none of us should be given "illusions" about our inherent importance. "Your grandfather's station is no excuse for your ignorance," he frequently told me when I was young, and I would cry bitter tears in secret over these words, for my ignorance came not from an assumption about my higher place in the world but because my spirit was not meant to contain such knowledge. I was built with a different, contrary purpose in mind. Tyelkormo once, at a festival, made a rude demand of one of Grandfather's servants, and Atar's retribution was swift and loud, and Tyelkormo spent the rest of the meal in an apron, refilling water glasses.

Our people. I wonder what that means. I have never tried to discern the meaning of one's people at home; I wonder which of my demands they would meet. I wonder how far they would follow me, if I asked. I came here, wondering what it would feel like to be treated as a common traveler. Now, I uncover my father's star at my throat and let the opal wink in the light, wondering the opposite: What does it mean to be treated as a prince?

Nelyo notes my gesture and says, "Don't get any grand ideas, Macalaurë. This is a humble land. They will not pave your way with roses, as they would in Tirion; they will not bow and call you 'my lord,' but neither will they speak ill of you in their houses and stare hard at your back when you walk away."

We reach the fountain at the center of the town. I am hungry and wish for a rest, but I can see why Nelyo brought me here: Our people are compelled towards such splendor; it exceeds all other needs. I see now why Atar is so keenly respected here. The fountain is constructed of red iron; it rises in the shape of a tree trunk and silver fronds of water cascade from each branch. But at the tip of each is a sliver of colored glass, lit from within, that stains the water in a rainbow of colors: I have known my father long enough to know his work and this might be one of the most splendid examples of it. This was what I spied from afar, what dazzled my eyes from the hilltop.

Metalworking and gemcraft are not my fortes, as they are Atar's, but I have had enough lessons in craft to know the difficulty of such a construction and to appreciate the splendor. Many townspeople gather in the square, as though nearness to the fountain's beauty will heighten the happiness in their lives. A small child plays on the fountain's edge, sailing a boat constructed of oiled parchment while his mother watches. A young couple with silver rings upon their fingers walk hand-in-hand. A bard playing a lute serenades them as they pass. I stand in awe.

"Atar made it?" I say at last.

"No, it has been here longer than he's been alive. But he made the stones and encased each in glass of a slightly different hue that gives it its color. He did it as a gift to the town."

"Why?"

Nelyo shrugs. "He studied here, I think, for a while, in his youth."

I am beginning to think that there are few places where my father—who's been on Arda less than a century—hasn't studied. I imagine him lying along the edge of the fountain in his languid manner, intent upon some book or another, with our mother at his side. Nelyo and I would have been distant thoughts then, maybe even laughable. I wonder what they would have said if told that their two eldest sons would stand in this square, only a half-century later, and gaze in wonder upon Atar's work.

It is a suitable gift from a Noldo. In a rare, cynical mood, Nelyo once said that a gift from a Noldo is either very large or very small: a ring with a pinprick of a diamond or a ten-story tower. There is even a Noldorin ballad to this effect, sung so often by lovestruck couples that the lines in it have become rather trite clichés: "I'll build a fountain for you, my love / A sturdy tower, reaching above." Infatuation is dismissed in this way: "He loves her enough to build a tower for her," meaning, "He loves her in the same way as his mother, his sister, his dog, and his favorite childhood pony." Nelyo said that such clichés became true only if you added "in my pants" to the end of each. And so we sing, when we are alone and in surly moods: "I'll build a fountain for you in my pants / A sturdy tower reaching above in my pants." Carnistir once hid under my bed and heard us singing this and took to singing it himself; luckily, Nelyo managed to bribe him with biscuits—one of the few foods that he will eat—before Amil heard it.

But this fountain is a tribute to love: I imagine that if I proposed to Vingarië here, then neither of us would tire of recounting the tale until the ending of Arda.

Nelyo touches my arm, interrupting my thoughts. "Come now, Macalaurë," he says. "Now that you have seen the fountain, then we can have a meal. I am starving."

~oOo~

The inn is just past the fountain, a three-story gray stone building with a simple wooden sign out front, emblazoned in beautiful script, stating simply, "Inn."

Nelyo pauses before we go in. "Mind you if we stay the night, Macalaurë? There are some with whom I wish to speak." He mentions some of the conversations he's had with people on the road; the words and names sound vaguely familiar but the details are foreign. I nod anyway. After the abuse I gave my body yesterday, I would like a good meal and a hot bath.

It is midday, and the inn is crowded. Several of the patrons I recognize as travelers, like us, with dusty cloaks tossed over their shoulders and parcels stacked beneath their chairs. Others are townspeople, in for a glass of wine and a conversation, or craftsmen who haven't the time to prepare a midday meal for themselves. Some still wear their smith's aprons. I can see why Atar is so comfortable here.

Nelyo approaches the front counter where a pretty, dark-haired girl is polishing wine glasses with a soft cloth. When her eyes alight on Nelyo, however, the glass and the cloth are set aside, forgotten.

"Greetings, my lady," he says, taking her hand softly in his in greeting. "My brother and I are traveling to the sea and greatly desire hot meals and soft beds until we leave tomorrow."

Her brow furrows, as though she must tell him distressing news, the death of a favorite pet perhaps. "We have only one room left," she says. I half-expect her eyes to brim with tears.

But Nelyo smiles, and her distress melts. "That is fine. I will share with my brother," he says. He reaches into his satchel, to find a commodity to trade for their services, but her quick fingers touch his arm, and even such a subtle touch is enough to stop him and make his eyes return to her face. "No," she says. "My father says that the House of Fëanáro is always welcomed as one of our own. We ask nothing from you."

Nelyo mumbles his gratitude. Something has disturbed him; he is like an acrobat balanced on a wire high above the ground and losing his balance. I watch his composure teeter and right itself, but knowledge of the near-fall has tensed his shoulders, and he remains precarious. I wonder: Was it the generosity of the innkeeper or the way the daughter touched his arm?

Nelyo finds a table in the corner, away from the loquacity of the townspeople and the other travelers. He doesn't say much even to me; he watches the innkeeper's daughter, and she graces him with the occasional glance back, accompanied always with a smile.

If we were in one of the inns of Tirion or Formenos, in the days before Nelyo decided that he wanted to marry Annawendë, I would know how this was going to progress: Nelyo would wait for the inn to empty, justifying his usurpation of the girl's attention; they would drink wine together, and Nelyo would be perfectly charming and accommodating, refusing her service in favor of doing all for her; quiet plans would be made, and her cheeks would glow with hope, and I would brace myself for the storm to come, because all of Nelyo's courtships end in the same place, with broken hearts and tarnished reputations.

The innkeeper himself brings our meals. "Russandol, what an unexpected pleasure!" he says, and I find myself again alarmed by the name. He is Russandol only to the Tirion family; to everyone else, he is Nelyo or Maitimo. I am introduced to the innkeeper, and he takes my hand with surprising strength. Does no one here have weak hands, I wonder? "The revered minstrel!" he exclaims. "Of whom Fëanáro speaks so proudly! It is good to meet you at last, Macalaurë."

This startles me also: Atar speaks of me when he goes abroad, and proudly nonetheless?

Nelyo gestures to an empty chair and invites the innkeeper to join us. He gives a wary glance around the dining room, like a parent who does not trust a child not to misbehave while his back is turned. "They are all eating," says Nelyo. "There is nothing that they will need that Halwará cannot handle. Sit."

And so he grabs an extra bottle of wine and an extra glass and sits with us. The meals he has given us are excellent: venison sliced thinly and served over bread, covered in gravy; sweet, buttered corn; and wild rice tossed with such a variety of spices that I cannot identify them all. He and Nelyo talk of mutual acquaintances, both in the town and in Formenos. He asks the purpose of our journey. "We are traveling to the sea," says Nelyo, and the innkeeper appears puzzled by this. "But for what purpose?"

He is Noldorin, and so everything is done with a purpose in mind. Trips are not taken without reasoning: to see some mine or acquire some material unique to a single area; to appraise a tower or a building constructed by an illustrious architect, perhaps; to meet someone who can impart knowledge that can be found nowhere else. The Teleri would understand, for they desire the sea apart from any single purpose; the Vanyar would understand also, for they are known to journey days just to see the way the water looks at the Mingling of the Lights. But to a Noldo, something that cannot be held in one's hand or put towards the construction of some physical entity does not constitute a purpose.

"I am studying the patterns of the waves," Nelyo says, and my head jerks in his direction, for it is a lie, yet Nelyo tells it easily, without a glimmer of guilt in his silver eyes. "My father and I are studying waves, how they pertain to sound and light, and I hope that the more tangible waves of the sea will shed some insight into this."

Of course, what would he say if he told the truth? That he's been slighted by a woman and wishes to escape her memory in the places where they've shared kisses, conversations? That he wishes to be away from the demands of our father, the persistence of our little brothers, and the reproach of our mother? That even one so beautiful and composed fears being broken by a poorly timed remembrance or an unintentionally callous word?

The conversation shifts to a discussion of our family; I recognize it as Nelyo's doing, subtle even to me and imperceptible to someone who knows him less. The innkeeper refills our glasses and inquires after our mother. "She is well," says Nelyo. "She has taken two apprentices and has resumed nearly her full workload again."

The innkeeper grins. "I was infatuated with her when she used to come here with your father, but even a smitten boy could see that her heart was taken."

"Indeed," Nelyo replies. "If I should be so blessed in love as my parents, nearly any other curse would be bearable."

"You are not then? You are courting no one?"

This is a very personal question, and I am surprised, but Nelyo doesn't appear to notice. Of course, he is working through his fourth glass of wine even as the question is asked. I wonder if he will mention Annawendë. "I have no one," he says. I watch his eyes, but they remain as flat as if he were answering a question about the type of stone Atar used to construct a house. "I remain unattached."

"As does my daughter. Fifty-two years old and nary a suitor."

"That is a shock. Your daughter is very beautiful."

"Beautiful, yes, but also particular. Oh, they have expressed interest—the boys of the town—but she will not hear of it. Perhaps she would settle for the eldest son of the high prince?" he teases.

"Perhaps," Nelyo says, grinning, and drinking more wine.

I feel chills prickle my arms, as though Nelyo—despite his inebriety—had orchestrated that very question.

We are given a second-floor room that overlooks the street. Pressing my cheek to the glass, I can see a single sparkling tendril of the fountain, and so I am content.

There is a single bed but it is big enough for both of us—we have slept in far worse conditions before—and a marble tub in the corner to use for bathing. True to the Noldor, the finest piece of furniture in the room is the writing desk, complete with a ready stock of quills and parchment, as well as a stack of three books on architecture, left to occupy the traveler stricken with insomnia, perhaps dull enough to cure it.

Nelyo throws back the drapes and lets the afternoon light flood the room. "I feel like I am crawling with insects," he says. "Shall we wager for the bath?"

He puts a stone in his fist, shuffles it around behind his back, and asks me to select a hand. He turns it open, palm empty. "Sorry!" he sings, and already, he is tearing off his tunic and filling the tub with water.

That is fine; I am dirty but I do not feel as though insects are crawling on me. I lie atop the quilt on our bed and thumb through one of the architecture books. It is as bland a subject as I remember when I studied it with Atar. The book is old and others have added their words, in the margins or on slips of parchment stuck between the pages, updating the material. One hand is intimately familiar; the letters swirl with the ease of storm clouds on a high wind. "Further study has elucidated this equation to be," it reads, followed by a string of variables that I suppose I once understood, when it behooved me to pass the assessments that Atar would give me. It makes me feel strange, though, to think that Atar once lay across this very bed—perhaps while Nelyo complained of itching and drew himself a bath in the corner—reading this very book and adding his words to it, as though time has folded upon itself and given me his identity.

He would have been irritated, though, not perplexed by the inaccuracy. I can hear him complaining to Nelyo, who has just cast aside his dirty socks and breeches and splashed his feet into the tub, that there is no excuse for such a mistake. "Had they been meticulous in their experiments, they would have discovered the truth," he would have said, "but they were lackadaisical." To Atar, lackadaisical is a word with the disgustingness of phlegm, while meticulous is a virtue that he himself is known to display.

I set aside the book and retrieve Nelyo's hairbrush and, drawing the desk chair behind the tub, comb the snarls from his hair. Nelyo's hair darkens when it is wet until it is almost the color of my own; it is slippery like oil through my fingers. He sighs and leans into my touch. I am the opposite and do not care for others touching my hair. Nelyo I will allow to braid it before important functions (my hair is like silk and I cannot, for all my efforts, convince it to remain in place) and Amil or Atar fix it before the festivals in Tirion, but in Nelyo's place, I would swat at my hands and take the brush and comb it myself. I suppose it comes down to differences in our sensitivities: Nelyo is aware of his body where I am aware of my voice. I am not soothed by touches—by physical pleasure—the way that Nelyo is. I am soothed by sound, by the words of another, by reassurances. Nelyo would prefer that someone hold him and say nothing. At home, at night, I am sometimes overcome with loneliness in our big house: Atar and Amil are busy with their work and the little ones care not for me the way they do Nelyo. On those nights, I sleep in Nelyo's bed with him because it is big enough that we may lie without touching but, should I awaken in the night, I can hear his breathing and know that I am not alone.

(Nelyo's bed belonged to Atar, when Atar was young and lived in the palace with our grandfather. It was specially made, of a splendor fit for a high prince. Lying side by side, all three of my brothers and I can fit in it without touching. My own bed is not so splendid, and the few times that I asked Nelyo to sleep in it with me, I would awaken with his arm tossed around me—once his leg too—as though he had mistaken me for one of his girl-friends with whom he would sometimes spend the night under the pretense of some pursuit in Tirion.)

Nelyo moves suddenly, righting himself, disturbing the hairbrush, which had long ago stopped finding snarls and has been simply slipping through his hair with the ease of a paddle through water. "I could have you do that all afternoon," Nelyo says, standing and reaching for a towel to blot dry his body, "but I would fall asleep, and I have errands that I wish to make."

We have each brought a spare set of clothes, and Nelyo puts his on now. He squeezes the water from his hair and braids the sides, fastening the braids away from his face; he affixes a gold emblem of our House around his neck. In the splendor of Tirion, he would be trite, but here, he is radiant; he is fit to stand beside the fountain in the square, both products of our father.

With Nelyo gone, I bathe quickly and less meticulously (lackadaisically, perhaps?) than he did, but I do not find the pleasure in a warm tub of water that Nelyo does. At home, I will often sniff myself before deciding whether to bathe, and if I smell clean, then I will settle for combing my hair and washing my face, neck, underarms, and between my legs. I would rather take the time it takes to bathe to write a few bars of a song or sit at my window and listen to the birds sing. Now, however, it is clear that I am not clean; upon raising my arms, my odor is offensive even to me. If not certain that the innkeeper is used to the stink of travel, I would be ashamed for taking a meal with him in such a state.

I wonder where Nelyo has gone. He knows that I dislike "visiting"; I despise reciting the same news and listening to the same stories as told by the other townspeople, chewed slightly differently by each. I am not interested in the names of their children or the success of their trades, and I don't like pretending to be. Nelyo, on the other hand, believes each person he meets to be a genuine friend and treats them as such. This is why people love his company so much, for only a few kind words with him and he makes them believe that they have been elevated to the status of a confidant of the eldest son of Fëanáro.

But, in reality, we confide in none but each other—we sons of Fëanáro—for the things that occur in our house defy what seems to occur in the regular world. Would I tell of the way my parents fight? Of Carnistir's bizarreness? Of Atar's defiant words to us about the Valar? How would I form such words so that they would slip as I intended into the ear of a listener, without horrifying him? I cannot; only one of my own—Nelyo—can accept such insights.

Instead, after dressing in my spare set of clothes and quickly washing those that Nelyo and I have discarded, laying them in front of the open window to dry, I take my harp, which I never fail to carry on my back when we travel, and head for the town square, for the fountain, where I will be happy to spend the afternoon composing a song adequate to describe its splendor.

~oOo~

I return after the Mingling of the Lights, having spent the afternoon with the town's bard, crafting songs about people that I had never met before that moment. With my contribution of a first impression and his insight into the true character of each, we wove songs that soon had an impressive throng gathered around us, laughing and applauding our verses. I spring lightly up the steps the second floor of the inn, expecting that Nelyo will still be visiting, but he has returned and is lying across the bed, reading one of the architecture books and adding his own notes in the margins.

"Look who has returned! I thought I might have to dine without you." He stands and fingers the garland of flowers placed around my neck by a little girl from the town. "Who gave you this?"

"A girl," I say simply.

Nelyo acts shocked. "What would Vingarië say, little brother, to know that you are accepting gifts from other girls?"

"She was no older than Tyelkormo," I say with some irritation. "It will be many years before she will entertain the thought of marriage or before even the finest gift she gave could capture my love."

Nelyo tugs the chain. "It is well constructed." He smirks and rolls his eyes, saying, "Noldor," as though he himself is not one.

The prince of them, I think, somewhat scathingly, before remembering with a start that I am too.

We go to the dining room, which is quickly filling with travelers and townspeople hungry for supper. A group of craftsmen wave at Nelyo, and he goes to join them. Wine is poured and sloshes over hands as hasty toasts are made. Hands are licked clean: Better to stray into impropriety than to let a good vintage go to waste. A chair is pulled out for me: I am one of them, apparently—even though I can think of nothing to say to these people—by virtue of my father's blood in my veins.

"Your brother is quiet," remarks a blacksmith. The supper plates have been brought, although the noise around the table hasn't subsided. When speaking and eating interfere with one another, apparently, speaking wins.

Nelyo laughs, "Were you to hear him sing, you would not think that!"

And that is how I come to be hastened in finishing my supper so that I may be ushered to a makeshift stage in the corner, given my harp, and told to sing. Not that I mind (although I pretend to): The only place in the world where I am truly comfortable is a stage. Anywhere else, my limbs feel too long, my head feels too big, as though I will not even make it through a doorway without wriggling. My voice—beautiful in song—is not deep enough to be commanding, as my father-name implies, although Vingarië once confessed in a letter that the first time I spoke to her, she shivered at the sound of my voice. I shivered at the thought of that. But onstage, I feel as though my body settles into normal proportions. I am no longer awkward, gangly, at risk of making a fool of myself. I will command the audience in song as I cannot in life. I will live up to the expectations of my father-name.

The craftsmen, the farmers, the weary-worn travelers have all fallen silent. Even cutlery is laid aside. I clear my throat—I wish I'd been given the chance to warm up!—and place my fingertips on my harpstrings. If they wish to hear more, I will take their requests later, but for now, I will begin as I always do, with the Song of Celebration, which was written by Rúmil when the Eldar received the invitation to Valinor, shortly before beginning the Great Journey.

I close my eyes and begin plucking the harp. I hear falling rain and singing water, trickling in gentle glissandos from leaves edged only in silver starlight. Then I hear the stars themselves, high above; they ring in clear notes like bells, the sound I imagine they made when Varda placed them in the firmament. There is a whisper of wind, the sough of a distant sea, calling me to light, and I open my mouth and let the words spiral to the low ceiling of this meager small-town inn in the north of Aman; I sing as though I were in the Halls of Manwë with the expanse of the heavens to fill with my voice. There are words, yes, but they are subverted by the song, by the spirit of joy in the hearts of the Eldar as they set out for the haven of Valinor. The song is what is important.

It ends with the abruptness of a cool breeze dying on a hot day, and I open my eyes. I can always tell those who lived during the Great Journey, for they are the ones with the tears in their eyes. They must have heard Rúmil sing the song for the first time after it was composed, before it became fodder and was twisted by proud whelps like me. Those who didn't walk the Journey are merely awed—my brother is among their number, although he must have heard me sing this song a thousand times—and I sense envy in the faces of some, as though they wish to know why this is called the Blessed Realm with the same keenness as those who walked the long roads of the Outer Lands.

There is no applause, but I do not expect it. There rarely is. There is silence and tears, and that is enough.

I play another song, then another, and soon, the audience is calling out requests; the mood shifts as the wine pours faster; there are others on the stage with me, belting out farcical tunes meant to mock and tease. I play along on my harp, light, leaping melodies, and I add my voice when I know the words. Some of the songs requested are my own, and my heart sings with pride then, and I understand why Atar is called proud when really he only burns with love for his work and the joy it brings to others' lives.

The night winds on, timeless. The inn is packed; every chair is filled and people stand along the walls. Others poke their heads in from the street, drawn by the music, and all end up staying. Tables are pushed back and some dance. I recognize the young couple from the square this morning, and the innkeeper and his wife turn a quick-stepped reel that makes the audience pound their feet in glee. The wives of some of the stragglers appear to see what is keeping their husbands, and they are coaxed into dancing and end up staying, their anger eased. My voice fails before their attention does, my throat becoming hoarse and sore, and as though sensing the imminent demise of my voice, the innkeeper calls for an end to the night—"The rooster will call early tomorrow!" he reminds the reluctant craftsmen and farmers—and the people slowly trickle out into the night.

The innkeeper serves me a drink that he says will ease my throat: hot tea and lemon, I know—for that is what Atar gives me after a particularly vigorous night of singing in Grandfather's court—but there is something else in there that burns deeper, in my belly.

The innkeeper sets three bottles of wine before me. "Your brother said that he wished to trade me for them. You have more than earned them this night, my lad."

It is then that I realize that Nelyo is gone. No one is left in the dining room but the innkeeper and me. I was so distracted by the audience that I didn't even notice the disappearance of my own brother. A faint hurt stabs at my heart swollen with pride, threatens to deflate it. He has heard you sing thousands of times, I tell myself but still cannot deny that his appreciation matters more than that of an entire roomful of people.

I mumble my gratitude to the innkeeper and hear myself make an excuse of exhaustion and head for the steps and for bed.

Perhaps he had other meetings to attend? I am perplexed, for it is Nelyo who usually sits at the very front of the crowd when I sing, who grabs the hand of a maiden to initiate the dancing once the quick, fun songs begin. It is Nelyo who calls out requests for my best songs should the audience's interest begin to wane. But not tonight.

But you didn't need him tonight, a little voice whispers, and I have to force regret to remain in my thoughts.

I reach our room at the end of the hall and turn the knob, sleepy and yawning, eager to slip underneath the quilt on our bed, expecting my brother to be there already, asleep perhaps. I console myself about his absence with the reminder that he did not sleep last night; surely I cannot fault him for wanting a good night's rest!

So this is what I come to expect. Certainly not what I encounter instead.

I notice first the flicker of candlelight on the trail of my brother's clothes leading to the bed: his boots, his socks, his tunic, his breeches. My eyes should have stopped there; I should have known and left, but my mind is weary and slow and my eyes are drawn forward in the same way that one's gaze is drawn to a scar upon an otherwise beautiful face. There is an empty wine bottle on the writing desk beside the bed; two wine glasses with only dregs remaining. My brother is on the bed but he is not alone: He has the innkeeper's daughter on her back, her hand nearest me tangled in his hair, her dress torn open at the top. Nelyo, naked, is poised over her, kissing and nuzzling her breasts; I cannot see her other hand but judging the way my brother is breathing—hard, each breath punctured by a cry, as though he'd been terribly wounded—and the way his hips are jerking in a tireless rhythm, I can guess what it is doing.

I would like to turn away, unnoticed, and escape, but Halwará sees me first, and she screams. Nelyo looks up, and I am stammering apologies in no language I can understand, fumbling for the doorknob with shaking hands, while Nelyo tries to cover Halwará's breasts with his hands. "I am—I am—" I manage, as comprehensible as I will be, but my hand finds purchase then, and I slam the door behind me.

I don't realize that I have run until I crash into the wall at the end of the hallway. I have to catch myself to keep from flying down the stairs: I can hear the innkeeper down there, whistling as he cleans the tables for the night—songs that I was singing only moments before, it seems—and I do not wish to imagine conjuring an explanation for my state or my reluctance to return to my room. I can imagine his insistence on accompanying me … I slide down the wall and crouch at the top of the stairs with my head in my hands, shaking hard. It is only when I take a breath and suck water into my nose that I realize that I am crying.

Why? My thoughts are a jumble; I can barely untangle them from one another.

He left …

More important than …

In my bed!

He left!

My knees grow stiff from kneeling for so long but I dare not move, even to slip into a more comfortable position. After my noisy crash down the hall, I am lucky that no one heard, that the innkeeper hasn't come up the stairs and none of the other guests have poked their heads out their doors. Or, perhaps, it is an unspoken code in places like this that one keeps one's head in one's room, no matter what the ruckus.

Trapped like an animal cornered by a predator, I wait for the inevitable moment when Halwará will emerge from my room. I imagine and rehearse my reaction—will I greet her as though nothing has happened? mirror her shame? ignore her?—until, gratefully, I hear the sound of the innkeeper entering his own quarters at the back of the inn, and I fly down the stairs and into the silvery night.

I do not know how long I wander the streets of the town, the music in my head killed by the thought that my brother—whom I love more than anyone on Arda—might be a bad person. Might I be too, then? We share the same blood. The burning drink that the innkeeper gave me churns in my belly; I want to vomit for my disappointment but cannot bring myself to defile these carefully wrought streets. The fountain? Blasphemy.

Eventually, ashamed and exhausted, I return to the inn because I have nowhere else to go.

This time, I rap gently on the door first, but there is no answer. I wonder: Will he have the audacity to keep her there the night? But when I open the door, Nelyo is alone on the bed, dressed in his spare set of clothes, sleeping deeply and snoring lightly. My half of the bed waits for me, and I contemplate it, and I see Nelyo and Halwará sprawled down the middle and cannot bring myself to lie upon the sheets that I imagine to be soiled.

I grab my pillow instead, turning the pillowcase inside out first, and make a place for myself on the floor, beside the writing desk, falling into darkness even as my thoughts burn with the certainty that I will not be able to sleep on such a hard bed.

~oOo~

I awaken with the floor creaking in my ear; Nelyo is walking about our room, fully dressed down to his boots even. He is folding the clothes that I washed yesterday and putting them into our satchels. I want to lie here forever, with my eyes closed, until he goes away, but the floor is digging into my shoulder, and when I shift, I bump the desk chair and its creaks loudly across the floor.

Nelyo turns and catches my eyes on him, and so I am forced to sit up quickly, rumple-headed and sore, while he wishes me a good morning and says something about having our breakfast brought to our room. I can see that last night will not be mentioned between us. At least not now.

Although, by having our breakfast delivered, he is acknowledging it. He is admitting that Halwará does not want to see me and that I don't want to see her. Or maybe he doesn't want to see us together.

I comb my hair and braid it, knowing that it will slip loose in only a few hours, just to have something to do with my hands. My stiff shoulder—abused for two nights now—makes me sit crookedly to accomplish the task. Nelyo chatters about our course for the day, about how he hopes to arrive at the sea by tomorrow. "I have been told to avoid the forest," he says. In the mirror, I can see him behind me; he is flitting about the room, as though he too wishes to keep his hands busy. "Atar always liked it, but I suppose that is fitting: Atar loves a challenge."

There is a brisk knock at the door, and Nelyo dashes to answer it. I hear him greet someone, then the innkeeper's voice, speaking about the wine he selected for me last night. I hear Nelyo's genuine gratitude. No wonder he is loved so keenly, I think, if he can talk to Halwará's father after …

"Myself, I seek the easiest road." The door has clicked shut, and Nelyo is setting two covered trays on the writing desk. "This 'rest' hasn't been restful, to say the least. But diplomacy never is. The easier it looks, the more exhausting it is."

I think bitterly that he wasn't suffering for lack of sleep when I returned last night.

Nelyo offers me the desk and the chair while he sits on the bed with his plate balanced on his knees. I wait for the inevitable segue, posed innocently, as delicate as a breeze: "You could have slept in the bed last night," he might say. Or, "Would you like a balm for the stiffness in your shoulder?" (for surely he has noticed my awkward posture and deduced the cause). But he does not; perhaps even Nelyo lacks the grace for such a feat. He talks instead of the wine that the innkeeper is giving us. "Your talents have secured for us three excellent vintages," he says.

"I thought you didn't want quality," I retort, "only to get 'blind drunk.' "

I challenge him on this in lieu of breaching the subject we both avoid. It is passive-aggressive and immature, like Tyelkormo's tendency to stick out his tongue at Atar's turned back when Atar displeases him.

"No wine in this town lacks that," Nelyo says with a smile, ignoring the insolent edge to my voice the way Amil will pretend that sarcasm is genuine, to avoid a fight. "You can get drunk from the water here. But if I can have something with a better taste than water, then I will take it."

My heart is softening to him again, the way a hard piece of fruit left in sugar water will become tender and swollen, acquiescent. I poke at my eggs, which I have half-eaten and not yet tasted. I offer peace to him with soft words the way I might stretch out my hand with an appeasement on my palm: "This breakfast is excellent," I say. It is a lie, just like that upturned palm: I wish you no harm.

"Yes, Atar and I make a habit to stop here for a reason. The food, wine, and company are all superb." The company. He swallows quickly and changes the subject. "I will pick up the wine if you will go and see that our horses are ready."

I am content with this, even to carry both of our satchels and walk alone while he orchestrates the inevitable encounter with the innkeeper's daughter, the encounter that he wishes me to avoid.

Too late, while waiting for the groom—in less than a day, I have forgotten his name—to saddle our horses, I realize that I never thanked the innkeeper. I imagine that heads will shake after we leave. "The second son of Fëanáro is not nearly so diplomatic as his brother."

Well, it is only the truth, I suppose. It is not that I desire to be thought of as rude, but realizations of the correct actions to take occur to me long past their effectiveness. Nelyo would never forget to bid farewell to a host, especially one so generous as the innkeeper. With a stature and beauty like Nelyo's, he is not easily forgotten but nor is he apt to be remembered with affection—even the best are prone to envy—but his grace and sincerity ensure his fond remembrance. Me, I am remembered like Atar is: for my talent, for the blaze of light I brought to a moment and for my tendency to disappear afterward and leave darkness behind.

I kick the dust in the stableyard with the toes of my boots, watching the polished leather (did Nelyo clean them? I didn't) become tarnished again. I hear the crunch of gravel behind me; I plot Nelyo's progress on the road by the sound of his boots upon the ground.

He arrives at the same time as the groom, leading our horses, cleaned and curried and readied for the journey. "I heard you last night in the inn," the groom says to me, "and I must give you my praise before you depart."

I nod and quietly thank him. With stage gone and my harp on my back, it is hard to believe that it was I who sang so beautifully last night.

As the groom offers me a leg up, Nelyo adds to his praise. "My brother's voice is fair indeed," he says. "In my family, we've no doubt that had Macalaurë sung in the Music of the Ainur, Arda would be a much fairer place."

In my family …

Yes, he is right: Those are Atar's words, said to Grandfather Finwë at my begetting day feast last year. Amil and Arafinwë had tried to hide their unease, but Uncle Nolofinwë's displeasure was plain. To compare one's son to the Ainur is an act of blasphemy and pride beyond even Atar's normal defiant stabs at Nolofinwë's loyalty to the Valar. But here, in the north of the land, where the work of the Valar is less obvious, the groom smiles and agrees. "Indeed. Perhaps his voice should bring us rain, for it has been two weeks, and my wife's cotton thirsts for it."

"May Manwë hear your plea," says Nelyo, swinging unassisted onto his horse—but he is so much taller than me—and bidding the groom a final farewell before heeling his stallion into a light gallop away from the town.

~oOo~

It rains that night in torrents, accompanied by thunder. Ponderous clouds roil overhead, their swollen bellies lit from below with silver light. We are crossing the long plains, and it is many hours before we find a stand of trees thick enough to give us even imperfect shelter. It is too wet to start a fire and cook, and I am grateful that Nelyo thought to prepare the grouse prior to our arrival at the town. He also acquired a fresh loaf of bread and more cheese, so we will have that which I brought from home and store that from the town to eat by the sea tomorrow.

The canopy provides us with a good deal of cover, but every now and then, a thick drop of rain trickles through the maze of leaves and branches overhead and plunks on my head, stabbing like a cold needle. The comfortable warmth that is summer in the north is gone, devoured by the storm and made into bristling lightning that the clouds hurl at the ground. Even with my cloak around my shoulders (it is a light cloak; who expects to need anything more in the late days of summer?) I shiver, and my stiff, cold hands might be blocks of ice. I wish aloud for a tent.

"Alas, we do not have one," says Nelyo, who travels more than I do and is accustomed to weather like this. "I would have brought one, but then we would have to have a pack horse and our travel would be hampered."

The air is soggy with rain and makes the bread mushy and the cheese slippery. Both are hard to choke past my throat, but I do so to please my belly, which is sore with hunger. Nelyo tears bits from the grouse and gives them to me. I suspect that he gives me some of his share as well, but I say nothing and gratefully lick the juices from my shivering fingers.

We have not spoken much this day. I sense a disagreement waiting to erupt, an infection waiting to burst forth from mottled skin. At times, today, when the silence became too heavy, he asked me to sing, but he never joined in, only rode beside me and listened with a distant expression on his face. He behaves towards me like a child awaiting punishment from a parent but also like a child who feels that punishment to be unjust, and his polite subservience has an edge to it.

I fear our conversations twisting in that direction: How could you? Who are you? You are not the brother I love so dearly. And what would he say? Why should I not? Whose "morals" do you emulate so blindly? Whose son are you?

So I say nothing, and he takes my silence as a sign of my continuing displeasure, I suppose, and he hands me a drumstick torn from the grouse, and I eat it while the occasional raindrop needles my head and I shiver, wet and miserable.

Our meal finished, we sit with our backs pressed against a tree. Nelyo has unrolled a damp blanket and wraps it around both our shoulders; he is careful to tuck the bottom edges around my feet. "To keep your toes warm," he tells me. How long has he been doing this? Since I was born, I imagine, taking care of me and putting his feet inside my own toes, feeling them to be cold, and covering them. Acting as a third, unacknowledged parent to me, to all of us. I feel guilt gnaw where the hunger has left.

"You may move closer," he says. Normally, he would put his arm around my shoulders and force me to sit against him, sharing his warmth, but he is reluctant to be so brave now. It is I who must reach out to him, scooting across the wet, leafy ground to lean against him, if I wish for such warmth. I regard him carefully. I think of his body, which I know so well. There is no shame between us: We undress; we even bathe and relieve ourselves in front of the other; we share a bed when need dictates it, for comfort and warmth. We are not like our kinsmen in Tirion, with their robes dragging the floor and fastened tightly to their throats, baring skin only to show jewelry. What is the shame in the look, the touch of a brother? Is it not more shameful to acknowledge that unnatural thoughts could shatter our innocence?

But the last person to press close to my brother was the innkeeper's daughter, and I cannot dispel her presence between us. I have shifted away from him at the thought, and it would have been imperceptible if not for the blanket stretched between us. Now, he feels it; he feels the blanket tighten on his shoulder as I draw away. The look on his face is one of pain but also curiosity. Will he acknowledge it now?

I cannot fight Nelyo. Physically, of course, he would easily overpower me—kill me even, if such a thing was possible between kinsmen—but that is not what I fear. Emotionally, he is stronger. I weep when I argue, although I do not know why. Perhaps I am afraid, afraid of being surpassed too easily, of having my lesser intelligence revealed. I would sooner be displayed naked above the palace in Tirion than have my inferiority proclaimed in such a brash manner: The lesser son of Fëanáro. Nelyo has no such fear; only one person can surpass him and that is Atar, and even if Nelyo's wit cannot defeat Atar, still it wounds him, frenzies him like a desperate animal. The rare fights between Atar and Nelyo are next in awfulness only to Atar's fights with our mother. And I know that this fight I could not win. Nelyo and Atar would both label my prudish shame of physical love a fault. I expressed disgust once to Atar and he said, "From where do you think you came?" Yes, I know this, but I cannot let him hold me, kiss me, with this thought in my mind. I am well aware of the pleasure my own body can give me, but it is awkward and squeamish to imagine the same capability in another, equivalent to the disgust I'd feel if asked to lick the blood from another's wound even as I am sure that I would lick it from my own.

My imagination does not easily overtake me. I knew what Nelyo did in the lords' houses when we would stay the night in Tirion. I knew that the bedroom he was given was not used; his bedclothes were as smooth in the morning as they had been upon our arrival; his nightclothes stayed folded in his satchel. I knew these things, but I kept the picture of their reason from my head. I found Nelyo once in the stable with one of Grandfather Finwë's messengers, but I erased the memory, made myself forget. Even when Nelyo was caught with Lord Laiquiwë's daughter and the explicit details of their transgression broadcast to my parents in our house—my hands clamped over Tyelkormo's ears and Nelyo huddled in a corner, face buried and shoulders shaking with what might have been tears or mirth; I'm still not sure which—I kept the image from my head. But in the way that many small stones can combine and force an avalanche, I can keep it away no longer.

I look over at Nelyo now. His gaze is intense upon mine; words wait on the thresholds of both our lips, needing only the barest provocation to spring forth. Me: I do not want to touch you. Him: You do not touch me because of your perversions, not mine.

If we fought, I would weep. I would try to hide the tears in the rain, but Nelyo would know. This trip, which I so eagerly anticipated, flattered at being included in this personal quest of my brother's, would be ruined.

I put my hands on the damp ground and ease myself towards him with the same motion as one lowers himself past the groin into icy water. I do not know what I expect—another body to squirt out from between us?—but it is the side that presses mine is the same which I have known all my life; the same ribs, the same shoulder shaped as though meant to support my head. His arm circles my shoulders and he holds me—for his comfort, not mine, but I let him—and slowly, my shivering subsides.

~oOo~

I slip deep into sleep, past the rattle of the rain and the bite of the cold air, to the place where dreams are senseless and strange. I dream that Atar and Varda are stirring a vast cauldron together, discussing the recipes for stars. I want to string them together with song, but Atar insists that the constellations must remain only in one's imagination.

I dream of a baby being handed to me, and Grandfather Finwë says, "Seven is the number of fortune." I have seven children!? Ilúvatar in Ea! The baby screeches and Grandfather Finwë looks at me with alarm, and I hear a gasp behind me of a thousand voices and realize that I am standing and have just cursed before the whole of the Noldor. Nelyo is to my right and wearing a red color that does not match very well with his hair and is laughing at my foolery. I shout at him, "Quiet, Nelyo! Leave me be!" and he says, "For the thousandth time, Macalaurë, I wish you would call me Russandol. Like everyone else."

Then there is the uncomfortable dream set in a palace bedroom starker than even Atar is willing to accept—but I am certain nonetheless that it is the palace—and Vingarië is undoing the laces on my trousers. "Bond me," she says. "Bond me, Macalaurë," when there is a knock on the door, and I fling it open and shout, "Clean your own forsaken boots, Nelyo!" but he is not holding his boots; he is offering me his right hand as though he wishes me to take it. "It is empty, Macalaurë," he says, in a voice sick with shock. "It is nothing. Not there."

On his left hand, there is a ring on every finger—beautiful jewels that only Atar could have made—but his right hand is devoid of jewelry, the wedding finger bare of even a silver ring. I am suddenly sorry for him, weeping with my sorrow. I take his face in my hands: He is pale, sepulchral and beautiful, his cheekbones so prominent that they cast shadows on his face, and I weep and weep until I think I might never stop.

"Macalaurë."

I awaken to Nelyo's hand on my shoulder, gently shaking me. My head has lolled off his shoulder in the night, and now the crown is pressed to the tree trunk behind me, bits of my hair have snared in the bark. I jump when he touches me, and the hairs are yanked from my scalp. "Ai!" I hiss. "Ulmo's fish!"

Nelyo laughs. "Ulmo's fish? That's a good one!"

The rain has stopped, and beyond the copse in which we took shelter, I can see golden light. It is mid-morning; I am surprised that Nelyo let me sleep so long. Rubbing my head, I say as much to him, standing to shake the dampness from my cloak. The seat of my pants is soaked from the wet ground. I feel as I remember from early childhood, my bottom wet and Atar displeased. I gingerly unstick my breeches from my backside, but they reattach themselves almost immediately with obstinate suction.

"Do you not know?" Nelyo says, in answer to my question. "We rode late last night, to find this shelter. We are only two hours from the sea."

Wet breeches and missing hairs forgotten, I plunge heedlessly through the underbrush, across spongy moss, and into the field beyond. Soft fronds of grass wave, renewed and made green by the rain, and I run until they reach my waist, turning my face to the east to sniff the wind.

Even the faintest scent of salt and sea enervates my legs, like I might collapse in this field if I do not soon have the roar of waves filling my ears. Laughing, Nelyo has followed me, wading through the tall grass to stand beside me. "Surely you can sense it," he says, and I nod eagerly. A brisk wind brings the air of the sea to me; last night, buried beneath the musty rain, it was imperceptible.

"There is no cause for haste," says Nelyo. "I have made you something. But first, you are soaked and in need of dry clothes."

Even my spare set of clothes was soaked last night, so Nelyo and I find a rock and lay both sets across it to dry, even my socks and underwear. Barefoot, teeth chattering, and wrapped in the blanket, I allow Nelyo to lead me to where a small campfire dances. There is toast, from the remnants of last night's bread, and potato cakes made from potatoes and onions that Nelyo sneaked into his satchel, planning to surprise me even then, before he had a truce to offer.

We are both too hungry to speak. Laurelin's light is warm and soon—with light on my skin and hot food in my belly—my shivering subsides enough that I can even enjoy the cold cups of water that Nelyo has set out for us.

"You were having wild dreams last night," he says. "You were moaning and groaning like you were being put to torment."

My brothers all tell me that I talk in my sleep. It is one trait that I have without a doubt inherited from Atar, who will uphold his end of a conversation about craft or lore in a tone so clear and direct that—when we travel together—I am often startled from sleep and convinced that a stranger has entered our tent and engaged my father in a conversation about the chemical composition of colored glass or the correct use of prepositions in the Valarin language.

Atar chatters to himself about random facts; he recites lists and formulae or speaks in languages that (maybe) only Nelyo understands. When I am told that I talk in my sleep, I am afraid of what I reveal.

I am careful now, with my words. "I dreamt of you," I say.

"Oh? I dreamt also of you. Maybe we met in our dreams."

I think of the gaunt, pale Nelyo who held his bare right hand out to me. It's empty. In the warm morning light—escalating to the heat of midday—I have to suppress a shiver.

Nelyo goes on. "I dreamt that I had two sons; you had a daughter and a son. We lived in Tirion, next to each other, and we took the children to play in the park. We were both so happy, Macalaurë, that we talked of nothing heavier than musical selections for the Autumn Feast in Tirion. Vingarië and Annawendë were there too."

Annawendë. It is the first time that her name has been mentioned since we left. It disturbs the morning with the same force as a brick plunked into a serene pool.

Nelyo smiles at me. "It was a good dream."

"In my dream," I say, "I had seven children."

"Seven! You seek to surpass even Atar!"

"The youngest was being presented to Grandfather Finwë at the naming ceremony, and I didn't know that I had so many, so I cursed in my surprise, and you laughed at me, and I got mad at you. We kind of argued. You wanted me to call you Russandol."

Nelyo laughs and begins gathering our utensils. He douses the fire with what is left of the water and kicks dirt over the embers. His hair is a red sheet over his face.

"I am thinking about it," he says in an innocuous voice.

Distracted, I miss his meaning. "About what?" I ask.

"Of having you—everyone—call me Russandol."

He is looking at me now, appraising my reaction. With the dumb bluntness of a small child, I say, "But your name is Nelyo."

"No. My name is not Nelyo. My name is Nelyafinwë Maitimo Russandol. Nelyo is a …" he pauses, "an aberration."

I think of how my brother must have been as a very young child, his red hair just beginning to curl around his ears, his face still round and yet to take on the perfect contours for which he is known now, his chubby little limbs awkward, not yet strong. And Atar—younger than Nelyo is now!—eager in that intense way of his: His son had just begun to speak! Surely Atar had collected the necessary figures and computed the averages and knew that his son was premature in this milestone, surely of exceptional intelligence, just as he doubtlessly knew that the weight of the baby on his hip was too heavy to suggest anything but an exceptional physique buried beneath the awkward roundness of youth. I imagined the beautiful words of our language, those words that Atar loves with a force that should not be committed to something that is nothing but a glimmer in the air, in Nelyo's voice, for the first time, clunky like pebbles rattling around in his mouth. Nelyafinwë, too much to say, even now, when he is called that only in the most official of capacities, shortened to Nelyo and called that ever after by our father, who despises slang and contracted speech and began to break Carnistir of baby talk at the age of three. In my first memories of Nelyo, he was already big enough to lift me and perpetually of scraped knees that came from exploring too intensely the gardens of our home; always, he had books in his arms that Amil chided weighed more than he did and would strain his back, but I like to imagine that the memory of his first speech belongs to me, as well as to Amil and Atar, and it is one of my favorite thoughts.

I repeat, insisting: "But it is your name, Nelyo." I realize too late that, ridiculously and perhaps disrespectfully, I have used the name that he wishes to abandon.

"It has no meaning, Macalaurë." He smiles wryly. "Well, it does, of course. It means 'third.' Why would I want to be named after a number?"

"It is part of your father-name!"

"I despise my father-name. It also means nothing."

"It is indicative of your inheritance."

"An inheritance that I shall never claim." Silence. How can I argue with that? But Nelyo goes on. "When am I ever going to be king, Macalaurë? Should Grandfather Finwë see a need for abdication, even temporarily, Atar would take his place, and can you see Atar relinquishing the kingship? And who would I be to try to take it after that? It would be like an apprentice seeking to fill the place of the two greatest masters."

"You would make an excellent king, I think," I tell him.

"That is like me telling you that you would fit well as a bird. You are not a bird. Despite your fair voice, you shall never be one. And so there is no sense in calling you as though you one day will."

"Perhaps Atar and Grandfather would travel together somewhere, meaning that they both have to abdicate, and you would serve in their stead."

"No, Nolofinwë would serve, and he would not abdicate, and he would travel nowhere willingly in Atar's company."

"Nolofinwë is not the heir."

"Nolofinwë is a high prince." I am startled by the abruptness of Nelyo's words. This is evolving into an argument. "I am not."

"He is Grandfather's second son! He is not his heir. That is your right."

"He is the eldest son of the rightful King and Queen of the Noldor. He could make a claim on my place."

My heart leaps. "Surely not," I say.

"It is a question that has been asked."

"By whom?"

"By members of the court." He sees the alarm in my eyes and quickly qualifies: "They do not intend to take Atar's or my place from us. It is out of curiosity alone that the issue is raised. It is not a question that our system was designed to answer. We operate of the contingency of having only one spouse. Remarriage and children by two spouses were not factors when our system of inheritance was contrived. It was assumed that the high prince would take the throne only after the abdication of both the king and the queen. Grandmother Míriel no longer lives to bestow that right upon Atar." Nelyo's features relax, as though hoping that mine will follow. "Macalaurë," he says; he reaches across the space between us and touches my cheek with his warm, slender fingers, "do not look so. Nolofinwë would have to contest Atar's rights, and do you honestly think that he would do that?"

I think of the sourness that exists between my father and my half-uncle. (Like how it so natural to think of him as a half-uncle while Arafinwë is an uncle or just Arafinwë.) "Do you?" I ask, not wanting to answer first.

"Of course not! Nolofinwë would accept Grandfather Finwë's wishes, and Grandfather Finwë has made it very clear that Atar is his heir."

"But if the court is discussing it—"

"The court discusses many abstract things: What happens to the spirits of Avari that refuse Námo's call? Do Orcs go to Mandos? All kinds of things. There are no concrete answers to those things, but they like to banter about them, for sport almost. Our people were given minds capable of great things, and we like to use them on questions that defy an easy answer. It is like stretching in the morning: It feels good, like you're more alive than before."

Slowly, I am reassured. Nelyo's words and manner placate me in the same manner that I have seen horsemasters calm a frightened steed. A practiced diplomat, I think. A true king.

"Perhaps," Nelyo adds, his voice gentle now, convincing even me, "even if Atar were to also abdicate, the throne would go to me. It would be a more difficult decision, though, whether to skip Nolofinwë."

"It would be Atar's wishes as king, don't you think?"

"Perhaps. Or maybe Nolofinwë or I would simply stand aside for the other."

I sense a subtext in Nelyo's words, worming like a snake beneath the water. He should know better than to try such tricks on me, his closest brother, perhaps the person who knows him best of anyone in Arda. I can read him clearer than Tengwar on a page. "Would you stand aside for Nolofinwë, Nelyo?"

His eyes are bright on mine, glints of light on the water. "I do not know, Macalaurë." He knows. He knows, but he doesn't want to say. He adds, in a firm voice that threatens to meander into wistfulness, "I would meet with him for sure. I would like to see peace restored between our houses."

An impossible dilemma, I think.

~oOo~

Later, as we ride, it occurs to me that we have skipped from the original topic of Nelyo's name, and so I ask, "Do you wish me to call you Russandol then?"

Russandol is an epessë given to him just after birth by our Grandfather Mahtan; Nelyo claims to have never known a time when it was not part of his name. The Tirion-family mostly calls him Russandol, except Findekáno, who calls him Maitimo. Nelyo regards me carefully, perhaps wondering why I am so concerned. "I just wish to call you properly," I explain. "Your own brother should not call you by a name you disfavor."

"It is not that I disfavor Nelyo," he says and stops, as though he does not think it is a subject I will comprehend. He sighs. "Call me as you always have. Call me Nelyo. If I am going to abandon my father-name, then I think Atar should be the first to know."

~oOo~

(I do not know, of course, that the discussion of Nelyo's name will not resurface for many years. But yet it is there, a shadow beneath my dreams, a whisper upon the breeze, and an ache in the marrow of my bones. I know. The discussion of Nelyo's name will slip—as trivialities have a way of doing, in the wake of love, engagements, feuds—from my mind. And my tongue, by then, so used to twisting the familiar syllables of my beloved brother's name, will be loath to change its habits, and I will call him Nelyo in offhand moments for the rest of our lives. Indeed, on the last day we spend together, in a land far from Aman and in a language not the Quenya of which Nelyafinwë is composed, I will call him Nelyo. But by then, for many reasons, he will no longer notice.)

~oOo~

The scent of the sea grows so heavy in the air that it nearly has a weight to it; it is like a blanket being wrapped around my head, and when I stick out my tongue, I imagine that I can lick the air and taste salt upon it. Nelyo and I hasten our mounts without realizing it, and they heed us eagerly, perhaps wishing to plunge their tired legs into the soothing washes of the sea.

We have visited the seaside at points along the coast from Alqualondë to the northern parallels shared with Formenos and Osto-Ehtelë. We are Noldor; we have no ties to the sea, no reason to be drawn to it, but we love it nonetheless. There is a primitive joy in plunging one's body into water, in imagining that were one to swim straight out, the next time one's feet happened upon land, it would be on the Outer Lands, where the light of Valinor cannot reach. It is a thought both romantic and scary to imagine an obsidian sky crusted with stars whose light is dampened by nothing more substantial than the campfires and lanterns of the cousins our people left behind. (And, sometimes, brothers, sisters, parents … wives, even.) It is comforting almost to imagine that as surely as I stand waist-deep in water, someone across the powerful belt of ocean stands also, looking back at me. Do we share blood, perhaps? It is possible. Grandfather Finwë is Unbegotten, but Grandmother Míriel and Amil's parents are of later generations and doubtlessly left someone behind. Few are the families that did not.

Even now, approaching adulthood, I have not broken myself of the childhood urge to stand at the edge of the sea on the tips of my toes, my neck craning until it hurts, stretching, staring, wondering if the shadow on the horizon is the Outer Lands, wondering if the whisper of a song I hear beneath the waves is the voice of the one who stands opposite me.

Of course, I know now that it is not. I asked Atar once about the line on the horizon and he gave me an unsatisfactory explanation about tricks of light and the effects of colors upon one another—perceptive anomalies, he called them—but I closed my ears to him, not wanting to have my fantasies shattered by his cold logic, and when I hear the song of the sea, I sing back.

The trees are growing sparse and bare, constantly battered as they are by the salty wind, and soon we are picking our way through wetlands, our desires thwarted my a maze of creeks and canals. Towering reeds tickle any exposed flesh; fat green flies torment the horses. Nelyo slaps one off his neck, wincing and leaving a smear of blood that matches in color the tendril of hair stuck to his neck by the humidity. "Elven blood tastes better than horse-blood, don't you know?" I tease. "Sweeter, some say, like sugar water."

"Macalaurë, have you been conspiring with Orcs?" Nelyo retorts. "Perhaps your scary stories are not your own imaginings after all." He smirks at me, challenging me in the same manner that young males coming of age will ride at a full gallop towards each other and see who draws to the side first, only this challenge is one of emotional and intellectual fortitude. Can you handle the thought of blood-drinking? He asks this with his eyes, bright and brave. I can.

I can too. Tyelkormo slept with Atar for a month after I told him that if he came into my music room unbidden one more time, I would carry him to the north, to the Orcs, who would drink his blood with their supper. (And I was subsequently appointed to both scrubbing the floors of the forge and laundering the newborn Carnistir's soiled diapers for many months after.) I laugh, trying to sound dark—which is hard with a voice like mine—and say, "Nay, it is not Elven blood that is revered as sweet, dear brother, but Elven flesh, which is said to resemble in tenderness that of a newborn fawn."

Nelyo plays along and agrees. "Broiled is best, I hear."

"No, raw. It is the blood that seasons it. Elven blood is salty and yet sweet." A fly lands on the inside of my wrist; bites. I swat it, leaving a splash of my own blood on the inside of my wrist, and lift the tender, swollen flesh to my lips, licking. "Mmm. Salty."

In reality, it tastes of metal and makes me think of Atar, of his forge, of the air bitter with the taste and smell of copper.

Nelyo reins his horse close to mine, leans across the space between us, and brushes his thumb to my lips. "You missed a bit," he says, putting his thumb in his mouth and sucking it with an intense ferocity reserved for the finest delicacies, his silver eyes fixed upon my face as he does.

My stomach quivers.

"Yes, but better than that," I say, quickly, loudly, to cover my discomfort, "are fingers, removed from the living and eaten under their witness, seasoned not only with blood but fear."

"Like lemon," he says. "Acidic. So I hear."

Images flicker through my mind; I hear a whisper of words read once in Atar's study, from his secret notes, and I have to steel my body to keep from shivering. Those words are not things I wish to imagine, and yet I must. Memory cannot be denied, and Elven memory is exceptional, when it wants to be.

I need to reply because Nelyo is smiling, thinking he has won. I pretend to concentrate on navigating a small creek to earn myself more time (in reality, my old nag is more than adept at doing such things for herself) while my mind listens the whispers of words I wish long forgotten.

"Acid," I say at last, recalling a tale that gave me nightmares—and no wonder!—for I prize my voice above all else, "is part of the truest delicacy, yes, but it is not fingers taken from the living. That is trivial." I wave my own fingers at him, acting, much in the same way that I do when we perform our songs together, when I swagger as an adventurer or a woman or a Vala, more comfortable in another's body than in my own. "Acid goes in the throat, for it destroys the voice and allows the victims to be eaten alive, without the annoyance of their constant screaming." I roll my eyes; flip my head, as though this is something I believe, when really, I feel a bit sick at the thought.

And when I look back at Nelyo, he is very pale.

I think of the dream: his face, as white as parchment, and his hand, offered to me. It is empty.

"Where did you hear that?" he snaps, no longer playing. His hair is very red next to his face, blood on white sheets. I shiver despite the warmth of the day.

"Where did you hear that tale?" Nelyo insists, frantic, disrupting my thoughts, which have strayed into another dream, one from long ago.

"I read it, I'm sure, in one of Atar's books," I say uneasily.

"It is true, Macalaurë. It is not funny."

"They are all true, Nelyo. None of them are funny."

We consider each other for a long moment. Our horses are moving on without us, following the scent of the sea. A bit of color has returned to Nelyo's face, to his cheeks, an angry flush that chastises me for taking the game too far. But I did not mean to. How was I to know that this tale would affect him so? We say so many awful things to each other when we're alone, curses and tales that we would utter in the presence of no other, indulging that visceral thrill of danger that we left behind in the Outer Lands … how was I to know that this time, it was too far?

But Nelyo's logic prevails over his emotions—a trait that he does not get from our father, for certain—and I see the realization coming into his face: The angry flush drains; his normal color returns. "We should not talk that way, Macalaurë. It dishonors the dead." There is a tremor in his voice, like he has narrowly escaped some awful fate and is only now pondering it.

"I know, Nelyo," I say.

"We should keep our game to cursing, I think," he says.

"I agree."

"Tail of Yavanna," he says. It is a forced attempt at banishing the awkward air between us, but I play along anyway. "Foul winds of Manwë," I echo.

We have picked our way through the worst of the wetlands; the land is falling away in front of us, the horizon empty. I can hear the soughing of the sea. In a moment, it will be a sparkling ribbon before us, growing until it fills half of our sky.

Nelyo heels his horse, galloping towards the sound of the sea. "Salt of Ulmo!"

I follow him, laughing. "Vána's flower!"

"Rock of Aulë!"

And there it is, a thousand gemstones tossed across wavering silk, reaching for the horizon.

~oOo~

We are both laughing with the senselessness of children when our horses' hooves first plunge into the sand and we gallop soundlessly into the surf. The wind off of the sea whips my hair back from my face, sticking out from the back of my head, stiff and ragged as a bit of driftwood. Sand sprays our legs, Nelyo dismounts while cantering and the weight of his heavy Noldorin riding boots into the insubstantial softness of the sand topples him onto his backside with a whoop of laughter.

I join him, and our horses move on without us, stopping only when the surf sprays their knees. Nelyo is sitting in the sand, unlacing his boots, his clothes already liberally coated with sand. I follow his lead, tossing my boots aside and racing barefoot beside him to meet the sea where it laps the shore.

The wet sand is so cold that my feet hurt upon touching it; nothing prepares me for the frigidity of the water, so cold that it nearly burns and makes me yelp with surprised pain and backpedal until I fall, my clothes covered in sand now too. Nelyo laughs at me and stands ankle-deep in the water that can't be any kinder to his flesh than it is to mine, but Nelyo has always borne pain better than I.

I recline on the dry sand that has been warmed by Laurelin's light and watch Nelyo wade out to where our horses stand, waves breaking against their skinny legs and spraying the good tack; it would anger Atar if it was ruined. Nelyo doesn't even roll his breeches off of his legs and he steps high—like a gangly shorebird—until he can stretch and catch my mare by her reins. To his stallion, he whistles, and the horse reluctantly follows.

We remove their tack and our satchels from their backs and turn them free to wander the beach and mouth at shore grass. Nelyo cautions me to wrap my harp in my dry tunic lest the sea air spoil the wood, and I do as I am advised. We work quickly, for we did not come to the sea to execute domestic chores all afternoon. I make sure to tuck my tunic carefully around my harp and leave it at adequately high ground; when I look up, Nelyo is dashing again for the sea, tearing his tunic over his head and letting the brisk breeze carry it, billowing, back to the dunes.

I am prepared for the aching cold of the sand and even manage to steel myself against the lap of water against my feet, although I am grateful when the sea washes back and leaves me again to Laurelin's mercy. I look at the tops of my feet, whiter than the sand beneath them, slender and delicate, not nearly as calloused as Nelyo's, who spends much more time in boots than I do. I wiggle my toes and they stiffly oblige. They would rather I return them to the warm, dry sand, but Nelyo is in up to his waist now—the waves breaking as high as his bare chest even—and my pride makes me grit my teeth against my discomfort. Rather I would be in Alqualondë, where the seas are as warm as baths.

How anything can live in so cold of water is beyond my comprehension, but the shore is dotted with shells—not delicately iridescent and of every hue of the prism, like those in Alqualondë—pale, sturdy shells whose colors rather remind me of paints diluted with much water. I stoop and dig my fingers through the sand—mercilessly cold!—and coquina clams wiggle in their wake, burying themselves back in the sand with their noses. In Alqualondë, these tiny beasts might have chipped their shells from a rainbow; here, they are all blue-gray. Like the Noldor, I think.

Something seizes me around my waist, and before I can holler, I am slung over Nelyo's shoulder. "Come now, wee Rosebud of Vána," he says, and he is marching with me out to sea; the waves are spraying my down-turned face. I have only a moment to relish the warmth on the bottoms of my feet before I realize his intentions and begin to wriggle desperately, begging him to let me go in a voice that is muted by the crush of his shoulder in my midsection. "The water feels good, once you get used to it," he tells me, and a wave splashes his waist and I taste saltwater on my lips.

"I do not want to get used to it!" I protest, but at that moment, I twist and the stiff band that was his arm around my waist loosens, and gravity draws me headfirst towards the sea. I hear myself screaming in childish hysterics, "No no no no no!" and I am reminded of the time that Tyelkormo committed some indignity against Atar, and Atar ordered him to his room to await his punishment, but Tyelkormo—perhaps mistakenly thinking that if he avoided his room he could avoid also the punishment—latched onto the doorframe like a barnacle and it took Nelyo and Atar both to pry his little fingers away (he held so tightly that his palms were bruised later), and he was carried by Nelyo, screaming like this: "No no no no no!"

I have a fraction of a second to contemplate my hair swirling with the kelp on top of the foaming gray water before the crown of my head introduces my body to the agony of cold, and I plunge into the water. Water fills my mouth, still open and screaming, and burns my nose. It is nearly silent undersea: The only sounds are the crunching susurrations of the waves battering the shore and, beneath that, my frantic heartbeat roaring in my ears. I plot my body's slide into the water by pain. Once, sparring with Atar, the movement of a deer in the forest distracted me, and I turned and his sword met the side of my face with a slap that reminds me of the feeling of the water now: a sting of pain followed by a blaze of burning numbness. But Atar's sword hurt only my cheek and this delivers my whole body into pain. My head thumps on the soft bottom, disturbing a plume of sand. I hear a muted splash as the last of my body—my legs—joins the rest of me in the water, and I am on my knees, pushing for the surface. My face breaks from the cold and into the light, my mouth is opened and gasping, my eyes closed against the sting of salt, and as I breathe in—longing for warm air to fill my lungs that feel flattened and shriveled like forgotten balloons—an unexpected wave slaps my face, and I breathe only water.

For a panicked moment, I am drowning. It hurts. My chest is filled with fire; I choke, but there is no cool, soothing air to replace it and so the agony continues. My body screams for air, that essential that I have taken for granted in every moment of my life until this one; my frantic hands scramble for anything but find only water that passes uselessly through my fists. The sand beneath my feet is gone; all that meets my churning legs is yet more water.

I am suddenly aware of the dichotomy of body and spirit. They are different entities, comes the startled realization, followed by an even more terrible thought: I can die.

If my hands don't find something soon, my spirit will pull free of my body and leave it behind, an opportunistic passenger deserting a doomed vessel while there's still time. I realize suddenly the pain that this will cause: It will be the last thing I'll feel, the unbelievable agony of my spirit being torn from my body. Námo does not keep Elves so long in his halls so that they may atone for the deeds of their lives, I realize, or find forgiveness in their hearts for those who still live, but to cure them of the fear of the pain of death. For who would venture again into the world of the living, knowing that such pain is possible?

Then Nelyo is hauling me to my feet, sputtering; he is whacking my back, bringing the water up from my chest; it is pouring from my mouth and nose in hot streams. I swipe at tendrils of snot, trying to both gasp air through my mouth and dispel the burning water in my nose. "Why did you wiggle so hard?" Nelyo accuses in a guilty voice. "I wouldn't have let you go." I do not believe him and so punch in the direction of what I think is his stomach, still doubled over and gagging on seawater. My knuckles graze something that feels like flesh, but it does him no harm; he catches my hand and pulls me straighter before a high-leaping wave slaps my face. My hair is a mat over my face, but I like it that way. He cannot see that I am crying. He pushes my hair aside, but I fight his hands, grumbling at him in syllables whose meaning even I do not know, and so he abandons this pursuit to seize me and hold me close, while we both stand shivering.

"I am sorry," he says. Damn him, he's determined to get the hair from my face; he is trying again, swiping it aside with annoying, persistent hands. But if he notices my tears, then he says nothing. "Macalaurë, Macalaurë, I'm so sorry."

I hear a voice and realize it is mine. There are obscenities pouring from my lips that would astound even Atar, and they are all being aimed at Nelyo. He is shaking harder than me even—although he is dry to his shoulders, only the tips of his perfect red hair sodden by seawater—and I wonder how he could be so cold until I realize that he is shaking with laughter.

Then it hits me too: It is like racing with a bladder full to bursting to make it to a lavatory on time—stumbling, bumping into things and people in one's haste—and once the need is relieved, one can appreciate how silly he must have looked during that flight that now seems too melodramatic to be anything but contrived. When the waves aren't surging, the water reaches only to the middle of my thighs. I imagine how stupid I would have looked when Nelyo explained how I drowned in three feet of water.

And so laughter burbles past my lips, and it relieves Nelyo of having to hide his, and we laugh together—uproariously—being buffeted by waves strong enough to make us sway like redwoods in a storm. If my body is still cold, I do not feel it. My heart is pounding with glee, grateful to still be up to such a mundane task as pushing blood through my body, just as a castaway left long without food will appreciate even moldy bread. And to have the arms of my brother around me—my laughter mixing with his to make the most beautiful of music—is akin to inviting the same castaway to dine at the King's feast, where instead of dying of starvation, he might fear dying of gluttonous joy instead.

~oOo~ 

We play in the water like two young children until the Mingling of the Lights, splashing and wrestling with each other, screaming freely with laughter for, here, no one will hear us.

When at last we stumble onto the sand, it is by the delicate, mingled light of evening. The mingled light of the Trees has the power to placate even the most passionate of tempers, and Nelyo and I lie subdued on the sand for almost the whole of it, uncaring about our wet clothes and hair tacky with seawater.

My clothes were soaked by my unexpected dunk into the sea, and although I removed my tunic soon after, the humid air by the seaside is not conducive to drying, and so Nelyo gives me his clean, dry tunic to wear instead, setting out over the dunes to retrieve the one he let the wind catch before. It is much too large for me—I have to roll it off my wrists to use my hands unhindered—and it smells of Nelyo. I have always thought that Nelyo smells like the light on a spring day.

My stomach twists with hunger, and I am grateful for the provisions—simple though they are—that Nelyo has brought from the town. When he returns, scratchy-sandy tunic in hand, I have already collected a pile of driftwood and coaxed a fire from it, and I am sautéing the fresh vegetables he brought from the town in what remains of the butter.

We eat like curs, straight from the pans in which we cooked, passing them between us and sharing also a bottle of wine. When the food is gone and most the bottle drained, Nelyo pauses, the muscles in his face and neck stiff, as though he is trying not to vomit, and I asked worriedly—sure that he's eaten too much, too fast—"Are you ill?" but he belches, a rolling, stinking eruption from the bottom of his gut, turning to grin at me while I holler and fan the air around my face with frantic futility. "Disgusting, Nelyo!"

"Better than if I saved it for later," he tells me. He lifts the wine bottle, but it is empty. Unceremoniously popping the cork on the second, he guzzles from it, wipes his lips with the backs of his fingers, and shoves the bottle in my direction. All I want is something that will get me blind-drunk. I hold the bottle for a long moment, pondering it in the firelight. The wine is sweet, deceptive, like fruit punch, so thick that the alcohol is barely detectable until I feel my head lurch as though still borne adrift on the waves. I decide to join him in his blindness, and I swig from the bottle still warm from his lips.

"This is why the Eldar came to Valinor, you know, Maca—Maca—," he stumbles over my name a few times before sufficing to call me, "Cáno. It was not to see the light; it is because they couldn't be held accountable for their manners when the Valar weren't around." He laughs. "People made whiskey before wine, to get drunk, to feel good, to forget. They didn't give a hair for 'complementing a meal' or the other muck the Valar tell us about wine. They just wanted to forget how hopeless it was to sit at the end of the day, like this, beneath the big sky, next to the big sea, and wonder, 'What am I going to do with myself for the rest of eternity? How am I going to equal this?' " He thrust his palm in the direction of the sea. "When you're drunk, you don't care about your insignificance. I don't care."

If Nelyo is insignificant, then what am I? His eyes glow like fire in the silver light of evening; he is beautiful. He is also the King's heir, and even if he never holds the kingship, then he holds the power to change history, and that is something that I will never possess.

"You are the heir—" I begin, but inhibitions gone, Nelyo interrupts me with a rudeness that would usually shock him.

"I am held thrall to the word. That is all it is, a word. It yokes me to a destiny I'm not sure I want." He drinks more wine. "Should I bring a child into this world, I don't know that I want him to bear this burden. Maybe I'll give him to you to raise, Macalaurë."

"But if you have no heir, then I'm your heir," I mumble.

If he hears me, he doesn't reply. "It is a word, Macalaurë," he rages. "A bleeding word! Atar studies language; shouldn't he know its insignificance? Why does he care so much that a word belongs to him? That the label be transfixed so firmly on his proud chest that nothing should dislodge it: 'Heir. King.' Why?"

This is rebellious, I realize, in a way that I have never heard Nelyo speak, especially of our father. He will mutter in assent to Atar's claims that we owe no loyalty to the Valar; he will speak of independence and freedom, but to speak against Atar? But perhaps it is Atar's own doing: After all, he culled rebellion in us, his sons; should he fancy himself immune to it in his own turn?

"Our grandfather's power is not in a word, Macalaurë," he continues, "but in the love people feel for him. Their love is his mandate; they crown him, not the court, not tradition. And Atar is loved too, but it is not enough for him; he is still so bleeding unhappy!"

I think of Amil, of us—his sons—of the beautiful works of his hands. "Is Atar unhappy?" I ask in a child's tiny voice.

Nelyo looks at me. His lip is trembling like he might cry. "He is making it so that I can never have both. The word and the mandate. He is making me choose!" In his anger, he seizes and handful of sand and flings it to the wind, where it is scattered into futility, blown back by the breeze off the sea and peppering my face, clinging in my hair. I close my eyes against it. "He knows that I will choose him, that I would let him hold my face beneath the water if it was what he deemed best for me. I will let him destroy me."

My mind reeling from the wine, I am not sure—even in the moments after his words have left his lips—if Nelyo has spoken in the future tense.

The alcohol has risen to my head and sloshes there, numbing my brain. Nelyo sits trembling as I fight to find a response. "Nelyo," I say at last. Even I can hear how slurred my voice is. Do I expect to construct a coherent thought? "Nelyo," I say again, "didn't you say that your hopes for the kingship are futile?"

He looks at me, and I can see facts sliding into place in his brain, behind his eyes. Coherence is returning to him, taking over where blind, drunken worries fancy themselves as foresight.

"I am sorry," he says, in as decorous a voice as he can muster. "I should not speak so."

He lies down on the sand without even a cloak or a blanket beneath him. (He will be combing the sand from his hair for weeks, I think.) "My heart has been torn," he tells me, "into many pieces. I do not know what to think any longer."

Annawendë, I think, of the girl I once a fancied a friend, damn you to Mandos.

I reach out to stroke his hair, made brittle by sand and seawater. "You are upset, Nelyo," I say, annoyed with the weakness of my words even as I slur them. "But do even the worst aches not diminish with time?"

He chuckles darkly. "When you're in great pain, Macalaurë, strange thoughts sometimes come to you. I remember the tales of the Avari who were blessed with exceptional foresight, and they would put hot irons to their flesh to inspire the images for which they were renowned. I have had strange thoughts lately, Macalaurë, although I have not asked for such abuse."

"They do not portend the future," I tell him, although I have no way of knowing that.

"Annawendë will return to me, but we will not marry, and we will bring no children into the world together. I have strange feelings. Bad feelings."

I stroke his hair, his face. "You are drunk. It is the wine speaking, not foresight."

He says no more, and I take that as a good thing. I sit in silence, stroking his hair, until I fall asleep.

~oOo~

I awaken at the Mingling of the Lights, lying on my side in the cold sand, where I must have toppled in the night. Nelyo must have thrown a blanket over my body and balled up my cloak beneath my head for a pillow because I don't remember doing it, but he is nowhere in sight, although there is a shadowy basin in the sand beside me, roughly the size and shape of Nelyo's body.

There is a sour taste in my mouth and dryness like it is lined with cotton batting. I am reminded of the time that I bit into a bone while eating fish in Alqualondë and cracked a molar in half: The feeling in my mouth when the healer spread the numbing poultice inside to cement the tooth back together, coupled with the cotton to soak up the blood, felt a lot like I feel now. But this is worse. My tongue is thick and dry, a slug stranded on the flagstones at Laurelin's zenith. The thought occurs to me that Nelyo and I never sought fresh water and I drained most of my waterskin during the humid trek through the wetlands.

I sit up; a mistake, I realize, as soon as I do it, because my brain slams into my head like the clapper inside a bell, and pain buzzes through my whole body. I groan and clutch my head, but the damage has been done, and pulses of agony are radiating through my head. My eyes are scratchy and dry, and they ache. What doesn't ache? I have been drunk and hungover many times before—Nelyo's and my frequent forays to midnight picnics have seen to that—but it has never been this bad. Or course, normally, many nights—weeks even—pass between drinking episodes that exceed my allotted glass or two of wine with supper; now, I have drank heavily for the last three nights, to the point of intoxication, with little rest or reprieve for my body, keeping pace with Nelyo, who is bigger and older than me and more accustomed to such indulgences.

There is a feeling like a painful, tight stone in my lower belly, and this is what awakened me, I realize: the urge to relieve my bladder. I stand as delicately as I can manage without setting off another burst of pain inside my skull and shuffle across the sand to a patch of beach grass sprouting from the sand dunes. I barely have time to fumble open my breeches before a scorching stream of urine begins to patter the sand. The caustic stench rises and burns my nose, and before I have even finished peeing, I am retching too, although there is little left in my stomach to vomit, and it is mostly bile scalding the back of my throat. The sight of it—milky and viscous, with bits of partially-digested food suspended in it—makes me retch harder, and hot tears spring from my eyes and my head feels as though it is being sawed in half.

Returning to our "campsite"—if the messy collection of blankets and cloaks and charred remains of a fire can be called that—I fumble for my waterskin and rinse my mouth with the remaining mouthful of fresh water in it, determined to banish the taste of vomit or risk becoming sick again. I wish for Nelyo, Amil, Atar: anybody older and wiser who knows how to blend a concoction for ridding oneself of hangovers, who can administer a cup of warm, soothing tea to quell my nausea, who will hold my aching head in his or her lap and stroke my hair and flatter me into thinking that I am somehow not to blame for my misery.

At least it is the Mingling of the Lights and I do not have to fear having my aching brain skewered by midday light for some hours now. It is also low tide, and the soughing of the waves is gentle and soothing in its persistent rhythm, reminiscent of being small enough to be cradled in Amil's arms—and the vestigial comfort of her heartbeat—being rocked to sleep at night while Nelyo did his recitations for Atar.

I lie down with the blanket between my body and the cold, damp sand, trying to calm my churning stomach while balancing my head to keep it from being assaulted by the worst of the pain still rolling inside. My eyes scan the horizon—the roiling, green-gray sea—and come up a funny sight: Nelyo, wearing only his underwear and standing thigh-deep in the water, wielding a spear made from a stick with an arrowhead lashed to the end.

I laugh and regret it because it is followed by a bile-flavored burp that threatens to turn into another fit of retching. Nelyo plunges his spear into the water and lifts it with a fish wriggling at the end. He must be better at catching fish than he thought because there is a line with four of them draped over his shoulder. My stomach is empty and sore, but the thought of eating disgusts me, especially eating fish. Most Noldor do not even eat fish; living inland, as we do, the opportunity rarely presents itself. But Atar, of course, is friends with many of the Teleri, including those of the Telerin court—being as he remains instrumental in building their Havens—and we were raised knowing how to ignore the stink of seafood long enough to find pleasure in its taste.

Nelyo is not alone in his pursuit: Screeching shorebirds dip low over the water, rising with silvery fish squirming in their beaks, their raucous shrieks grating against my eardrums that feel like they're flayed and raw. I wrap my head in my cloak and pray for an end to my agony.

I must have fallen asleep because when I am next aware, Nelyo is crouching beside a low fire, frying fish in a pan. He has put on his sandy breeches but is still shirtless, his hair in a long, damp twist down his back. I feel my own in a similar tangle and loathe to the think of the pain that will come when I finally decide to comb and wash it. I sit up, careful of my head, but my hangover, though still present, has diminished, and the ache that follows my reluctant movement never fully blossoms into agony.

"Macalaurë." Nelyo smiles at me. "You look rough."

I can only imagine, with my hair in a tangle down my back and my eyes gritty, how I must look. "I feel like I'm dying," I mutter to him, and he passes me a mug of a murky brown liquid.

"Drink this," he instructs.

One sniff of it burns my nose and nausea threatens to erupt again. Gagging and shaking my head as gently as I can without feeling as though my brain is going to leak out of my ears, I shove it back in his direction. "I can't," I sputter.

"It smells terrible—and tastes worse—but it will help you, I swear," he says, and he sets aside his pans and utensils to put an arm around my shoulder, hold my nose, and tip my head back. "Close your eyes," he instructs, "and swallow as fast as you can. Try not to taste it."

He pours the drink down my throat, and I try to do as I'm told, but taste of it fills my mouth, and I fight to free myself of him, but he is much stronger than me and won't let go. When he is finished, he tosses the mug into the sand and clamps a hand over my mouth as though he knows that vomit will rise—trying to push back the awful taste of the drink—and when I moan in protest, he says, "Swallow it. Swallow it, Macalaurë."

I do as I am told—it is either that or drown on my own bile, and at last, he releases me. My head is pounding, my throat burns, my ears feel as though Atar has taken his engraving tools to them, and now, a burning pool of some unknown concoction boils in my stomach, but as I open my mouth to complain to Nelyo, I feel all of that rise and dissipate into the air, like sweat rising off of my body.

I must have looked incredulous because Nelyo laughs. "How do you think I managed to get into that cold water first thing in the morning?" he asks, picking up his pan of fish—which is quickly beginning to smell delicious—and holding it again over the small fire.

"What was it?" I ask, and Nelyo says, "It is best that you don't know. It is a remedy that Atar taught me the first time I came home sick from drink—after letting me linger in agony for a few hours to teach me a lesson, that is. But even Atar is not without pity."

Hangover gone, I am suddenly ravenous and can barely wait for Nelyo to scrape my pieces of fish onto my plate before beginning to eat. He has also brought fresh water and made bitter coffee that startles me fully into wakefulness. We sit beside each other in companionable silence and eat, picking each last flake of fish from the bones. "Let's never go home, Nelyo," I say suddenly, startling even myself with my words.

Nelyo laughs, too quickly, nervously. "You would tire of me soon enough and wish for Amil, Atar, Vingarië and—I dare say—even our little brothers."

"Perhaps the former. I doubt the latter," I reply.

But my words seem to have reopened the conversation to the topics of the night before. "I am sorry for my words last night," Nelyo says. I look at the fish bones, although I can feel Nelyo's gaze on my face. Skilled as he is in diplomacy, he knows that one always admits wrongdoing with his eyes on the other's face. I am not so brave. "I said things that I should not have. You were right: It was the wine speaking."

I can recall little of his actual words—buried as they were in a haze of drink—but I remember his fervor, the sand flung at the air in childish insolence. "Nelyo, I—"

"I have been hurt, Macalaurë," he interrupts, not seeming to hear me, "that much is true. And I lashed out unfairly because of that hurt, much like a wounded animal put in a corner will bite even benevolent hands. I should not have said those things about Atar. He has great suffering to justify the things he has said to me in private, and it was not right of me to use those things against him." He hesitates, then goes on. "And the things he said, he did not mean. Not really. He is hurt too, Macalaurë, but neither of us desire to wish harm against those who have hurt us. He cannot curse his mother just as I cannot curse Annawendë, for we love them too much."

My mind spins at his words. What things that Atar has said? I think back to all of the times they lock themselves into Atar's laboratory under the guise of doing hazardous experiments to which our light-footed little brothers need not be subjected; their earnest conversations in the gardens. Here, I thought Atar hid his heart from everyone, except maybe Amil, but now I must wonder what confessions he has made in the presence of my brother.

He is making me choose.

I will let him destroy me.

~oOo~

For twelve days and twelve nights, we dwell by the sea. We remain until we can think on those things that cause us fear and pain and worry no longer. I remain until I can think back on Nelyo's face on that first night and forget the desperation that carved it into that of a stranger.

On the morning of the thirteenth day, I awaken from the cold, shivering, huddled beneath my blanket and my cloak, curled into the tehta-shape of Nelyo's body, but still unable to find warmth. It is early morning—earlier than I should have awakened, given the late night Nelyo and I had, singing duets around the fire—but the temperature has dropped precipitously in the night. Nelyo's arms are tight around me but it does no good. I look at his face and he is awake: "Your teeth were chattering so loudly that you woke me up," he says.

Without needing to say so, we both know that today is the day that we will return home.

"There is winter on the wind," Nelyo says later, as we sit close to our rekindled fire and sip hot coffee. "The first frost will be coming to the inland soon."

We always stay in Formenos until the first frost, returning to Tirion before the cold sets an ache in our bones. I think of our Tirion home and joy seizes me: to be able to sleep with the windows opened once more! to be able to pack my heavy cloaks at the back of my armoire! to see Vingarië again! With this thought, there is a nervous flutter in the pit of my belly, as though a tiny bird has been loosed there. I am suddenly filled too with a sudden loneliness for Grandfathers Finwë and Mahtan and Grandmother Istarnië. Even my half-uncles and aunts receive a moment of longing, though I would never say so to Atar.

Nelyo and I stand at the water's edge and bid farewell to the sea. I even kneel and put my hands into the water, as one might take an old friend's hand upon departure. I stare out over the water, at the line on the horizon. I imagine it to be the Outer Lands and shiver with gratitude to be on this side of the ocean, where places like Tirion exist for escape. There, all is cold and forbidding.

I stand and wipe my wet, salty hands on my breeches. "Farewell," I whisper.

The sea surges and clutches my ankles in its frigid grasp.

Grieve not, Macalaurë. We shall not be long parted.

I gasp and leap back to the safety of the sand.

There is a strange quality to the light when I awaken: It glitters, like someone has taken a handful of diamond dust and cast it into the air. Telperion has faded and Laurelin is still wan, but the room looks as though a thousand tiny lamps have been placed outside my window.

It is also cold, and that—not the strange light—is what awakened me. Tyelkormo has left our bed, pulling most of the covers onto the floor in the process. The heavy, down-filled quilt is balled entirely on his side of the bed, and I have snuggled into it in my sleep, perhaps mistaking it for another body to warm me. Only a thin flannel sheet remains wrapped around me, and that is because I have learned to tuck it under my body before falling asleep or chance having it also pulled away in the night.

Tyelkormo awakens early—no later than the Mingling of the Lights, usually—and I have grown accustomed to spending a few luxurious hours after his departure with the bed to myself and no worries of being kicked or elbowed if I stray too far onto his side. (Although retaliation is justified by the number of times that I have awakened, teetering on the edge of the bed while Tyelkormo presses to my back with his arm flung around me, I swallow the urge.)

Better still are the nights that he spends in Maitimo's room, but these have been rare, as we have spent nearly a month away from home, at the House of Oromë, while Maitimo went with Macalaurë to the sea. Of course, at Oromë's, Tyelkormo and I didn't have to share a bed, and sometimes I thought he snored louder there than he does at home just to spite me. Sometimes, Tyelkormo will also go to his parents' room, but Uncle Fëanáro has been bringing him back lately—Tyelkormo's lips quivering as he tries not to snivel, his face turned defiantly from his father's—tucking Tyelkormo back into bed with haste, his appearance haphazard and his dress mismatched, with tunics on backward and hair half-unbraided, and he usually forgets to greet me and hustles away after planting a quick kiss on Tyelkormo's forehead. (Perhaps he thinks I'm asleep?) On these nights, Tyelkormo's constant sniffling makes it impossible to sleep, and he mutters in my direction, vindictive things about his parents. "He is trying to make Amil pregnant," he said one night. "But I don't want another damned brother!" I feel my face burn in the dark—although I do not know the full meaning of his words—and the backward, mismatched clothes and the smell on my uncle's skin like lightning in the air made better, although still incomplete, sense.

But now, I am too cold to enjoy having the bed to myself; even when I pull the quilt around my shoulders, I shiver. In the middle of summer here, the nights became almost warm, and we stopped lighting fires at night, but Uncle Fëanáro has resumed this last week, since our return from Oromë's, although they always die by morning.

I want to go home, comes the thin, babyish thought, one of those I believed silenced when Uncle Fëanáro flung me from the cliff and buried when I faced the wolf.

I roll over, towards the window, and observe a most astounding sight, so astounding that my self-pity is forgotten, and I throw the blankets from myself and leap from the bed in alarm.

The glass on the window has changed; it has become roughened by a feathery pattern across its lower half and that is what changed the light. Instead of a single window through which Laurelin can peer, she has been granted a thousand, and there are a thousand bright facets of light like tiny crystals. Curiosity overcomes my alarm, and I go to the window, only to discover that the glass is smooth on the inside; it is the outside that has changed. Fearless—for what harm can come of something so beautiful?—I press my hand to the glass and cry out when I remove it and discover that a clear spot in the shape of my hand has been left.

The first frost—I suppose that's what this is. I have heard Uncle Fëanáro speaking of it with my aunt and my older cousins. Preparations have been made to leave: Trunks have been packed, carts have been repaired and readied, and the house and forge have been meticulously and painstakingly scrubbed. But our departure from this cold, dark city has remained contingent on this first frost which I have never seen—of which I've never even heard!—and which remained enigmatic until now, where beneath the warmth of my hand, I find it to be a frail, ephemeral thing.

Suddenly, a child's maliciousness seizes me, and I press my hands to the windows and huff the hottest air my lungs can make onto the glass, until all of the frost is destroyed and only a thin sheen of water remains. My triumph at this success, however, is undercut by a vague regret for the delicate, beautiful filigree of ice that I have so thoughtlessly destroyed and replaced with smudgy handprints.

The light through the window is normal now and gaining in intensity. I think briefly of going back to bed, but my body is infused with energy now, and I would only lie there restlessly until Maitimo came and roused me for whatever chores await me today. I suppose that we will leave tomorrow. Such was the plan: Leave after the first frost. Perhaps we would leave today if not for the fact that Uncle Fëanáro and Aunt Nerdanel stayed in the city last night to attend a feast being held by one of the lords, and they do not expect to return until the afternoon.

With that thought, I realize that the house is very quiet. I do not hear noise from my cousins' rooms, as is typical at this hour. Maitimo is usually awaking now and Macalaurë is still in the depths of slumber, sometimes talking in his sleep. Dread pinches my insides momentarily, and I am convinced that they have left and I have been forgotten. But then comes a thought, comforting and certain: Maitimo would not leave you.

Even if the others would, I have learned this summer to trust that Maitimo would not leave me.

I dress hastily, pulling a woolen tunic over my nightclothes and donning a thick pair of socks to protect my feet from the mercilessly cold stone floors outside my bedroom. I hasten to the stairs and down, wanting to call out but suppressing the urge the way that one might suppress any presumption or rudeness, and I am rewarded for it, for I hear a shout of laughter from one of the front rooms, and I hurry in that direction.

I am surprised to hear Macalaurë's voice, laughing—there is no mistaking Macalaurë's voice, for its beauty makes me shiver even to hear him utter the most innocuous of words—and a squeal that must be Tyelkormo. The sounds are coming from the sitting room, the large cozy room at the corner of the house where the normal rules for cleanliness and behavior are suspended. The furniture is comfortable enough to sleep there—and indeed I have, with my head on Maitimo's lap, his fingers twined in my hair, and my feet resting unpunished on the cushions—and there are always castaway boots and cloaks thrown over the backs of chairs and sketches, musings, and bits of song written on scraps of parchment during casual moments when inspiration is allowed to sneak into one's unsuspecting brain.

I round the corner and laughter catches in my throat at the sight: Maitimo, Macalaurë, and Vorondil are playing some kind of game with Tyelkormo: Tyelkormo has a strip of cloth tied over his eyes, and he is attempting to tag one of them, while they run around the room and catapult over furniture and away from his grasping hands. Tyelkormo moves in blindness with the same confidence as he does while sighted, leaping onto furniture and navigating obstacles with such ease that I might swear he could see them. The others are trying not to make a sound, and I can imagine Tyelkormo's sensitive ears straining to catch the faintest rustle of breath or the padding of a foot stepping from the chair to the floor. The scene is comic, to see my two eldest cousins and my uncle's senior apprentice darting around as if they were small children, using each other as shields, still in their nightclothes, laughing silently through open mouths. I have always found Vorondil a bit too stiff and serious to be comfortable around, and Macalaurë is usually too distant to pay me much heed, even during our lessons together. And Maitimo is very dignified—although warm enough in manner that I am not made uncomfortable by it—and I certainly wouldn't have imagined him throwing a shoe across the room to distract Tyelkormo away from where Vorondil is hiding behind him.

Tyelkormo moves in the direction of the shoe, leaping easily onto a low tabletop, his bare feet soundless as air, his hands grabbing at the air in front of him. I let out a sniff of laughter despite my best efforts to suppress it, and before I know what has happened, Tyelkormo's hands are on me, and he is laughing and tugging away the blindfold.

"I got you again, Maca—" He starts when his victim is revealed to be me. "Oh. It's you."

"I'm sorry, I didn't—" I begin, but Tyelkormo is already turning to Maitimo and saying, "That's not fair. He distracted me! How long has he been standing there?"

Maitimo comes over and soothes my flustered cousin with a hand to his hair. "He just got here, little one."

"Is he playing?" Tyelkormo's wide blue eyes are uncertain: Does he want to invite me to join his games? If he does, I will become his prey, but I could also be mistaken as his friend. It must pose quite the dilemma.

But Maitimo solves it easily: "No, no. It is getting late. We have much to do today before Amil and Atar get home, starting with breakfast."

Vorondil is standing stiffly, staring at a piece of parchment that has fluttered onto the floor. Macalaurë is gazing into space, his eyes sleepy. I feel suddenly guilty, for it seems that the game has ended on my account.

~oOo~

Macalaurë and Vorondil will prepare breakfast while Maitimo rouses and dresses Carnistir. First, though, he supervises Tyelkormo and me while we wash our faces and teeth and dress in clothes suitable for a day's work. He combs our hair and fastens the sides back from our faces. Most of our clothes have been moved from our armoire and into the big trunks that we use for travel. Only a few undergarments, tunics, a pair of breeches, and our boots have been left. Tyelkormo also wears the pendant that Maitimo gave him for his begetting day, but he always wears this; he sleeps in it even.

My own begetting day is only two weeks away, and we should arrive in Tirion just in time to celebrate it. I wonder if Maitimo has made me a gift? Probably not—I have only known his company this one summer, whereas Tyelkormo has known it for fifteen years. I feel a pinch of envy when I see the pendant sparkling at my cousin's throat and know that my greed is shameful. After all, I will receive many gifts from my parents and my grandparents and the lords most loyal to my father, whereas my cousins receive trinkets from their family and little more, for Uncle Fëanáro commands the loyalty of craftspeople—not lords—who haven't the means to give luxurious gifts to his many sons and so have been told to give to none. I can't help the thought, though, that comes unbidden: All of these things I would exchange for a crudely shaped artifact from my cousin's hand.

As though he senses my thoughts, Maitimo smiles in my direction. "Findekáno, would you help me with Carnistir? Tyelkormo, I'm sure Macalaurë and Vorondil could use your assistance in setting the table downstairs."

And so Tyelkormo is dismissed while I am permitted to trot at Maitimo's heels down the hall. He has been doing this lately—sending Tyelkormo away and asking me for help—especially on delicate tasks that require a measure of decorum or patience. I wonder if he notices that he does it; I wonder if he realizes that the ease of having me help him with such things (versus Tyelkormo, who tends to be loud and boorish even when he tries to be the opposite) might not be worth the conflagration that will one day ensue. I feel as though I am marooned between them, and stepping one way brings me closer to one and takes me from the other. The thought of losing Maitimo is unbearable but the thought of enduring Tyelkormo's wrath again—which has notably lessened since the incident with the wolf—is like willingly subjecting oneself to torment.

(But—maybe—I would do this for Maitimo? It is hard to say that my love for him isn't born of desperation, the way a drowning man loves a plank of wood as long as it keeps him afloat but becomes ordinary again on the seashore. But maybe I would endure torment for him.)

Carnistir gives relatively little fuss this morning, and so I am left to sit with him while Maitimo gathers his clothes. He curls in my lap and nibbles on a piece of my hair, and I stroke his hair, which is heavier than satin. I hold him in the way that I have learned this summer, to keep him from tumbling onto the floor, and watch Maitimo move around the room with rapid confidence, selecting a dark red woolen tunic and shaking the wrinkles from it, sighing when he stoops to retrieve Carnistir's boots and sees that they have been unlaced. He sits beside me on Carnistir's bed and begins re-lacing the boots; Carnistir reaches out, grabs a long tendril of Maitimo's unfettered hair, and tucks it into his mouth with mine.

Maitimo's nimble fingers thread the laces with effortless precision. To Carnistir, he says, "Who unlaced your boots?"

Carnistir answers in a small voice: "Turko."

"Why would Turko unlace your boots?"

"He likes to chew on the strings."

Maitimo sighs, and Carnistir buries his face in my shoulder. I tighten my hold on him, and Maitimo gives me a tiny smile. "You will be a good brother, Findekáno," he says, and I wonder if this is true. I have thought of it, many times, watching him: Can I mimic the love and patience that comes so effortlessly to Maitimo? I think bitterly that I have no reason to love my unborn brother. I do not know him, and he was part of the reason that I was sent away this summer. (Although the main reason was my disinterest in my studies that is hard to believe now, when I have found such enthusiasm for the letters and lore that once bored me.) I have trouble imagining that Atar and Amil will let me hold my brother like I hold Carnistir now without keeping a keen eye on me to make sure that I don't drop him.

I raise this point to Maitimo now. "What if I drop him?"

He laughs. "Small children are quite resilient, Káno. They bounce." I look at him with horror. "Knowing your cousin Tyelkormo, have you any trouble believing that his early childhood was marked by numerous falls from heights? If Tyelkormo knew the number of times that Atar wasn't attentive holding him and he wriggled out of Atar's arms …" Maitimo trails off then smiles wryly. "Possibly—not likely, but possibly—he wouldn't be so devoted."

He takes Carnistir from me and stands him on the bed, and while Carnistir is distracted, playing with the radiant stone at his throat, tucks him quickly into his clothes, then holds him tightly in his arms to comb his hair. Carnistir shrieks at this—his hair is perpetually tangled—and clamps his teeth onto Maitimo's arm, but Maitimo is not affected and does not stop until the task is finished.

"I hope my brother doesn't bite."

Maitimo laughs. "Most young Elves go through a phase when they bite, but they quickly grow out of it. It has lasted overlong in Carnistir." Whimpering, Carnistir casts his eyes upward at his brother. "You would love him despite it, Findekáno."

I wonder.

~oOo~

When we reach the kitchen, Macalaurë and Vorondil are arguing, Tyelkormo is nowhere in sight, and the kitchen is filled with a filmy gray smoke that smells of scorched bread.

"If you had been more attentive—" Vorondil is saying when he and Macalaurë catch sight of Maitimo at the same time and both begin pointing at and speaking accusingly of the other.

Maitimo grimaces and holds up his hand to silence them. "For Manwë's sake! Quiet! What has happened here?" Macalaurë and Vorondil both open their mouths and, realizing that he is inviting another deluge, he quickly adds, "Vorondil first."

Macalaurë's cheeks flush and he snaps, "Why him?"

"He is older."

"But I am your brother!"

"I am attempting to give impartial judgment, Macalaurë! Now, quiet!"

Vorondil says, "I had put extra wood in the oven to make a potato casserole, but he didn't look before putting in the bread to make toast and set fire to the whole lot of it!"

Macalaurë's pale, placid face has turned red, and he squeezes his eyes shut and screams, "Because who makes potato casserole for breakfast the day before a bleeding journey!"

Maitimo puts his hand to his forehead as though trying to banish a headache. "Macalaurë, please don't scream and don't curse in front of the children."

"I'll say whatever I damn well want—"

"Macalaurë, please—"

"—at whatever volume I damn well want—"

"Macalaurë—"

"—to whomever I damn well want!"

I have moved closer to Maitimo without realizing it, and pressing against his thigh, I can feel him trembling. Carnistir is whimpering and threatening to erupt, and before I know what has happened, Maitimo has dropped him into my arms and stormed from the kitchen. With wide eyes, Macalaurë and Vorondil watch him depart, and we all cringe when the front door slams so hard that the lamp hanging from the ceiling rattles.

And Carnistir screams.

~oOo~

It is a long moment before Macalaurë steps forward and takes his shrieking brother from me, although it does nothing to solve the situation. Carnistir screams louder. His face is a hideous shade of red; his eyes are narrowed to slits; he pounds Macalaurë's shoulders with his fists and bucks in his arms until Macalaurë has no choice but to pass him to Vorondil, who is bigger and stronger and more able to contain him.

They try to sit him in his chair at the dining room table, but he rolls onto the floor and curls into a ball like an offended potato bug. (I think of what Maitimo said about young children bouncing and might have smiled if Carnistir wasn't cultivating a headache behind my forehead.) Both Macalaurë and Vorondil stare down at him, wearing identical expressions of terrified distaste, the way one might stare at an impossible mess he's left to clean, and finally, they decide that one will walk with him while the other sets out the breakfast.

"He is your brother."

"You work for my father!"

"Yes, I am an apprentice in his forge, not his servant. And certainly not yours!"

"I cannot hold him. He is too wriggly."

Vorondil rolls his eyes and stoops to lift Carnistir. I scurry after Macalaurë, grateful for the relative silence of the kitchen.

Breakfast will be fruit salad and cold bread. I look longingly at the unbaked potato casserole Vorondil left on the counter, but no one is willing to wait for it now, not with Carnistir wailing like a madman. With a sigh, I join Macalaurë at the counter and begin slicing strawberries.

Macalaurë ponders me for a moment, then asks, "Where is Tyelkormo?"

"Maitimo sent him to help you."

He thinks for a moment. "Yes. He came here. I sent him out for a watermelon. Check the kitchen garden for me, would you?" and without waiting for an answer, "Thanks, Findekáno."

But I have no complaints: I am permitted to escape the house, to the garden, where Carnistir's shrieks are nearly inaudible. I find Tyelkormo there, crouching among the watermelons and poking an anthill with a stick.

"Tyelkormo?" I say softly. His head jerks up, and his blue eyes are surprised.

"What is it?"

Perhaps he has forgotten to be angry with me. I hope. "Macalaurë was wondering where you went."

"I went anywhere that's not in there with the two of them hollering like crazy men and—from the sound of it—Carnistir adding to it." His forehead rumples. "I heard the door slam. Where is Nelyo?"

"I don't know. He ran away." His interest has returned to the anthill. There is a trail of ants leading to a broken melon; Tyelkormo is scratching across the trail and watching the ants bumble around until they find where it picks up again. "Are you coming in?"

He laughs. "You can go back, if you want."

"Aren't you hungry?"

"I'm sitting in a melon patch, Findekáno." We consider each other. He sighs and scoots to the side. He pats the ground beside him. "Here. Sit." From his pocket, he extracts an object that he unfolds, revealing a serrated hunting knife. One by one, he turns over the watermelons until he finds one that is suitable and ripe, and he cuts into it. In a few quick strokes, he is offering me a palm full of dripping, pink fruit.

I take it. "What about Macalaurë?"

He shrugs. "Let him deal with Carnistir."

"We won't get into trouble?"

"What can Macalaurë do to us?"

He has a point there. Macalaurë cannot even contain his four-year-old brother. I take a tentative bite of the sweet fruit. Juice dribbles down my chin; my stomach is a hollow pit in the center of my gut, and this might be some of the best fruit I have ever eaten. Tyelkormo is devouring a handful too and seeing how far he can spit the seeds. I do the same, and my seeds fly almost as far as his. He turns to me with wide, alarmed eyes, and soon, we are spitting seeds and laughing, carving more hunks of fruit from the melon and eating until our bellies are stretched and sore.

Tyelkormo reclines against a watermelon and looks at me, grinning, through blue, satisfied slits of eyes. The lower half of his face is sticky with watermelon juice. "We ate almost a whole watermelon, Findekáno."

I want to laugh, but my aching belly is too sore. I groan and curl up on the ground beside him, and my early morning catches up to me then, and I fall asleep.

~oOo~

When I awaken, Tyelkormo is gone. The ground—chilled and damp from the frost that morning—has soaked my clothes, and I am shivering. My head is propped onto a watermelon, and my neck is stiff and sore. I open my eyes to appraise the light to see what time of day it is, but it is dark.

The light is gone! For a panicked moment, my heart leaps like a startled animal in my chest, then settles into a normal—albeit pounding—rhythm, and I realize that the light is not gone but blocked, by Uncle Fëanáro, who towers over me with his hands on his hips.

"No mind, Nerdanel!" he shouts. "I have found him!"

He stoops to lift me, and the light blazes in my eyes. It is afternoon! I have slept for half of the day!

My aunt appears then, rustling out of the cornstalks, still in a wispy pink gown that makes her look like a chunk of rock with a frizz of fire upon her head. I look at Uncle Fëanáro then and realize that he is dressed similarly, in dark red robes and his circlet. They had come from the feast at the lord's house and fancied me missing, I imagine, and feel a nervous guilt creep into my belly.

"Findekáno! Thank Varda!" I am seized from Uncle Fëanáro a little roughly and hugged by Aunt Nerdanel. "We thought you were lost again!"

Again. The word makes me cold with the realization that I will be presented to my parents in a week—what I have hoped to be a happy occasion, marked by an easy show of my accomplishments this summer—and Uncle Fëanáro will probably have a word with my father then about my tendency to "disappear," first with Tyelkormo and now escaping my cousin Macalaurë, who sent me out with clear orders, which I not only ignored but did so in favor of dropping off to sleep in the middle of the melon patch when there were clearly things that needed to be done for our journey tomorrow.

Perhaps sensing my feelings, Aunt Nerdanel squeezes me again and says, "We are just thankful that you're safe!" but Uncle Fëanáro is already striding towards the house.

Aunt Nerdanel carries me on her hip into the house, and rather than free me there, she takes me up the stairs to the suite she shares with Uncle Fëanáro. The door opens into their sitting room, and my cousins Macalaurë and Tyelkormo, as well as Vorondil, are already there. The door to Uncle Fëanáro's study, which is usually open and, indeed, warmer than the sitting room, is closed.

Aunt Nerdanel leaves me there with the others, regret pinching her face, and whispers something about Uncle Fëanáro wishing to have a word with me, and leaves. Tyelkormo has already taken refuge on Macalaurë's lap, and Vorondil has all the comfort of a straight-backed wooden chair—not something against which you want to cuddle—and so I go off and sit alone in the chair in the corner.

I wonder briefly about the whereabouts of my other cousins, especially Maitimo. Were he here, he would hold me and settle my nervous, quivering stomach. (Actually, Tyelkormo surely would have chosen him first, but then I could have Macalaurë, who is not as comforting but is adequate in a moment of need.) Tyelkormo's posture is slumped and sleepy, but his eyes are shrewd and resting on me, perhaps waiting to see if I will show my fear. Macalaurë and Vorondil sit stiffly, formally, as is not their wont, betraying their anxiety, but I decide that I will not. I close my eyes and imagine myself as Maitimo. I imagine that the hair that spills down my back has greater weight and gentle waves; when I touch it, I imagine that it blazes red beneath my fingers. I am tall, poised, and confident, and I sit as Maitimo would: my posture straight, shoulders proud, so easy in the stance that makes others look brittle and stiff. I do not splay my legs in an effort to look casual but keep my feet together with my hands in my lap—not clasped by lying one atop the other, with no stress whitening my knuckles—and open my eyes and smile at Tyelkormo, whose blue eyes widen then narrow with surprise.

Macalaurë and Vorondil—made friends again, apparently, by their shared plight—are talking in brisk, hushed voices about Maitimo. "I cannot imagine how he felt," says Vorondil. "I was shocked when she told me, and indeed, I miss her direly, although we shared nothing more than friendship."

"He assures me that the sea healed his spirit," says Macalaurë, "but until he knows whether she will return to him, I don't believe healing is his to be had."

"I think it was cruel what she did."

"Naturally, I agree. He is my brother. I wish him no pain."

"Did she think that he would not fall in love—" Vorondil breaks off abruptly as the door to Uncle Fëanáro's office opens. Both he and Macalaurë jerk upright—rigid in their chairs—their gazes fixed on the floor rather than looking at my uncle, who still wears his good robes and looks imposing as a result.

Uncle Fëanáro always looks imposing: He is tall, and although he lacks my grandfather's bulk, there is no doubt that beneath his skin is muscle with the strength of steel. He ripples with brilliance like light on water, moving with an ease that dazzles the eye and makes him hard to look upon. He usually wears work clothes—old tunics and breeches, often soiled and torn, and boots—and his hair is restrained in the fastest, most efficient manner. Even then, he is imposing, but it is easy to forget that he has the same authority as my father, that his birthright is that of a high prince. He laughs and plays at times with the same enthusiasm as his sons; he tells jokes that make Aunt Nerdanel scowl at him; he allows us liberties of which my father would never dream. But now, dressed in the vestments of his position, he is a different man. A high prince. I feel as I do when my grandfather stands and addresses the lords of his council: Despite having been held by him in the most languid of moments, laughing and feeling his breath whisper across my face as he kisses me, when he stands before us as our king, the weight of his authority wants to force me to my knees.

I would kneel before Uncle Fëanáro now and kiss the hands that are adorned with rings more beautiful than those upon my father's and his lords' hands in Tirion; I would beg for mercy. But I do not; I force myself to remain dignified in my pose. Like Maitimo, breathes a voice inside my head. I restrain the urge to flinch or take my eyes from his, and his glance finds mine and lingers for a long moment.

I realize that in the three months that I have lived in his house, I have never allowed my uncle's glance to catch mine for long. Despite becoming more at ease—if not completely comfortable—with my uncle, I tend to look away when he addresses me. I realize that he probably thinks this rude, but then—in the heat of his gaze—most people look away, and so he is probably accustomed to it.

Maitimo does not look away, even when Uncle Fëanáro burns with anger that makes me want to weep from fear. So I do not look away.

There are many things in Uncle Fëanáro's eyes, but what makes me want to cringe away from his stare is perhaps the deepest buried: There is a spark there, with the madness of fire, that which flutters innocuously but, with the faintest breath of wind, swells out of control. Warmth floods me: love, greater than that which I have yet known, greater than that for my parents, even. But some of it is twisted and blackened like overheated metal: That which has been destroyed by grief. That is the madness I see.

He blinks, and when his eyes open again, they are on Vorondil. "Vorondil," he says. "I would like a word with you."

Vorondil and Macalaurë exchange quick looks, but then Vorondil's head drops and he obediently obliges, rising awkwardly from his chair, head lowered and hands clasped in front of him in an attempt at fearlessness betrayed by his whitened knuckles and the tendons that stand out like wires on his arms.

The door closes behind them with a bang.

We wait, but the voices never rise above mutters, and I see Macalaurë's face slowly sags into relief. (When Uncle Fëanáro is angry, Aunt Nerdanel told me once, people in Tirion hear his voice and shiver.)

Vorondil emerges a few minutes later, sneaking a weak smile in Macalaurë's direction, and Macalaurë goes in, emerges, and then I am left alone while Uncle Fëanáro speaks with Tyelkormo in private. Even without the benefit of witnesses, I maintain my poise, even though my shoulders ache with the effort. Is this how Maitimo feels all the time, I wonder? Perhaps he has grown accustomed, or maybe it is so natural to him that he does not feel pain for the constant effort to maintain it, like one who is double-jointed doesn't hurt to bend his body in painful ways.

Tyelkormo emerges and scurries from the room without looking at me, and I am standing and answering Uncle Fëanáro's invitation to enter his study.

I have been here before, brought by Maitimo to recite my lessons for my uncle. It is a place that gives an appearance of being haphazard at first, until one looks closer and realizes that order is maintained amidst the chaos: The piles of papers and books are all organized and part of ongoing projects; the beginnings of craft scattered about are arranged by project, with all the pieces contained so that they do not become lost. On the walls are portraits of each of my cousins—meticulous oil paintings—in which their eyes are as bright as diamonds. I touched one once, while left alone here for an instance—Macalaurë's cheek—and was startled to find that it was not warm.

On Uncle Fëanáro's desk is a new sculpture of my aunt, done in rose quartz, lying back with her hair spilled across a base resembling a bed, the body hastily draped with a strip of silk. My own abilities in sculpting have improved immensely, but the sight of such perfection—it is enough to make even my aunt look beautiful—makes my fingers feel thick and clumsy, like sausages. I tend to stammer here on words that flow easily from my tongue when it is only Maitimo listening. I will not stammer today.

"Findekáno, please sit," says Uncle Fëanáro with surprising graciousness, gesturing to a chair while he sits behind his desk. I do so, making my shoulders touch the back of the chair, resisting the urge to sit—stiff and scared—teetering on the very edge. I close my eyes and envision Maitimo: If only I was that beautiful, this would be easy.

Uncle Fëanáro still wears his circlet upon his head, and it draws my eyes upward, to the eight-pointed star with the fire opal at its center. As though he feels my gaze resting there, he reaches up and removes it, sitting it at the center of his desk. Removing it has pulled tendrils from his braids, and he looks more like the uncle to whom I am accustomed, but I find that I cannot relax. Despite my demeanor, my heart is pattering in my chest, frantic as a frightened animal.

"Findekáno," he says, his tone even, his hands loosely folded on his desk, "you are aware that your aunt and I had an event of some importance to attend last night with Lord Verkaturo and his family." I nod but he does not appear to see it. "I was clear in my instructions that all of you—meaning my sons, my remaining apprentice, and you, Findekáno—were to control yourselves in my absence and complete all of the tasks on the list that I left with Maitimo. Was I unclear in that expectation?"

"No, Uncle," I say, fighting to keep the tremor from my voice.

"Imagine my surprise, then, to arrive this afternoon to find that two of my sons and my brother-son have gone missing, Carnistir is in a state, and none of the tasks to which I appointed you have been done. Would you tell me why that was, Findekáno?"

His eyes meet mine again, twin blazes set in a face that is otherwise placid, and I force myself to look and to collect my speech, but the words are already pouring forth from me: I am speaking of Vorondil and Macalaurë and the burnt bread, of Maitimo attempting to mediate their argument and storming out himself, of Carnistir erupting in screams, and of being sent to the watermelon patch to retrieve Tyelkormo. There, I stop, more from lack of air than anything else, and draw gasping breaths into my lungs.

"Given Macalaurë's instructions, why then did you not return?"

"Because it was Macalaurë."

The words are out, and I regret them in that instant, for that is what skipped through my mind but which I did not intend to voice. Uncle Fëanáro's eyebrows have popped up with curiosity.

"Are you implying, then, that Macalaurë has no authority over you?"

My mouth flaps like a fish left out of water. How do I answer that? Macalaurë projects no air of authority—not when compared to his father or Maitimo or even Vorondil—and it is hard to think of him as being much different than Tyelkormo, Carnistir, and me. But I cannot tell that to his father—who has always been clear that Macalaurë is to be obeyed in Maitimo's absence—because then I would be confessing to disobedience not only to Macalaurë but to Uncle Fëanáro as well, and I do not want to imagine the repercussions of that.

"I have always told you and Tyelkormo and Carnistir that, in the absence of my eldest son, Macalaurë is to be obeyed as you would obey me. If he asked you to return, Findekáno, you should have done so, not lingered in the garden, making yourself sick on watermelon to avoid the responsibility of caring for your younger cousin."

I realize that my words have revealed more than what I intended, and despite my proud determination, my head drops in shame.

At the sight of my shoes on the floor, aligned so nicely next to each other in a fruitless imitation of Maitimo, my head snaps up again. I meet my uncle's eyes, although they seem to sear my spirit with their intensity. His face is eager, awaiting my response. "Uncle Fëanáro," I say carefully, keeping my voice even and collected, "I admit blame to all which you have laid upon me, and I am sorry for it. The wrongdoing was mine and no other's. I will gladly do what you bid as recompense."

Uncle Fëanáro's expression dissolves into a smirk that I can see wants to break into something much more. His eyes glisten with laughter. "Thank you, Findekáno, and you are forgiven. There is no punishment, and this day shall never be mentioned again. I ask only that you go and help your cousins and Vorondil in the forge, and I will call you for supper in two hours."

With relief rushing through my veins, I do not wait a second longer to race for the door and do as I am told.

~oOo~

I report to the forge and am given rags and solvents and instructed by Macalaurë to follow my cousin Tyelkormo and help with the cleaning. I am alarmed by Maitimo's absence—is he still missing?—but dare not mention it. I feel as though I have been given a great gift, and drawing attention to it might cause it to be stolen.

The three others have all been punished, and they discuss their sentences in low, indignant voices. No one asks me what my sentence was, and I wonder why I was spared. Tyelkormo will spend his forge-time for the next two weeks cleaning rather than having lessons. (He appears more distraught by the idea of punishment than the actual sentence.) Vorondil will spend those same two weeks doing ten pages of copying from books for Uncle Fëanáro each day. Macalaurë's punishment is met with the most indignation and is perhaps the worst: For showing disrespect to Maitimo and Vorondil both, he will not be permitted to travel from home for two weeks after our return—except to attend events with his family—and will not be permitted visitors either. He swipes angrily at his cheeks while he works, leaving damp smears of soot, and keeps his face hidden from us: I remember mention of a girl named Vingarië and understand this to be the reason.

After two hours, as promised, Aunt Nerdanel appears with word from my uncle that supper is ready. The meal is simple but good: leftover salted venison in gravy, sweet creamed corn, a spicy rice dish, and thick, crusty bread. Uncle Fëanáro has replaced his grand robes and circlet with his usual tunic, breeches, and boots. His only adornment is his marriage ring and the luminous stone that matches the one at Maitimo's throat.

I am surprised when Maitimo enters the room and takes his seat without a word. Like his father, he is dressed in clothes suitable for working, and his conversation with Macalaurë reveals that he has been readying the horses for tomorrow's journey. So we are still leaving tomorrow. A realization occurs to me that this might be the last time that I will eat at this table for many years. Surely, once I am an adult, I can journey when I want to Formenos, and my uncle will welcome me to his table again, but I feel a pang of regret nonetheless. Maitimo will continue tutoring me twice per week over the autumn and winter, but we may never sit like this again, in casual silence, our bodies wearied and made content by labor. He smiles at me when no one else is looking, and after supper, he has a word with his father, and I am told to go with him to the stables.

He is checking each horse's shoes and replacing those lost with new. I have never seen my cousin do this kind of work before, and it surprises me, but I suppose that it is a matter of necessity to learn to shoe one's own horses when one lives an hour's ride from Tirion and its many farriers. I hold the horses for him and feel rather useless—surely I could accomplish more helping Macalaurë finish in the forge—but I say nothing. When he is finished, we begin braiding the horses' manes to prevent tangles from forming over the course of the journey, and with this, I can help and am grateful, feeling uneasy with the sudden weight of blessings put upon my shoulders.

My fingers can braid without looking but I keep my eyes on my work, nonetheless aware of Maitimo beside me, of the warmth from his body and his breathing. I have to gather my courage to speak, and when I do, my voice is tentative, babyish, like it was at my arrival here. "Maitimo?" I whisper, watching my fingers fly through the braiding. "Were you punished?"

He shakes his head and says, "No, I was not."

"Nor was I." I pause a moment, hoping he will intuit my thoughts, but if he does, he says nothing. "Why?" I ask.

"You were honest, Findekáno. And you gave your apologies to my father. He will not punish honesty."

"But how did he know that I was honest? Perhaps the others were telling the truth."

"The others all attempted to put blame up each other. They did not accept their own guilt."

"But how did he know the way of things? Perhaps some had no blame."

"All had blame. I told him this. I met his carriage on the road; he was returning from Formenos with my mother, and I was just stewing, angry, I suppose, at many things. He asked how I happened to be there, and over the course of the ride home, I told him."

"You told the truth?"

"Of course, Findekáno. I do not lie. I may have many flaws, but I do not lie, and Atar knows this. Situations like that have a way of unraveling until we are all ensnared and guilty. We cannot change what we have done, but we can make apologies for it and accept our blame so that such a wrongdoing does not seize us again."

I try to imagine time winding backward. I see myself escaping gratefully into the relative peace of the garden; I see Tyelkormo poking at the anthill, disrupting their parade to the broken watermelon. He invites me to sit—what do I do?

Face flushed, I concentrate harder on the braid appearing beneath my fingers.

Maitimo's voice brightens, although it sounds slightly phony to my ears, as his voice has had a habit of sounding since Annawendë left. I have searched his face during these moments and found no clue to suggest that he is less than sincere; I cannot even identify what exactly in his voice makes me feel this way. Perhaps it is less his tone and more my expectation that he should have trouble recovering happiness after what happened—of which, admittedly, I know very little. "Meanwhile, Findekáno, we go home tomorrow and to so much happiness. You will have a little brother in only a few months time, and your own begetting day is only two weeks away!"

"No more sleeping with Tyelkormo," I say, trying to jest, but my voice sounds flat and unfunny.

"Yes, and you will see your parents again, and we will both see our grandparents, whom I have taken to missing keenly in the recent weeks. I cannot imagine your own sorrow, Findekáno."

I do not want to tell him the truth of this: I miss my mother and her affections, but my interactions with my father in the last months before I left were confined to expressed displeasure and punishment, and my stomach quivers at the thought of returning to it. We finish the braids on the first horse and move to the next—Uncle Fëanáro's—and as though sensing my thoughts, Maitimo pauses to stroke my cheek and tip my chin in his direction. "Little one," he says, "your parents will celebrate what you have become. Your accomplishments are exceptional."

"I will miss you," I blurt out, feeling my cheeks warm. He laughs but it is not unkind. "You will see me twice a week. I will be staying with your family on the sixth night of the week and tutoring you on the sixth and seventh days. More often, I will visit with my father and Macalaurë, and you will visit me for Carnistir's, Macalaurë's, and my parents' begetting days. There will be no grief, little one."

My spirit is not entirely soothed, but as we work, I join him in talk of this future nonetheless. I consider my memories of him before this summer, confined to the observation of a very tall and exceptionally beautiful youth who stayed ever by my uncle's side and, at times, could almost eclipse him. I'd thought little of him. Given my father's attitude toward Uncle Fëanáro—and subsequently, Maitimo and his brothers—Maitimo seemed unattainable. Bright and beautiful and out of reach, like the stars. To find him so ordinary in his daily life—wearing the same clothes as I did, doing the same things, capable of the same joy and sadness—should have disheartened me, but it did not: It filled me with hope.

I can be like him.

I imagine festivals in the future, as though I am a visitor to Tirion, being led about by an accomplished and knowledgeable guide. I see my father, splendid in his festival clothes with his silver circlet upon his hair and, beside him, is I. "That is Findekáno Nolofinwion," my guide says, and I am amazed by my splendor, less by my raiment and my hair entwined with gold—although that, too, is grand—and more by my manners and the way I smile when my eyes happen upon another's. I shiver with joy at the thought.

"Little one!" Maitimo exclaims, seeing the ripple pass through my body and supposing it to be from cold. He wears a long-sleeved tunic over his short-sleeved one, and he tugs it over his head and puts it on me. I laugh because it fits me like a set of robes but with sleeves that dangle almost to my knees and will have to be rolled nearly in half to give me use of my hands. It is warm from his body and—although I was not cold—I am glad for it. It smells of summer, of warm air and green leaves, of Maitimo.

Stooping beside me to roll the sleeves, he is my height, and I lay my head on his shoulder and bury my face in the warm silk that is his hair. Does this summer have to end? I suppose that it does; time inevitably moves forward, setting memories further and further behind us. Already, the memories I have from early childhood seem tiny as though viewed from a distance—emotions once strong are dulled—and those are only ten years past. Or less! I wonder how this moment will look to me in one hundred years, how I will remember the warm, bony strength of Maitimo's shoulder beneath my head, the air sweet with the scents of hay and horseflesh, my heart light in my chest, the feeling of his arms—hands finished with their task—circling me in an embrace. I suppose this is what it's like to realize that you love somebody, I think, for all the loves I've known so far—those for my parents, my grandparents, for Aunt Eärwen and Uncle Arafinwë—seem to have been with me from birth, and I give no more thought to their existence than I am amazed to awaken with two legs and the ability to run. I wish that I could press this moment into my memory the way my mother presses leaves into her journal, preserving their color and even their scent for years to come. I ask only for a lifetime—and just this one moment.

I awaken from a nightmare on the morning of Findekáno's return, before the Mingling of the Lights, when the world is still spooky and silver. It seems as though I have been dreaming it all night, although logic tells me that this cannot possibly be true, but my night seems full of pacing, waiting for Findekáno to arrive. The eyes of my wife, my brother, my father were heavy upon my back. I wrung my hands so hard that they ached. When he did not arrive, I saddled my horse and rode to my half-brother's house outside the city and, there, interrupted them in their supper. Findekáno sat at the table with them, between Russandol and Curufinwë, and when I shouted, "What is the meaning of this? Why have you not returned to me my son?" Curufinwë replied, in a calm voice unlike him, "Do you not recall, Nolofinwë? You gave your permission that I adopt him. He is happier here," and when I looked at my son—or was he Curufinwë's?—his eyes weren't blue like mine anymore but that eerie, bright silver-blue flame-color like his cousin Tyelkormo's that has always struck me as wicked, like the eyes of a beast in the dark.

~oOo~

I awaken with my heart pounding and the bedclothes tangled around my damp, weary body. My fingers are wrung around each other, and my hands ache. Anairë lies in peaceful slumber beside me, her hand on her belly and a smile upon her lips. Moving carefully so not to wake her, I ease myself from my bed and go to my study, where a message lies on my desk: the finest parchment available in Tirion (Curufinwë may dress like a heathen and go about the city in muddy boots, but he will spare no expense in showcasing his superior lettering), delivered last night by the stiff, silent apprentice of my half-brother. "Nolofinwë," it reads, "We have returned safely and will escort Findekáno inside the gates tomorrow for his Recitation." I felt a moment's gloating over the capitalization of "Recitation," which I assumed to be an error, then realized that it was not, that recitations are events to my half-brother the way festivals and begetting days are to most people.

I try to feel soothed by the presence of the parchment between my fingers, by Curufinwë's obvious handwriting promising Findekáno's return, but my fears will not be allayed, and finally—hearing the servants moving about downstairs—I dress and descend the stairs to oversee the preparations for my son's first "Recitation."

~oOo~

I received first word of Findekáno's return a week ago, via messenger from Formenos. The messenger was different than the one Curufinwë usually sends, a breathless boy with a habit of touching everything of value he encountered—although less in wonder and more with the probing fingers of a dissectionist—who dropped on my desk, instead of the normal packet of letters, a single sealed parchment bearing Curufinwë's seal.

It read: "As of this writing, we will be leaving on the morrow. Barring catastrophe, our return will take a week, after which we will seek a night's repose in my house and then return Findekáno to Tirion the following morning. At this time, he will recite to you his lessons from the summer. Please welcome an audience, if you desire. I will send word at our arrival."

I wondered exactly what constituted an appropriate audience for such an occasion, and so settled to ask my parents, my brother, and his wife. I thought of asking King Olwë and his wife—who are staying in Tirion until their first grandchild is born—and those lords most loyal to me but decided against it, envisioning my timid, weak-voiced son stammering through his lessons and having to listen to false voices offering their congratulations afterward. I remembered from my childhood several occasions where we had been summoned to Aulë's house to hear Curufinwë recite for one exam or another. I remember the hours of boring discourse, punctuated by excitement only when Aulë interrupted Curufinwë long enough to ask a question or offer an argument, and I'd sit on the edge of my seat, wondering if he would be able to reply. He always did, and Atar would smile then in a way that I never saw him smile for me.

Then, inevitably, we would proceed into the gallery, where Curufinwë would exhibit each of his accomplishments in turn: glittering gemstones with more facets than I could count, imposing statues made of recalcitrant metals, jewelry so delicate that it look as though a strong breeze could fracture it, but Aulë took it between his fists and yanked and nothing broke (although I found myself wishing that it would). My own education dwindled after I informed my father of my decision to follow him to the court—a position centered more on one's natural, intuitive graces than anything one can learn from a book or a tutor—and I never took any exams, while it seemed Curufinwë was always being named as a master in this or that and being honored by the Valar.

Today, I have invited my son's "audience" to our house first for a late breakfast, expecting that Curufinwë will arrive by early afternoon. I wonder which of his brood he will bring along and decide that I would like to see Nerdanel and Russandol, could certainly bear to see Macalaurë, and preferred that the two youngest be left home. (Of course, who would watch them? The apprentice whose name I cannot recall?)

My parents arrive first, a few minutes early, as is their way. One of my wife's handmaidens brings them into the parlor, where I've had the cooks set up quite an impressive buffet. "Nolofinwë," says my father, kissing me, "you must be overcome by young Findekáno's imminent return!"

I say that I am, and indeed, I am not lying, for my heart has not rested easily in my chest since this morning's awakening.

Arafinwë and Eärwen are late, as is their custom. I hear their chatter and the bell-like laughter of my sister-in-law long before they arrive at the parlor, and then they sweep in, Eärwen full of apologies and Arafinwë full of excuses and a flush high in his cheeks that tells me—along with the way Eärwen's gown lies crookedly along one shoulder—the true reason for their delay. I nod to the cooks to indicate that they may remove the covers and begin serving, and my father—looking about him with a lost, puzzled stare—asks, "Where is your brother Fëanáro?"

I keep my voice nonchalant. "Was I supposed to invite him? I was unaware of the customs for such an affair, if perhaps it was bad luck to see the tutor and his student before such a big event."

"Well, Nolofinwë, surely you can recall that we used to attend breakfast at Aulë's before your brother's recitations?" Without waiting for my answer, he shakes his head and walks away to accept a blackberry pastry from one of the cooks.

My wife is sitting with Eärwen, their heads close together, whispering and giggling like little girls. Even their loosest gowns can no longer hide their conditions, and there is radiance in their faces that I wish never to diminish. Anairë is flushed and twice as happy as usual, for her firstborn son will be returned to her today. Despite her best attempts at hiding it, I am no fool and know that she has pined for Findekáno over these months, never fully understanding—I suspect—the reasons that I sent him away.

I walk towards them, intending to join them, but at the sight of me, their lips pinch shut and they stop whispering, so I veer towards Arafinwë instead and let them resume their conversation of baby names and nursery designs or whatever it is that makes them smile so.

"Nolofinwë!" my brother exclaims, as though he is surprised to see me, as though this is not my house. He is picking over his plate—balanced on a tray on his knees—that seems mostly filled with fruit and bread, although I had the cooks prepare bacon, eggs, and sweet buttery pastries. But that is the way of Arafinwë, who refused to eat meat for the first five years of his life and vomited the first time I took him hunting and—perhaps more illustrative of his personality—never asked me to conceal this fact from our father or our friends, although I saw shame in it where he did not and concealed it anyway.

I sit carefully next to Arafinwë and nod in the direction of our wives. "What do you think they discuss that enthralls them so?" I ask.

"Probably they are debating which of us is better in bed," remarks Arafinwë, and startled, I look up and find the eyes of my wife and sister-in-law upon me, and they erupt into a peal of giggles. Blushing, I hiss at Arafinwë, "You should not talk that way."

"On the contrary, Nolofinwë, I think that we should seek our revenge by having the same discussion of them." I give him what I hope is a reproachful look—it works on Findekáno, but Arafinwë always has been remarkably immune to animosity—and he stares back at me, solemnly chewing a huge piece of cantaloupe, his glittering blue eyes telling me that he is serious. "You first," he says, from around the cantaloupe. "What's the best thing about Anairë in bed?"

I fleck of cantaloupe escapes his mouth and lands on my arm. Grimacing, I wipe it away with my napkin. "You are being foul, Arafinwë."

"My apologies," he says, muffled because he is still chewing the cantaloupe.

"It is not very sincere of you to apologize for a behavior while you are still committing it."

"I thought I was apologizing for inquiring after your wife's talents in the bedroom." He loudly swallows the last of the cantaloupe and, laying his hand on my arm and looking into my eyes with exaggerated sincerity, says, "I apologize, Nolofinwë, for spitting cantaloupe onto your arm."

Despite the fact that Arafinwë has no appreciable intellect or talent, I sometimes get the feeling that he is making fun of me.

"So," he says, his mouth clear of any food, "what is the best thing about Anairë in bed?"

Luckily, I am saved by the arrival of our mother. (Even Arafinwë is not so uncouth as to have such a discussion in her presence.) She sits between us, kissing my lips first, then Arafinwë's. "My beautiful boys," she says, and her hands on my face comfort me, and for that moment, my heart stops pounding and I am at peace. I want to curl up in her lap and bury my face in her neck like I used to do when I was small and Curufinwë had sent me away and hurt my feelings. I do not know why I feel like I am about to be hurt today, why—body tensed as though awaiting a blow of pain—I want to lash out in defense.

~oOo~

Laurelin blossoms and I manage to slip away and climb the highest, steepest stairs in the house to a balcony that soars along the rooftop. It is one of the highest points in the city—surpassed only by the topmost turrets of my father's palace—and I like to come here when I cannot sleep and turn and watch the stars. Anairë and I made love up here once, in the early, heady days of our marriage, in the middle of the day, with the chatter from the markets on the streets below reaching our ears as we bit our lips to keep from crying out.

From here, the city appears to fall away from my house, tall rooftops and glistening marble tumbling down the hill of Túna and into the expansive plain that surrounds us. Fountains wink in the afternoon light, and filling the streets are people as small as those whittled toys given to Findekáno after his first begetting day. To the south, the royal guard rides in the field, practicing maneuvers. To the north is a ragged strip of forest and, behind it, Curufinwë's house. From the peak of my roof, I can see the peaks of his, dark angles rising from the forest like some kind of weird joke. I can see flashes of light on the windows that I know belong to his bedroom, that of my brother-son Russandol, and the room they use as their "upper study." He has balconies too, along his rooftop, and sometimes I will see a haze of movement upon them but not today.

He should have left by now, but the long stretch of field leading up to the city is devoid of riders or carriages, unless he is still making his way through the forest or is climbing the city streets as I stand here.

The door behind me opens, and Arafinwë joins me. "I thought I'd find you here," he says. He has a drink in each hand, tall glasses of what appears to be orange juice. He hands one to me. "Here, take this," he says, and when I sip it, I find that it has been spiked liberally with champagne.

"I thought you weren't drinking alcohol until the baby is born," I say, but I am grateful for it.

"Ah, you are right! I do not! But with one important caveat: As long as I don't get drunk, I can have whatever I like. So I still have wine with supper, for example. Hopefully," he says, winking, "I won't get drunk."

I drink deeply and feel a pleasant weightiness settle on my limbs. Arafinwë seizes my arm and says, "Look! It's Fëanáro's carriage!"

I nearly spill my drink in my haste to turn and peer out over the plains, where a carriage bearing my half-brother's crest is making its way toward the city. My heart flutters in my chest, then resumes a normal rhythm: So the nightmare will not come true. I drain my drink and take Arafinwë by the arm. "Come," I say, "they will he here within the hour."

~oOo~

I know that Curufinwë has arrived by the subtle rise in commotion in the streets. It is rare when Curufinwë comes to the city, and by carriage no less! And with his whole family! On a day other than a Festival Day! The surprise among the people of the city ripples like a wave to the top of the hill, and not long after, I hear the clip-clop of shod hooves on the cobblestones outside.

Atar leaped to his feet the moment Curufinwë's presence was confirmed, and he is in the street now, embracing my half-brother with a shameless, wide grin on his face. Arafinwë jogs after him, followed closely by Eärwen, and I see them jesting with Russandol and Macalaurë. Anairë wishes to follow them—I can sense it—to delve into the carriage until she comes out with Findekáno in her arms, but I linger, determined to be dignified, and she will not leave my side. Russandol is helping his mother from the carriage, and together, they are lifting the children and depositing them beside the carriage. Tyelkormo is released first, and he immediately takes off running, skipping around the legs of Macalaurë and Arafinwë until Arafinwë catches him in his arms and lifts him, kissing his laughing face. Carnistir emerges next, cradled in Russandol's arms like a child much younger than he is, squawking with indignation at having been awakened. And so it is Findekáno who emerges last, holding his robes away from his feet in that prim way of his that manages to irritate me even after a three-month absence, and Nerdanel takes his arm, but he hops to the ground on his own, keeping his footing with effortless ease.

Beside me, Anairë gasps, and Findekáno's head tips in our direction and no sooner perceives his mother before he is off running, his robes in a flurry around little legs pumping faster than I knew possible for him. Anairë kneels on the ground, laughing and crying, both with joyful abandon, her arms spread wide to accept her firstborn, who crashes into her without dignity or grace, crying, "Amil, Amil!" into her shoulder.

"Oh, Findekáno, Findekáno," she whispers, and her face is soaked with tears that she cannot wipe away because both her arms are locked around our son, and she won't let go.

Laughter and joy are rising like bubbles around us; hugs and kisses are being exchanged, but I have hugged or kissed no one yet and stand alone, until—perhaps sensing my sudden loneliness—Anairë presses Findekáno into my arms: "Here, Findekáno, go to your father."

I am amazed at the speed with which his arms lock around my neck—and his weight! he must have gained ten pounds and two inches at least!—and I am kissing his face, suddenly hating myself for making him go away and missing this summer of his childhood that will so quickly end.

The procession climbs the stairs to my home. My half-brother's family dress with dignity for once—robes for Curufinwë and his sons and a modest gown for his wife—and they even wear their circlets. It is an occasion indeed!

Curufinwë leads, and he grasps my hand in his strong, slender one. "Well met, Nolofinwë," he says. His face is like marble, unsmiling, except for the eyes, which burn with unquenchable fire. He turns to my wife. "Anairë, you are radiant," and she giggles like a young girl and kisses his cheek—he allows it, although I see him stiffen—and says, "And you, Fëanáro, look robust, as always."

Indeed, he does: Curufinwë always looks like a man who has run ten miles on a cool morning, letting the life of the Blessed Realm seep into his lungs and into his body, rising to chase the pallor from his face and the lifelessness from his eyes. His gaze is always roving, as though he is memorizing this moment, as though even the most mundane of occurrences is worthy of his curiosity. I used to suspect that Curufinwë did not sleep—he seemed always to be at task when I retired to bed at night and at task again when I awakened in the morning—and I wonder if he knows how to spend an idle moment, seeking only comfort and repose without squeezing from it some new kind of knowledge.

On his heels is Russandol, resplendent in cream-colored robes trimmed in scarlet and gold and with his hair mostly free to tumble down his back, secured only at the sides in narrow braids. He smiles with a sincerity I cannot match and kisses my cheek. He is as tall as his father now, I see, and of the same slender, graceful build like a blade of grass that will bend and sway but never break.

"Uncle Nolofinwë," he says, "well met," and he is reaching up to stroke Findekáno's hair, his eyes filled with a raw love like none I have ever seen.

If the rumors are true, then Russandol's lady left him in Formenos. If she did, I think, she was a fool for doing so; there could be no one with greater grace and beauty outside of the Ainur. He goes next to my wife, and she clasps his hands for a long moment, her long fingers caressing the contours of his hands, as though memorizing each tendon and knuckle; I see the hopeless hunger in her eyes that accompanies the appraisal of a thing of beauty that is unattainable. I want to feel a pinch of jealousy but cannot quite muster it; he is inquiring after Anairë's health and that of the baby, and nothing in his posture or voice suggest that his interest is feigned; he is saying now what a pleasure it was to tutor Findekáno, how he never dared hope for so eager a student. I glance at my son perched in my arms, and his eyes are on my face, perhaps watching for my inevitable surprise at Russandol's words.

Nerdanel is next, full of soft, kind words, as she always is, that slip from my memory the moment she passes toward my wife. Carnistir is in her arms, and he hides his face from me and makes a noise into her shoulder that sounds like a growl. She tries to coax him out without luck, until I urge her along, expressing my laughing sympathy for the difficulty of small children while thinking that Carnistir at his best surpasses Findekáno at his worst. Behind her is Macalaurë with Tyelkormo in tow; the latter is darting about like a hummingbird in a bed of flowers. Macalaurë nods and mumbles a greeting to my wife and me, and Tyelkormo glares at me like he would like to kick my shins but greets me with fair words at his brother's insistence.

And so they are all here, and we go into the house, to the parlor that I have had set especially for today. I offer wine: Curufinwë and Russandol both say, "Please," at the same time, cast each other sidelong looks, and smirk conspiratorially. Macalaurë makes a soft plea to his father, his gray eyes wide, and Curufinwë dismisses him with "Ask your mother"; Nerdanel scowls and Macalaurë mopes and grudgingly accepts a glass of fruit juice.

I do not know how one of these "Recitations" is supposed to work: Curufinwë is sitting tall on the edge of a sofa cushion—feet crossed and hands folded—while Atar leans forward like an eager child and makes inquiries of him; Nerdanel is talking with my wife and Eärwen; the children (although Russandol can barely be called that anymore) are answering the polite questions of my mother. Tyelkormo tugs at the neckline of Macalaurë's robes, trying to show her some scar on Macalaurë's shoulder, and Macalaurë gruffly smacks his hands and there are tears. "Oh, dear," says Amil, pressing her hands together at her lips as though uncertain about what to do, but Russandol solves that for her by giving Macalaurë a stern look and sweeping a tearful Tyelkormo into his arms and effortlessly steering the conversation in a different direction.

I hear commotion in the entranceway and excuse myself to find my porters stacking two large wooden crates inside the doorway. "Where would you like them, my lord?" one asks while my baffled mouth flaps ridiculously.

As though on cue, Russandol appears at my elbow with Tyelkormo on his hip. I have to tip my head up to look at him now, just as I must his father. "They are Findekáno's projects from the summer," he explains. "We figured that you might like to have them."

"Of course," I say quickly, waving the porters in the direction of the western parlor, where I will figure what to do with them later.

~oOo~

Afterwards, I accept my congratulations for Findekáno's excellent performance with baffled duty, for I have done nothing to earn them. The congratulations, I suppose, belong with Curufinwë and his family, but they have knit together in a corner of the room in that way of theirs: Carnistir is shrieking, and Russandol is saying something that has both Curufinwë's and Macalaurë's eyes bright with mirth; Tyelkormo dances around their legs; Nerdanel leans against her husband's arm, their hands clasped like two youths.

"Nolofinwë," says Atar, "he was wonderful. You must be so proud."

Findekáno is at my side, but he is watching his cousins. I nudge him, and his attention snaps to his grandfather. "Thank you, Grandfather Finwë," he says softly.

"My porters have also delivered two huge crates full of Findekáno's work," I add. "The amount he achieved this summer is prodigious."

Russandol fractures himself from his family and comes toward us. "Uncle Nolofinwë," he says, in that voice of his that maddens me with its similarity to my father's, with its easy grace, "might I express again the pleasure that was teaching your son? He is a splendid student."

"And you did a marvelous job teaching him," says Atar before I can answer.

"Ah, the quill is nothing without the parchment." He reaches down to touch Findekáno's shoulder, and my son beams up at him. I realize that I am growing to despise Russandol almost as much as I despise his father.

A poor time to decide this, too, considering that he will be in my house for two days of the week for the entire winter to tutor Findekáno. I wonder if I might have Macalaurë instead, who is always so quick to escape my glance and seems always to be mumbling and scurrying away.

~oOo~

My half-brother's family leaves early at least, under the pretense that tomorrow will bring an early day in the forge. The horses are hitched, the children are packed into the carriage, a flurry of greetings is exchanged, and they are gone.

Findekáno perches in Anairë's arms. Russandol comes to him and kisses his forehead; Findekáno's eyes are bright with unshed tears. "Little one," he says, "do not despair for I will see you in only a week's time, and we will continue where we were with the Journey of the Teleri upon Tol Eressëa." I grit my teeth.

Atar and Amil leave shortly after, and Anairë sits with Findekáno in her lap and sips fruit juice with Eärwen and laughs at some silly story my brother is telling them.

I slip away, to the west parlor, where two large wooden crates sit in the pale, silvery light of early evening. I try to pry them open with my fingers but they are nailed securely shut; finally, I locate a servant who brings a pry-bar and wrenches them open for me, one by one; the boards are not even on the floor before I am plunging my hands into the crates to come up with statues wrapped in silk and books filled with a hand that barely impersonates the one I once knew as Findekáno's. I open to the last page: "The Sundering of the Teleri upon Tol Eressëa," it reads, and I clap it shut.

The statues are animals mostly, although there are a few awkward beginnings of human figures that I recognize as the Valar. As I delve further into the crates, the statues become less awkward and the chisel strokes less obvious; I find another book, this one filled with sketches and calligraphy practices. "Findekáno," says the word at the top of the page, done with a broad brush in a sweeping hand that belongs to Russandol, and beneath that, Findekáno's hand, growing more confident as it moves down the page. "Findekáno," it reads. "Findekáno. Findekáno. Findekáno. Maitimo. Findekáno. Maitimo Maitimo Maitimo Findekáno—"

I grow weary and turn the page. Sketches: horses, hounds, hawks on wing—the usual thing a small boy draws. On the next page are hands: childish hands, strong hands, hands holding hammers or other hands. I am surprised by his skill. Did he have this talent when he left? I cannot remember—or perhaps I just never saw any of his drawings.

There is a box filled with jewelry. There are colorful beaded necklaces and finer pieces done in gold and silver; rings engraved with words and pictures in a child's awkward, untrained hand. My half-brother must have judged these harshly but, to me, they suddenly hurt my heart with their beauty, and I want to fill my fingers with them.

At the bottom of the box is another book and, tucked between its pages, is a sheaf of parchment bound with a red silk ribbon. I untie the ribbon and recognize my own hand: the letters that I sent to my son, and those from his mother, grandparents, and my brother and sister-in-law. I reread the words and am stunned by my cold, rote words when my wife gushes, "My dearest Findekáno, I miss you so much …"

My brother writes: "I speak to your imminent cousin all of the time of you, and he cannot wait to meet you. Give my greetings to Fëanáro and family! Especially Russandol, and beat him in a game of Strategy for me (since I seem never to be able to beat him myself—but do not tell him that!)"

I write: "The weather here is fair, Findekáno, and I have had the servants rearrange your room in a more pleasing manner in anticipation of your return."

The weather is fair? I cringe. It is Valinor; the weather is always fair.

I stuff the letters back into the book and let the book drop into the crate.

"Do you always snoop in your son's private papers by meager Treelight?" comes the voice behind me. Arafinwë is leaning on the doorframe, a flute of sparkling cider in hand, eyes bright with mirth. I do not answer, and he comes to sit on the floor beside me.

"He is thirteen years old," I mutter. "I hardly think he has private papers."

Arafinwë ignores me. "He is coming into his talent, Nolofinwë. You must be so proud! If my son has half the ability at his age …"

I wonder about Arafinwë's son sometimes. I wonder if he will long for the Sea, like his mother's people, or if he will be spirited and carefree and utterly useless, like my brother. I cannot imagine him much like a Noldo—and then, with a start, I realize that he will be only a quarter Noldo anyway, and he will be an heir to all three races of Elves, not least of all the Teleri.

Arafinwë grins and shivers. "I love those words, Nolofinwë! 'My son.' How unbearable the joy must have been at Findekáno's birth! How you must love him! I cannot believe that so much of my heart can be taken by someone I've never even met."

Actually, Findekáno's birth was terrifying, lasting longer than the midwife would have liked, and Anairë abandoned her careful dignity to scream in agony—the sheets drenched with her sweat—and pushed me away even as she clung to my hand in a grip that was feeble at the end, when the midwife lifted my squalling son in her arms. I remember less my joy of being a father and more my relief of being still a husband, for Curufinwë had awakened in all of us the awareness that death could come even in the Blessed Realm, cloaked in an event as joyous as the arrival of a new life.

I smile at Arafinwë. "It was a wonderful day," I tell him, and certainly, it is true in a sense: It turned out wonderfully; my wife is still healthy, and my son is—I realize with a start—perfect.

"Who do you think," asks Arafinwë, "will be the first of us to give our father a granddaughter? You, me, or Fëanáro?"

Probably Curufinwë, I think, but I say, "My next child will be a daughter. That is going to be in my thoughts while—" Realizing where the conversation is going, I feel my face flush and stop speaking, and Arafinwë throws his head back and laughs. "While what, Nolofinwë? While what?"

~oOo~

It is Anairë who tucks Findekáno into bed his first night back home, after our guests have left. I retire to my bedroom and lie with the lamp on for a long while, leafing through a book of poems that has been passed among my lords, necessitating that I too must now read it. They are Rúmil's words and they are beautiful—his script, which my half-brother adapted—is poetry in itself, flowing across the page with the rhythm of the sea or the softness of a fresh breeze, but my mind will not absorb the meanings of the words. I am beginning to wonder if Anairë retired to her own bedchamber when my door opens.

There is youthfulness in her face that I have not seen in a long time, since I was a child and spun in her arms while she still entertained thoughts of marrying my half-brother. "Our son is home!" she says. "I never thought I could be so happy, even here." She begins to undress, and I mark my place in the book and lean on my elbow to watch her. "Two children—one who I can still feel inside me—and a handsome husband to keep me warm at night. The son of the King!"

I wonder whose heart I shall choose to break next summer: my wife's, to again send away her eldest son, or Findekáno, to tell him that Russandol will be riding north without him.

Anairë slips into a loose white nightgown and comes to my bed. As I reach to cover the lamp, she surprises me by guiding my face to her own and kissing me on the mouth, her lips soft and warm and imploring. Her lips part and our tongues touch, and I feel myself start—growing aroused even as my hand brushes her belly and reminds me of the fruitless redundancy of my desire—and then clutch her harder to me. We have not made love since we conceived late last autumn, and I had not thought of it. Until now.

She is astride me; her hands are already tugging at my nightshirt. "Anairë," I say, "why? When you are already—" She interrupts me with a kiss. Her belly—round and full—presses mine, taut and flat, and I feel our son kick.

"Is it not enough, Nolofinwë," she gasps against my mouth, "to do this, not to conceive, but out of love for me?"

She yanks her nightgown over her head. My hands slide up her belly and cup her breasts, and she smiles at my answer.

~oOo~

This is how Curufinwë must feel, I find myself thinking the next morning, as punishment for his shameless lechery. Now my shameless lechery. I am reminded of the few times in my youth that spent late nights with the sons of my father's lords, drinking too much wine and causing a ruckus, being awakened early the next morning to sit at my father's table. My head feels swollen and heavy; my eyes are grainy with weariness. I ponder the eggs—cooked perfectly, as usual—and thick toast that the cook sets in front of me and feel mildly ill.

When Curufinwë reappeared with Nerdanel clutching his hand and Russandol only a tiny bundle in the crook of his arm, he lived with Atar for the few weeks until enough of his house was built to be safe enough for his wife and newborn son to live there. (I have no doubt, had Russandol not been around, that Curufinwë would have slept beneath the stars with only naked rafters as his shelter.) I remember how he and Nerdanel would look in the mornings, arriving at the breakfast table after being summoned by Atar's servants. When I expressed my scorn, Atar reminded me of how difficult caring for a newborn could be, using a tone of voice that expressed his displeasure with me more so than his belligerent eldest who had fled to the forest to wed, had almost immediately conceived a child (also born in the wild, like some kind of animal), and couldn't even put on a clean tunic for breakfast in the morning. My bedroom was down the hall from Curufinwë's, in a different wing from my parents' suite, and I heard enough of what went on in Curufinwë's bedroom to know that Russandol wasn't the one keeping them awake at night. Russandol rarely awakened or cried at all.

But I feel now like he looked in the early days of his marriage, and Anairë smiles at me, as though she perceives the thought.

Findekáno is chattering about what he is going to do today—how he is going to read and ride and walk in Uncle Arafinwë's garden to see how many butterflies he can identify—and his plate is cleared in what feels like an instant. I rub my eyes and watch him scrape the last of the eggs from his plate with a fork and shove them into his mouth. "May I have more?" he asks, after swallowing, and my surprised wife adds another spoonful, not stopping until he nods and the plate is full again.

"I have a better idea, if you will hear it," I say.

"But I want to read the book about Tol Eressëa that Uncle Fëanáro said I could borrow!"

I wave my hand as though dismissing the thought. "Those things are boring. Those things you will do with Russandol when he comes to tutor you next week." Findekáno has stopped eating and regards me with wide eyes and a tight mouth. He looks dire, as though I am about to dole out some punishment. "Do not look so, Findekáno! I would like to take you around the city today, to let your people know that you have returned, and have lunch with you by the fountain in the square."

His eyes immediately brighten. "Really?" His brow furrows. "I have people?"

"Of course. You are a prince."

"Does Maitimo have people?"

I like to think not but—despite the rarity of his presence in the city—my eldest brother-son remains unfailingly popular.

I smile. "Of course he does. Your cousin is one the favorite Noldorin princes."

Findekáno blushes and admits, "He's my favorite too."

I want to remind him that I am also a prince, but it seems rather childish to engage in such an argument with a thirteen-year-old. Besides, he must surely prefer his father to his half-cousin.

"So would you forgo your books for a day?"

He nods eagerly.

I have my horse and his pony saddled, and we make the rounds to the houses of my lords. Each makes a fuss over Findekáno, asking him silly questions that he probably could have answered before entering the esteemed tutelage of Curufinwë or to sing songs that Macalaurë never needed to teach him. They turn then to me, and we discuss construction projects and grain supplies and grazing lands, and Findekáno swings his feet and looks bored.

When noontime draws near, Findekáno says in a tiny voice, "Atar, I am tired still from my journey. May I visit the others another afternoon?"

Findekáno's untruths are goldfish in a clear pool, flashy and obvious, but I force myself to smile. "Of course. But will you take lunch with me first?"

We sit along the rim of the fountain, and a brisk breeze occasionally mists us with water. The square is filled with people today, and I spot a young silvery-haired girl selling flatbread stuffed with shrimp and a spicy dressing, and I get one each for Findekáno and myself. He is dipping his finger into the fountain and writing on the flat, gray stones that form the rim of the fountain, only the afternoon is hot and Laurelin is at her zenith, and his words evaporate from the warm stones before I can read what he is writing.

"Did you enjoy your time in Formenos?" I ask him in a casual voice, hoping that he'll divulge some great misery, but his eyes brighten at the mention of it, and he nods. Before he can launch into a retelling of his great adventures (I heard him telling my father once; my brother again; no doubt, he has told his mother too), I ask, "And what do you plan to study this winter?"

He ticks them eagerly off his fingers: "Language, writing, history, botany, drawing, music, sculpture—"

I laugh and interrupt him. "You cannot study all of those things! Not at one time anyway. You will be dreadfully confused by it all."

Obstinately, he replies, "Maitimo studies all of those things."

Unsure of how to reply to that, I stare into the square. Ehtelion, the youngest son of the Lord of the Fountain, and the son of my father's chief cook are unwrapping wooden sparring swords and laughing. Both are ten years or so older than Findekáno. They brandish them and begin attacking each other in a flurry whirling limbs and bodies. My own body aches suddenly for my youth when there was time enough in the day for such foolery and the conversations with my friends—now the Lords of Tirion—didn't pertain to types of building stone or suitable rangeland for dairy cattle but was taken up by hunting, riding, sparring … and sitting at this very spot on the fountain and discussing the maidens that passed.

Findekáno is feeding bits of his flatbread to a pack of burbling doves. "So may I?" he asks.

"May you what?"

"Study all of those things?"

His blue eyes happen upon mine, and they are full of timid eagerness. It is a feeling I have never understood—this desire to sequester oneself away from the presence of people and foray instead into a book—and reminds me of when I was very young and Atar would insist upon Curufinwë's attendance at one or another affairs, and Curufinwë would implore, "But I am in the midst of a book of lore …" or "I have just begun a new project with Aulë …" and Atar would always relent and make excuses for his absence.

"Russandol cannot possibly teach you all of those things in just two days," I say.

"Well, he will teach me the language, writing, history, and botany. The music, drawing, and sculpture I have lessons enough for the entire winter, and I will study on my own."

Ehtelion bests the cook's son, but his hand slips, and his sparring sword touches the other boy's arm, forfeiting his victory. The cook's son crows in triumph and Ehtelion scowls. "Best of three," he says, spreading his feet into a wide stance, the laughter gone from his eyes.

Findekáno is watching them with great interest. He glances at me and looks away again. I wonder what is brewing inside his head, beneath the lengths of silky, dark hair braided this morning by his nursemaid. The cook's son is falling back—losing—but suddenly springs forth and nearly catches Ehtelion off his guard. Findekáno flinches as though it is his arm that will raise the sparring sword and sweep the other's away, and he lets out a relieved whoosh of air when Ehtelion counters and nearly wins.

"Atar?" he says at last. "May I—?" He nods in the direction of the two older boys. "I should like to learn."

I laugh. "You are too young. You could be hurt. Perhaps in a few years."

"Uncle Fëanáro taught me a bit," he says. "Even little Carnistir learns." In a voice—loud and brash—unlike my small, awkward Findekáno, he insists, "I want to learn, Atar."

The voice that comes out of me is weak and deflated, a balloon with the air let out. "Then I shall find you a teacher."

I am surprised by the sudden clasp of tiny arms—stronger, though, than I remember—around my neck, and the warmth of a voice in my ear: "I love you, Atar!"

~oOo~

For all of his purported exhaustion, Findekáno gets little rest upon our arrival home. I retire to my study to work on some reports for my father, and I hear Findekáno's eager little feet scampering down the stairs from his bedroom. A few minutes later, he is darting around the garden after butterflies with my brother meandering in tow. "Uncle Arafinwë! A monarch! Uncle Arafinwë! A painted lady!" His voice reaches to my window—past the barrier of height, past the glass—and I smile at its joyful abandon, my quill resting uselessly in my hand.

The door to my study opens and Anairë comes in: She is the only one who will enter my study unannounced, without knocking. Even my father and brother do not take such liberties. She eases herself onto the corner of my desk, lifting her dress and settling herself with great care. She smiles at Findekáno playing outside and bends to kiss me.

Her warm fingers trail beneath my chin. "You make me so very happy, Nolofinwë," she says.

I look at her with some surprise. Such blunt sentimentality belongs to the marriages of my brothers, never to Anairë and me. She laughs at my surprise. "Do not look so, Nolofinwë! As though you expected me to confess my misery instead!"

"As you make me happy," I answer, and she presses her lips to my forehead. I feel her mouth curve into a smile against my skin.

"Do you ever think of the many paths we could have taken in our lives? And if one step was different…." She trails off.

"If you had stepped away from me, you would have never known your loss."

"Still, it makes me want to step carefully, to maximize my joy."

"Our lives are long, Anairë. Some joys will come to us, and others will escape. We will never know those that do."

"What would it be, do you think, if we knew what we gave up in the mundane moments of lost encounters and missed coincidences?"

"I think life would be agonizing."

I take her hand and turn it over in mine. Her skin is fairer than mine; her hand smaller, looking as though it belongs on a porcelain doll. But her skin is warm, and her hand turns and closes on mine—defiant—guiding my palm to press against the firm bulge of her belly.

"He will be very wise," she whispers. "The most like his father of all our children."

Our son lies quietly beneath my hand. I imagine that I can sense him like Arafinwë says he can sense his own child. Suddenly, he shifts, and something flutters against my hand. I gasp and Anairë laughs. It is as though he is trying to touch me through his mother's flesh that separates us.

"After almost two full pregnancies now," Anairë chides, "I would think you used to the fact that babies kick."

"It is not that," I say softly. It is the thought of a person, unseen, only inches past my hand—a life constructed from bits of me and bits of Anairë. It is the thought of Anairë's body serving as a vessel for my children, a sacrifice I would have thought no one willing to make for me, to let her body be torn and weakened to give me a son. It is the thought of little hands and little ears belonging to my son, growing even as I sit here, feeling him punch the palm of my hand, and a heart beating that no one can hear but I can sense. I want to stay in this moment forever. I know that he will be born, and he will grow; we will become distant, as children and fathers do, and I don't want that to happen. I want us to be this close forever.

I allow my palm to shift, to soften, turning my touch into a caress. Anairë lifts her hand to stroke my hair. "Turukáno," I whisper.

"What is it, love?"

"Turukáno. It is what I shall name him," and I smile as he kicks again and lies still.

There is relief to be found in the endless march of identical days. We have been back in Tirion for a week, and I have plotted out every day of the autumn in a ledger that I have filched from my father's study. With a ruler, I divided the pages into days, and I filled each with my chores and duties for that day in no-nonsense fragments: "Day Five," it reads, "Morning Mingling of the Lights—Ride to Tirion. Tutor Findekáno in Voyage of Tol Eressëa; Telerin dialects; review last week's equations. Have supper with Nolofinwë. Stay night.

"Day Six: Hear recitation of Journey of Tol Eressëa; review calligraphy; discuss evolution of Valarin dialect. Have supper with Nolofinwë. Ride home after the Mingling of the Lights. Work on begetting day gift for Carnistir. Go to bed."

Yes, these days I don't trust myself enough to leave even "go to bed" to chance.

Whenever there is an empty block in the ledger, I fill it will an activity. I hunt these activities ruthlessly until the block is full. Today, I followed Vorondil, who has been bothering me to practice defensive swordfighting techniques all summer and whom I cheerfully ignored (when I had the chance to study for long hours with Annawendë instead) and pestered him about it until he allotted an afternoon of his time, and four spaces in my book were filled. For the next two weeks, I haven't an empty day, a fact that might have once bothered me but now fills me with cold relief.

For now, I am getting ready for my first trip to the House of Nolofinwë to tutor Findekáno. My head is stressed and sore, and I am glad for the chance to get away, although I am not sure exactly what I am escaping or entirely convinced that it will not follow me into the city. Tomorrow morning, I will rise at the Mingling of the Lights—assuming that I manage to sleep at all tonight—and ride to Tirion, to arrive in the first productive hours of the day, so to have a whole day for naught but studying. It is evening now, and the light outside my window is soft and silver.

Macalaurë followed me upstairs after supper, and he lies across my bed and watches me fold robes and stuff them into my satchel and select jewelry from the pieces in my box, holding necklaces to my throat as though I care. It is a pantomime; I avoid looking at him in the mirror lest he—who knows me best of anyone, perhaps—notice the deception.

"When your punishment is lifted," I say to him, "perhaps you will come with me to Tirion?"

I dread the journey tomorrow: Two hours on horseback, alone, in an open field where procrastination and distraction ever tempt me to stray from my road, ride past Tirion, and seek the city in the south where—

I do not think on that. I ponder a palm full of rings, picking over the selection and making deliberate looks with my face while actually choosing at random and dropping them into a velvet drawstring bag.

Macalaurë sighs. "I never thought two weeks could be so long …"

I laugh. "You have suffered for only half of it!"

A week, during which he has sent messages each day to Tirion and received replies, from Vingarië, and I have struggled not to be jealous. "Do not remind me," he says mournfully. "And Tirion—do you think Uncle Nolofinwë would welcome me?"

I snort. "Of course! You are his brother-son! That is not to say that he wouldn't want a bit of music after supper …"

"I do not think I would be welcome. I could not anyway. I am working on a project with Atar."

At this, my head snaps up, and I contemplate him in the mirror, but he is running his thumbnail along the stitches in my bedspread, eliciting slightly different sounds with different degrees of pressure. He is sculpting a little tune: just a fingernail and a bedspread. I did not think often about my brother's talents prior to Annawendë's departure. Prior to realizing how useless my own were. Macalaurë's gift with music was always like his gray eyes and his sensitivity to high heat and his satiny chocolate-colored hair: All are part of who he is, unremarkable except in the fact that they make him Macalaurë. I realize with a jolt that I have always thought myself superior. Standing side by side, people's eyes happened on me first. I am the taller, with a more beautiful build; the light on my hair is like fire, I know, for I have had both brothers and lovers tell me this. My talents, too, were superior, in the eyes of the Noldor, for they were meticulously honed over many long hours; they were not a gift—although my proclivity lies in the realm of academia—but something worked for and earned. Macalaurë was born with his voice, with his gifts, and at the end of the day, that which he creates cannot be placed in a satchel and carried away. Cities do not rise from his songs.

But now, it seems, that he is the greater of us. He makes people happy, at least, while I please not even myself during the long hours that I spend alone in the library—the doors barred against my brothers, under the pretense of studying for exams—staring at the pages in front of me but unable to read or write, even to think. My focus drifts—a point of light reflected from a piece of glass—darting where it does not belong and settling nowhere for long.

I look away from Macalaurë and concentrate more fully on the rings, keeping my voice nonchalant, letting them slide around in my palm. "Oh? What project?" I begin, but he has already realized the error of his words and sprang up from the bed. "I should not have said that," he says. "It is a secret project. Do not tell Atar that you know."

"But I do not know," I say. "You have not told me."

"I have told you of its existence, and that is too much."

My stomach twists. It hurts; it is jealousy, that which I never expected to rise against my own brother. Against my Macalaurë. I swallow and try to coax it back. Atar dismissed Macalaurë at the beginning of the summer from his apprenticeship, and I thought it the final demise of their relationship, but instead, things seemed to have brightened between them. Their single night of reading poetry per week increased to two; they laugh, sometimes, at meals over secret jokes; now they have secret projects too? I cannot imagine what secret projects our father could possibly conjure with Macalaurë. Macalaurë hates Atar's work and Atar hasn't the love or patience for music, although his voice is beautiful and his fingers are deft on the harp.

I used to be the one who entered into secret projects with Atar, and they were secrets for the danger that they posed to our family—and to our reputation, were our pursuits discovered. We made chemicals that did marvelous and frightening things and then destroyed them and locked away the formulae; we talked of things that might be thought wicked, of my half-uncles and the Valar and their decisions in that matter—of Eru, even. At times, Atar's voice would rise and tremble, and he would speak in such a way that reminded me of stones tumbling down a hill, knocking against one another, their violent descent inevitable. I would sit silently then, for I felt as though these words would have existed even without my presence and that I just made their being spoken out loud—beneath the witness of Manwë and Varda—legitimate.

I told things to Atar that should have had me punished, and he told things to me that a son should never know of his father. He told me that he did not want me until he knew that I existed—that he wished to be cursed with childlessness, as some of the Avari were rumored to be—but I could not feel hurt because his eyes burned with hatred for himself and those words that had once defined part of his being.

I am selfish. I cannot—and do not want to—imagine Macalaurë sharing the same. The feeling is one of falling. I lost my grip on Annawendë, and now I am watching everything that I hold dear—my father, my brothers, my books—sliding beyond my grasp and out of sight. I feel gravity pulling me towards my end.

As if sensing my unease, Macalaurë says, "It is but a small thing, Nelyo. You know I despise his forge."

I laugh. "I do not mind," I say, but I feel as though the laughter is only a hiccup away from a sob. My hands scramble; I fall farther. What is happening to me that I should envy my own brother?

"I wish I could tell you," he says, tracing little circles on my bedspread with his fingers; they sound like little glissandos.

"Well, you cannot." My voice cracks the air like a whip, and he looks up at me, his gray eyes wounded and afraid.

He sits up and places his feet upon the floor. "I am weary. I should go to bed. Each night's sleep brings me closer to Vingarië," he says with a hollow smile.

He comes to me and puts his arms around my neck from behind. My hands tighten on the fistfuls of rings that I have still not discarded, my knuckles resting on the tabletop; I can feel his breath on the tip of my ear; he kisses my temple. "Good night, Nelyo," he says. He holds me for a moment longer, perhaps, than he would on a normal night. "I love you."

I wait until he closes my bedroom door softly behind himself before letting the rings clatter across the tabletop so that I can weep into my open hands.

~oOo~

Atar touches my shoulder.

I awaken, momentarily disoriented. I was asleep, in a deep, incoherent dream. The side of my face is sticky with slaver; my eyes press into my head like rounded twin weights. Atar is standing beside my bed, tying bracers onto his wrists. The light through my drapes—which I did not close last night—is mingling and brightening towards daylight.

"You asked me to wake you at the Mingling of the Lights," he says.

I sit up with effort and let the covers fall away. I am still in yesterday's clothes, my socks even, although my boots lie in a heap beside my armoire. Atar appraises me as he tightens the laces on his bracers. He is dressed already in a light tunic and breeches—the clothes he wears on the days we have archery and swordplay lessons—but this is not the third day of the week. It is the fifth.

Of course, the fifth day is usually the day we take off from duties to sit in his laboratory for most of the day, talking, planning …

"Come with me," he says, jerking his head towards the door. "I will make you breakfast."

I follow obediently, feeling dirty in yesterday's clothes and my hair a ratty mess at the back of my head. "What may I—" I begin, upon arrival in the kitchen, but Atar interrupts me and says, "You may sit and be quiet."

He fries a large egg for each of us. He sprinkles diced bits of green onion and shreds cheese over each; he places them over thick slices of toast and dribbles some kind of pale gravy over the whole mess. My brain is trying to prod my stomach into admitting that it looks and smells delicious, but my stomach insists on performing queasy somersaults at the thought of food. Atar sets a pomegranate next to my plate. "They are good when you are traveling," he says. "They energize your spirit."

When I was little, I used to eat until sick on the pomegranates that grow on the trees in Atar's garden. Now, I gag a little at the thought and cover it by pretending to clear my throat.

Atar sits on the bench opposite me at the wooden kitchen table. He is eating before even fully settled. "You do not look well," he says around a mouthful of egg and bread. "Perhaps you should remain home for the day?"

"I am fine," I say. "I slept restlessly."

"And in your clothes."

"I forgot to put on my nightclothes."

(I shall have to add that to my ledger, I suppose, prior to "Go to Bed." Atar does not seem surprised by my admission and makes a muffled "Hmm" around the food in his mouth.)

I put a morsel of egg into my mouth and force it past the lump in my throat. Atar watches me while eating his own breakfast. His fork clatters to his plate, and his hand is on the side of my face. It lingers for a long moment while I let my eyes hold his—trying to look brave—and he says, "You remind me much of how I was in my youth. We are much alike, Nelyafinwë."

"You are my father," I say softly. "You are half of me."

I have my doubts, actually. I believe sometimes that Atar is more than half of my brothers and me. I know the science; I know the reality; I know that such a thing is not deemed possible by the laws of nature, but I cannot dispel the thought. Some of the loremasters of Cuiviénen believed that the father provided the sole inspiration for the child he derived, that the mother was but a vessel to hold the child that grew from his seed. Later wisdom taught them differently, of course, but I have doubts that my mother's nature will influence my destiny with the same weight as my father's.

"Yes," he says with a small smile, "and I survived the grief of my youth. And so shall you. Perhaps, in fifty-year's time, you will be sitting with a son at the age you are now, consoling him of his pain. And feel that you are unsuccessful and wish to cry for it, as I do now.

"It takes great grief to destroy the Eldar, Nelyafinwë," he says.

Still, when I look into the light that is his eyes, I see the lingering shadow of his.

~oOo~

I am glad to depart early, before even my mother awakens, to avoid the awkwardness of farewells. Every well-wish seems to come with an extra weight these days, hanging ponderously beneath it, unspoken, reflecting as only nauseating pity in the speaker's eye.

So I ask Atar to give my farewells for me. He nods gravely, still fiddling with his bracers. We are at the bottom of the stairs in the foyer; he kisses me goodbye solemnly. Am I really as tall as he is now? Our noses bump; I must be. His hand brushes my shoulder and he is gone, dashing up the stairs to awaken my brother Macalaurë for whatever adventures await them this morning.

There is no room for pity in his eyes. That is why I love my father so much, I sometimes think. To pity is to place yourself above another unjustly, based solely on the uncontrollable circumstances in the other's life, and look down on them, doting, as a parent would a child.

He is my superior, yes. The doom has been foretold that I will never surpass him in any of my efforts. But he needn't stare at me in that way, with simpering weakness in his eyes.

I walk out to the stable to saddle my horse, thinking that whatever affection Macalaurë formed for Atar is about to come to an end. Macalaurë does not do well to wake early in the morning. I wonder what tedium Atar will give him today. Archery, perhaps? Macalaurë is easily distracted, and his aim is not true as a result.

My little brother will celebrate his fortieth begetting day in only a few weeks. My little brother whom I at first despised but forced his way painfully into my heart the first time he fell asleep in my arms. Forced his way with so innocuous an action; he just fell asleep! How could I be so weak! I am no stronger now.

I ride to Tirion. I ride slowly, as is not my way, as is not the way of my father's family. We do things with purpose, as though we are not afforded an endless stretch of moments from now until the ending of Arda. I sometimes feel that that ending will be short for me. And so I ride with haste.

But not today. Today I ride at a slow trot, and I think. I wonder, if Macalaurë stole my heart with just the velvety shadow of his long eyelashes on his round cheeks and a sleepy sigh, how will I be as a father? How will I be able to muster the courage to be strong when my children need discipline; how will I overcome the tears in their eyes? How will I let them out of my sight, knowing that accidents await? How will I not suffer at the sight of their blood outside their bodies? How will I let them go?

For part of love for us, even for the Elves, who live forever, is letting go. I see that now that I have let my own love go; never will I love without resigning myself to the fact that I must one day turn away when I wish only to reach out and restrain my love with all the power in my body. Atar let me go just now: He does not wish me to go to his half-brother in Tirion, I know; he wishes that I would have given in to his invitation to stay behind, at our home. He would have taken off his bracers and put on his work clothes, and we would have sat in the laboratory and talked. Perhaps I would have said things to him that I could not even bring myself to say to Macalaurë at the sea. Perhaps I would tell him that I fear that I will never marry, and that his heir will remain childless, with no heirs of his own. Perhaps I would have wept, and he would have held my hand and said nothing, but I turned away and took the road to Tirion, and he let me.

He let me.

Why?

I will remain alone.

~oOo~ 

Findekáno is sitting on the front steps of Nolofinwë's house, pretending to read.

I know well that look, when one pretends to read: keeping still as though frozen, wrinkling the brow to give the effect of concentration, gripping the edges of the book too firmly. Macalaurë and I pretended to read all of the time in our youth, working on our exercises while Atar wrote letters or in ledgers that would be read by the greatest of the Eldar. We sat across from each other at the table in the library, our eyes fixed on our books but our feet sliding gently beneath the table to come to rest together, big toe pressed against the other's arch. We had a secret code that we would tap against the other's foot while pretending to read. We talked about our family, about what we would do once freed from the library. Of course, we complained about our studies, although I secretly loved them. "This is pointless," Macalaurë tapped once, during an algebra exercise, and Atar's voice rose above the scratching of his quill, which didn't cease, even as he spoke, and he said, "It is not pointless. It forms the basis for all that you will do after in metallurgy and engineering."

We must have looked alarmed because he said, without looking up, "Do you think I learned the language of the Valar yet cannot discern the meaning behind your elementary code?" but he did not tell us to put our feet beneath our chairs and resume our work.

Still, the secret was broken, and we didn't use the code much after, only when Amil prescribed the rare activity out of a book during our sessions with her. She has not Atar's command of languages.

I am quiet and unobtrusive in my approach, watching Findekáno as I walk. His eyes are fixed on the page; his face is screwed into a look of concentration. Yet I see his eyes darting to the sides occasionally, watching the streets, perhaps looking for a flash of red among the dark heads of the Noldor.

I evade his notice until the last possible moment, when I rattle the gate, and then, the book falls from his knees, and he is tearing down his father's front walk at a dangerous pace. Wordlessly, he crashes into me; his face is pressed into my belly; his arms circle my waist. I stroke his dark hair, and when I try to stoop and grasp him in a more appropriate hug, he grips me tighter.

"I did not think you'd come," he says at last, in a breathy voice, tipping his chin to look up at me.

I finally manage to crouch beside him. His arms circle my neck; his head comes to rest on the spill of hair on my shoulder. "Why would you think that?"

"I thought that maybe you had important matters with Uncle," he says, speaking into my neck, twirling a tendril of my hair.

"No, no, your uncle is working with Macalaurë today." We exchange secretive grins; we both know how quickly these private "tutoring" sessions between my father and my brother tend to boil over. "So if we hear any ruckus coming from that direction today, we will know the cause."

"Archery?" asks Findekáno, and I laugh, the first laugh in days that feels as though it erupts from the depths of my lungs instead of being carefully formulated by my brain. "I thought the same thing," I whisper, and he giggles.

We start down the path, towards the book lying facedown and abandoned on the stairs. Findekáno tucks his hand in mine; he lifts his small, pale face in my direction. "Well, Cousin Macalaurë always misses," he says brashly, and I am taken aback: In the presence of my brothers, Findekáno remained demure, but at the home of his father, I see how the summer with us has changed him. Even his robes are fastened crookedly, as though in haste. We reach the steps, and I stoop to fix them.

"He does not always miss," I qualify.

Findekáno makes a humming sound. "I am supposed to ask you something. For Atar."

"Yes, what is it?" I smooth his robes and retrieve the book, noting with relief that the spine was not broken.

"If you are joining us for the midday meal."

Riding slowly, as I did, breakfast with Atar seems far behind me. The golden light is overtaking the day; we are approaching noontime, the luncheon hour in Tirion. My stomach burbles with anticipation.

"Yes, I suppose I will," I say, unable to completely hide the surprise in my voice, at my own sudden return to normalcy. "I should like to have a room to wash and change from my traveling clothes, if that is possible."

Findekáno shrugs and turns to one of the two porters who wait by the door—their faces set like stone, unmoving and (supposedly) unhearing—and the door is swept open, and I am escorted up a set of stairs with Findekáno close at my heels. The basin is filled already with warm, scented water, and soaps and towels have been laid out; the bed is as big as mine at home, and the blankets are stretched taut across it. The room is done in dark green colors—in rich brocades and deep velvets. It is beautiful like nothing we have at home, where guests are uncommon and more apt to track in soot from the forge than to require scented water and velvet drapes.

The porter leaves us, and Findekáno hops onto my bed and watches me as I wash and dress. "I rode yesterday," he says.

"Yes? Did you?"

"I am taking larger jumps now. And Atar says that I may study the sword in my free time and has put out a call for an instructor for me." He sighs. "I wish that you could teach me."

"There are many in Tirion who are better with a blade than me."

"Yes, but Uncle is the best, is he not?"

I ponder this. He easily defeated Lord Laiquiwë that year, yes, but his impetuosity also caused him to relinquish the title. Swordplay is partially physical prowess and partially mental discipline; however intentional his "blunder" may have been, it nonetheless suggests a deficiency in regards to the latter.

"He is very good, yes," I suffice to say. "He does not compete, and so it is hard to say whether he is the best."

"Well, you are his son and so must be very good as well." Findekáno's brow wrinkles as he considers his own words. "Of course, that does not explain Macalaurë …"

I wince. The last time we did swordplay before leaving Formenos, Tyelkormo fared better than Macalaurë.

"Macalaurë has other gifts," I say.

"Yes, I asked if I could continue my music lessons with him."

Laughing, I say, "You might as well move to our house!"

His head snaps up; his eyes are bright and earnest. "Could I? I would rather live there than here. It is very quiet here, and soon Atar and Amil will have the new baby and little time for me. Could I, please, come home with you? Please, Nelyo?"

To hear my epessë—that which I am called by my parents and brothers only—in Findekáno's quavering voice startles me. I have given my permission, but it is a liberty he's never taken. His blue eyes are intense on mine; suddenly, his lip is trembling.

"I am not happy here," he says.

I go to gather him into my arms. He is quivering, trying to suppress his tears.

"I should have been born your brother," he whispers. "Eru placed me wrongly."

"Hush," I say. "Eru does not make errors. If you were born here, then that means that Eru has a purpose for you here. It is not our place to understand what it may be."

His quivering gradually subsides, and his breathing steadies. He is limp in my arms, all frail bones and soft, warm skin. One day, he will be as big as me, but that is hard to believe now.

"There is comfort in that, no?" I whisper. "That nothing is an accident? Everything leads to a greater purpose."

I think of Annawendë and grieve. What is the purpose in that? What is the purpose in creating our spirits to love more than one, or to love one who is unattainable? It occurs to me that, no matter what her decision, someone will be hurt. Someone will, perhaps, be plunged into a loveless and childless future.

"Even pain," I say weakly.

I think of her betrothed, whom I have never seen and do not know, making musical instruments in the hot, dusty south of Aman. If she rode with haste, she should be home to him now; she might be lying in his arms even as I comfort Findekáno. I think of the possibility of children between them. My selfish desire for her seems almost as cruel as separating a married pair. I wish I had the strength to send her a message, to tell her not to consider my heart and my pain when making her choice, but I sense that she will give it no greater consideration than she gives the heart and pain of her betrothed.

Besides, I have not such courage. I would sooner draw a blade across my own flesh.

Findekáno draws back. His fingertips—so soft, like his hands are wrapped in silk—trace the line of my cheek. His fingertips are damp—no, I realize: It is my cheek that is damp.

He kisses my cheek where the tear has fallen. "I love you," he says, and my heart squeezes painfully, for those are the words that it longs to hear. But not in his voice.

~oOo~

I dress carefully, for expectations are different in my uncle's house than at home. I shake the wrinkles from my robes and check twice that they are secured in the proper places. They are pale blue, trimmed in coppery-gold. They bring out the golden glints in my hair, although this is not why I chose them. I have little use, these days, for my beauty.

I open the velvet box stored carefully at the bottom of my satchel, wrapped in the silken trousers that I have brought for sleeping. The noon light caresses the copper circlet within; the red of the metal embraces the golden light in turn. As I place it over my hair, neatly combed and fastened away from my face, I see Findekáno watching me with his mouth hanging open slightly.

"Trying to catch flies?" I tease in a voice I hope doesn't sound too false, and he answers, "It is just that I have never seen you wear it before."

"I wore it last week. At your Recitation."

"But that was an event." An insecure pause and then: "Wasn't it?"

"Of course it was. Does your father not wear his circlet at all times?"

"Well, certainly, but—"

"It is his house. I will follow his lead."

We walk together to the dining room, Findekáno's hand in mine. The room is grand, with an oval table at its center, covered in a cream-colored cloth, and a crystal chandelier sparkling overhead. Aunt Anairë is already there, directing the servants about which wine to serve, and she starts at the sight of me. "Russandol! I did not realize that you had arrived!" She hastens to me; she cups my face in her soft, warm hands; she kisses my cheek. "You are radiant!" she says, but it must be the raiment because my spirit feels as though it is wrapped in the cold fibers that make up clouds.

"Thank you," I say, "as are you. You are well, I hope?"

Her hand strokes her swollen belly. "Yes," she says, with a soft smile, "we are."

We sit around the table and wait for my uncle. He is only a few minutes in arriving, and he appears with a goblet in one hand and a scroll unwinding in the other, navigating the room from memory. He kisses Anairë and Findekáno on their cheeks before noticing me and jumping slightly. "Russandol!" He looks at Findekáno, and his eyes narrow. "My apologies for not meeting you at the gate. My son was supposed to announce your arrival."

Findekáno's cheeks color and he looks at the tablecloth.

"I apologize, Uncle," I say, "for I was not aware of that, and I asked Findekáno to show me my chambers and remain, eager was I to hear of his studies."

"Well, then…" says Uncle Nolofinwë. "It is good to see you, Russandol." He sets the scroll on the table to clasp my hand in his. "We are pleased to have you in our home."

A servant breezes into the room and pours a goblet of wine for Nolofinwë and me and fruit juice for Anairë and Findekáno. Another brings in a tray laden with fresh fruits and a loaf of bread and sets it at the table's center. I watch Findekáno's hungry eyes appraising the nectarines, but he does not reach for them, and so I stay my hand as well, following the lead of my host. After a moment, the two servants return with a covered bowl in each hand; they are placed at the center of our plates and uncovered, revealing a rice soup in a thin, yellowish broth.

Nolofinwë reaches for a piece of bread to drag through his broth, and his wife and son follow, and so I also help myself.

Nolofinwë continues reading the parchment as we eat. The room is livened only by the clink of our soupspoons inside the tureens and Findekáno crunching into an apple. He earns a stern look from his father. "Your family is well, Russandol?" Aunt Anairë asks after a moment of no inquiry from her husband, and I quickly assure her that they are. Findekáno slurps his soup. "Really, dear," says Anairë, and Findekáno ducks his head. I lift my goblet and the base of it rings against my plate; I cringe at the sound, but no one else seems to notice. Anairë is carefully picking seeds from a kiwi with a fork, and Findekáno is drinking his juice with the glass held in both hands.

Nolofinwë stands suddenly, pushing back his chair with a rude bark of wooden feet on hardwood floors and drifts from the room, still studying the parchment.

Anairë's cheeks flush. "He—" she begins, but Nolofinwë comes back into the room at that moment and says, "Oh, Russandol, I meant to tell you: We are having supper with my father and mother tomorrow night. I trust you brought suitable robes?"

"Of course," I say.

"Luck with you studies, then," he says and disappears once more.

~oOo~

At first, the peace of the house is welcomed. Findekáno and I each read our books in the parlor Anairë directed us to use, a room muffled by cream-colored velvet and adorned with lace. There are no windows; the light comes from two lamps in either corner. The house is silent except for the occasional rustle of a page turning.

But, after a few moments of such ponderous silence, it weighs on me. I become aware of my breathing. How many breaths do I draw each day without knowing it? Perhaps I should be more grateful for my lungs, for the air around me. For my blood. I hear each breath now—drawn through my nose, sitting in my chest for a moment, and rushing back out. I hear my heartbeat too, in my ears. It sounds like the susurration of a tiny ocean—tiny waves pounding against my eardrums.

I imagine each squeeze of my heart, pushing blood through my body, slipping through my lungs to accept the breaths waiting there. I imagine the pillowy red blood cells, tumbling over each other in their haste to pour down my veins, driven by my heartbeat, swirling through my body, coming to peer our of my eyes and sit in my ears, rushing into the tangle of vessels in my fingertips that press the pages of the book. I push harder upon the pages and watch my nails turn white as the blood is barred. I wonder what happens to it? Does it sit there, puzzled and waiting, puffed full of oxygen? And the little cells trapped there, squealing as they drown—what of them? I release the pressure, and the color is restored; my rushing heartbeat never falters.

I think I might go mad in the silence of this house.

I peek at Findekáno's progress. He is reading one of Atar's books about the sundering of the Noldor and the Teleri on the Great Journey. We are supposed to be discussing the chapter when he finishes, but he is not even halfway there. I sigh. The sound fills the room and Findekáno looks up, his brow creased. I smile at him, and he resumes reading.

I have the urge to tear through the house, ripping at my hair and screaming until every last silent corner buzzes with the sound of my voice. No words, just noise. I imagine noise gathering in the corner like spiderwebs, not to be driven away so easily by my uncle's taciturn servants, noise coiling up to the silent heights and spilling over the roof. I imagine my voice stirring the heavy curtains, my feet pounding joyfully at the floor, and the air buzzing gleefully in places where noise has been thus far unknown.

When Findekáno was an infant, he must have cried, but it is hard to imagine the silence of this house splintered by the hungry cries of a child. My aunt and uncle's unborn son, also, will cry, I know—three baby brothers have taught me that—but when I try to picture him, with Uncle Nolofinwë's dark hair and blue eyes, I see his face scrunched and wrinkled like the outside of a walnut, the waving fists, and the red face but hear nothing, although his toothless mouth is open. And Anairë comes and soothes him with touch alone, her lips pursed as though humming, but no sound emitting.

I put my hands over my ears, as though to block the silence, and my heartbeat grows momentarily louder—trapped in my ears—but then I realize the futility of my act and let my hands fall quickly away.

Meanwhile, I am supposed to be reading; I am supposed to be pursuing my own studies about the divergence of the Quenya language into the Vanyarin and Noldorin dialects. The book is my father's; he wrote it in his youth, before he even married my mother. The leather bindings are beginning to wear, for the book has passed through many hands before mine; it is regarded as one of the best studies on the subject. My father keeps a list in one of his ledgers of names of those who wish to borrow and read it. Being his son, I do not have to be added to the list to have this honor. Despite this, I have been neglecting it. My brain feels like an ether-soaked cloth, balled inside my skull. I read the words but they sit in the fluid and become drowsy and fall away and litter the base of my skull like weighty, castaway clothes.

I pinch my eyes shut and reopen them; the words swim across the page in my father's beautiful handwriting. I see a waving wheatfield or the pulsing sea but can extract no meaning from the march of letters on the page.

This winter, in the month prior to the New Year, Macalaurë and I will journey to Alqualondë; I will spend my days in the libraries of Taniquetil while he takes his practical courses with his tutor in Alqualondë. I am supposed to know these books of my father's before then; I am supposed to be capable of reciting them, as he can. I will have only a month to hone my knowledge in Manwë's library before I will recite before him in hopes of being noted as a master in letters and history. Last year, I was noted as such in metallurgy, one of the youngest to ever do so—the youngest, of course, being my father.

These notations are important to the Noldor. The Vanyar also pursue scholarship, but they do not seek notations; this is strictly a custom of the Noldor, one granted as a special privilege by Manwë, who understands the importance to us of attaching the study of meaningless letters with still more meaningless letters. In the silence of the house, unable to concentrate, I ponder this importance. It seems ridiculous, suddenly, for one to allow himself such anxiety over having his name chiseled into a marble block that stands in Taniquetil. It seems silly to work one's heart into a pounding frenzy over this when Amil could do the same thing for me at home. I would destroy my own name upon this block, I realize, if it meant receiving other gifts that suddenly seem much more elusive—and more important.

I have taken my intellect for granted for the whole of my life. It seemed a natural part of being a son of Fëanáro; I expect it like I expect to have two hands and two feet; I would be incomplete without it, crippled. While still very small, before Macalaurë's birth, I used to sneak books from my father's study and read them by lamplight in my bed at night; I would write secret sentences on the floor under my bed in chalk. My father laughed upon finding them; my mother's lips pursed, but I could see that she also was pleased.

No one seemed very surprised to see my name chiseled a few rows beneath my father's last winter, a master of metallurgy. No one will be surprised to see it scribed on those blocks reserved for history and letters either, yet I strive for it, a century before it would usually become my due, for I had always assumed that the other things—the wife and the family—would fall naturally into place.

I always held close to my heart the image of my future: a small house, away from Tirion, in the north perhaps; a plain wooden table, laden with books; my wife, slipping her arms around my neck from behind, her flat hands caressing my chest, bare beneath my tunic; small hands on my knees and a tiny voice: "Atar?"

"I am ready, Maitimo," says Findekáno, his voice low, as though he too is afraid of disturbing the deep silence that fills the corners of this house and now my mind. "I am ready to recite for you."

I close my book and smile at him, relieved to let the pain suffered in centuries past dwarf my own.

As if silence has weight, I am exhausted by the day's end.

I am exhausted, and I have accomplished nothing, really, although Findekáno—ever an enthusiastic student—has learned much from me, and I have kept my voice light for him and my smiles frequent in hopes that he will not discern my weariness.

I consider falling into bed in my clothes again, for unwinding the ties of my robes and undoing the clasps seems a tedious effort. I have bidden Findekáno goodnight, tucked him into his bed to wait for his mother and father, and so no one would know; I am alone for the night. I consider it but cannot, and I make my tired fingers remove and cast away my robes. I even hang them on the back of a chair so that they do not become wrinkled, although I have brought a fresh set for tomorrow and a good set for supper with my grandfather.

I remove my silken trousers from my satchel. Beneath them are two books, brought with the hope of reading before sleeping, and I take one at random and toss it onto the bed, although I know, even as I do this, that I will not read tonight. Perhaps I will deceive myself into thinking that I am reading—an acceptable activity—while really lying with the book open and feeling sorry for myself. I wonder if Nolofinwë's servants will comment on the patchy discolorations on my pillows; I wonder if they will take them for tears or overlook them entirely.

I undress and unfold my trousers but do not put them on right away. There is a mirror, and I ponder my body reflected in it, the body that has always been a source of pride for me, that which was so easy to love and have loved in return. I consider my alabaster skin and the red hair so stark like blood against it, falling over my shoulders in unkempt tatters, for I have removed my braids but not yet combed it and probably will not. I touch the scar on my hip; even that, I loved, for it marked me as something different, more exotic. Lossirë, I remember, the first time we laid in my bed, was driven wild at the sight of it, and she put her lips over it and caressed it with her tongue—that piece of flesh long devoid of feeling—while she took me in hand and drove to me a climax so explosive that I ground my heels into the bedclothes and thrashed my head into the pillow to keep from crying out.

But the scar is meaningless, only a blight now, and I quickly draw my trousers over it and turn away from the mirror.

I lie in bed, beside the book. I open it and leave a lamp shining on the bedside table, casting a cone of light across the pages, but I bury my face in the pillow until I must surface for air. I will not weep tonight. I grit my teeth against the sorrow, as though trying to bear torment without crying out. My jaw aches. My weary body draws me towards sleep, but I know that I will never fully claim it—when I do succumb, it will be littered with bizarre and painful dreams—but I will not weep.

I look at the book. The letters twist and swim; I squeeze my eyes shut until the burning tears subside and try again to read. I read a page yet and cannot recollect what I have read. Holding the book open, I press my face into my pillow and try to sleep.

~oOo~

Dreams awaken me. I rise from them with a gasp, like surfacing from undersea. A ghost of a hand still traces my thigh; I bat at it and find that it is just the blanket. I pull it off of my leg. I am painfully aroused, I realize, on the brink of release, and when the blanket slides across my erection, I have to bite my lip to keep from moaning out loud. The house is heavy with the silence of sleep, but I am awake and futilely aroused.

I roll onto my side, carefully, but even the innocent drift of silk from my trousers teases me, and I have to ball my hands into fists beneath the pillow to keep from succumbing to what has become a shameful nightly ritual. I think of other things; I recite meaningless facts in my head and name all of the prime numbers and list the names of all of the Unbegotten, but my arousal does not wilt and bobs into the mattress, and my disgraceful hand loosens itself from its defensive fist and slips into my trousers.

I am rough, wanting it over quickly, and it is painful, so much so that the ejaculation is more one born of defense than pleasure. But pleasure wracks me anyway, making my body flush and grow tense, my toes curling and my teeth clamping so hard on my lip that I taste my own blood. I moan into the pillow, careful to hold my hand to catch all of the fluids that spill forth from my body, wanting neither to soil the bed lent me by my uncle nor the trousers that Macalaurë and my mother will wash after my return tomorrow, until the throbbing subsides and I am left with a palm full of my own fluids, teeming uselessly with life.

I strip and hurry to the bathroom to rinse my hand and wash myself, letting my tangled hair—damp with sweat—tumble over my face, avoiding my reflection in the mirror. My bed is still warm from my body when I return and slip naked between the sheets, and my mind teases me with fantasies that conjure the body of another, arms that slip around my waist and a face that presses into my back, kissing me between my shoulder blades. "Do you think …?" We discuss the possibility of a child, whether we might have found success this time, whether—even as we lie together, fitted to the curve of the other's body—new life is forming within her.

Heedless of the pillows, I weep.

~oOo~

Breakfast is early the next day, and while my silence would have drawn notice at home, here it is customary and unremarked upon.

Uncle Nolofinwë will be taking his midday meal with his lords. Uncle Arafinwë's attendance is also apparently necessary (the briefest ghost of a thought wonders why Atar was not also invited, then, and quickly passes), and so Anairë and Eärwen will also dine together, at Arafinwë's house. "I am having the servants prepare a picnic for you and Findekáno, in the courtyard," Nolofinwë tells me, and I nod. Findekáno's eyes get very bright at this, and I sense that this is a special treat for him.

Today, we discuss Vanyarin vocabulary. For each word that we have in Noldorin, it seems, there are ten words of more precise meaning, crafted by the Vanyar, who delight in the empty meaning of sound. Findekáno wrinkles his brow at this idea I looks at the vocabulary lists that Atar wrote for me years ago and that I now pass to him. "Rain?" he says doubtfully, reading one of the columns.

"Yes. There are different kinds of rain, you see: torrential rains, light rains, the rain that is more a mist—"

"But it is all rain," he interrupts, then sighs and dutifully resumes his lessons, copying each in calligraphy that I will later critique. "I prefer history," he says. His eyes grow bright and he grins, "I like to read about the big battles on the Journey."

I chuckle. "They really weren't battles, love. Only the Valar fight battles. We are not strong enough." His forehead rumples with disappointment, and I stroke his hair. "They were important fights, little one. Just not so dramatic as the battles the Valar have fought."

We take our lunch in the courtyard, in the shade beneath the fig tree. In my robes, I appreciate fully the clothing I usually wear, at home, for the robes are hot and awkward, sitting on the ground. Findekáno doesn't seem to notice. He eats his bread and cheese with an energy I do not possess. I distract myself by peeling an orange in a single long strip, as Atar used to do when I was little and impressed by such minor accomplishments. Findekáno chatters about the training with the sword that Nolofinwë is going to procure for him. He takes the knife that we used for spreading soft cheese upon crackers and dances around the courtyard, practicing thrusts in the direction of the bees that buzz near his mother's roses. An angry wasp attempts to alight on his hand, and he bats it away with the knife and a triumphant, "Ha!" sending the poor wasp hurtling to the ground to ponder its sudden demise. The servants appear with a chocolate mousse and strawberries, and I say in my tired, patient voice, "Findekáno, come, sit, and eat your dessert."

There is a thin sheen of sweat on his arms, and his breathing is audible. "Do you think Uncle will make me a sword?" he asks, collapsing onto the ground beside me and reaching for a strawberry in a single movement.

I twist a strawberry in the mousse. It looks delicious, but I lack the enthusiasm to eat it. "You have a practice sword already."

"Not a practice sword. I want a real one, made of steel."

I start and look quickly about us. The servants have left and all of the lords are lunching with Nolofinwë; cold relief touches my pounding heart. I smile nervously. "Real swords are not allowed, little one."

"You have one." He looks puzzled. "So does Uncle. I saw it. Both of them. In his study." The bold fire in his eyes is wavering; he looks hurt and timid, the Findekáno that was left behind in Formenos. "I saw them, Maitimo!" he says, as though he must convince me, when I know very well of their existence, for I have calluses on my hands that they have caused.

"Hush, little one," I say quickly. "They are not allowed. You were not supposed to see them."

"What will happen to you if the Valar find out?"

I blink. That is a good question, I realize, and one that I have never considered before. Atar has warned us always of the importance of secrecy; we practice only in the deepest and darkest places in the forest or in Formenos, where nothing made of steel is reviled and smiths keep each other's secrets. But I do not know the penalty. As far as I know, no one has ever been penalized in this land, for anything. For all of Atar's diatribes about independence, we have experienced naught but freedom.

So I am forced to reply, "I do not know," in a careful voice, and Findekáno's blue eyes fill with concern.

"Would they send you away? From Valinor?"

I laugh. "We live here, little one. The Valar would not send us from our home."

"Do not use the steel sword, Maitimo. I do not want you to go."

I tickle his chin and wipe a bit of chocolate away from the corner of his mouth. "I will not leave you, little one. I promise."

We return to the house, his little hand in mine, and resume our studies. The day has settled into the languid heat of afternoon; I wonder how my uncle bears these heavy robes on his arms, every day. The full sleeves drag the page as I write; the dry sound irritates me. I shove them about my elbows, but they slip down again. Findekáno and I practice our calligraphy. I draw samples and ask him to find the errors, the stems that are too long or sketched with the quill held at the improper angle. Chewing his lip, he writes out his lessons, trying to make each letter perfect and identical to the next, an imitation of my writing. Atar writes differently; Atar writes so that each letter flows in a flourish, surging across the page, as varied and beautiful as the waves that caress the shore in Alqualondë. Findekáno writes like I do.

"Well done," I say when he finishes. Would I concentrate upon them, I could extract errors, but what is the point? What is the point in constantly approaching but never obtaining perfection, a frustrating asymptote that makes each passing day more tedious than the next?

Findekáno sniffs. "They are not," he tells me indignantly, and jabs his finger into the parchment. "The stem on this one is too short."

"Yes," I say, "it is."

"Then why did you excuse it?"

"Because it does not matter, Findekáno," I answer wearily, "if one stem is a wee bit too short. Or long. It does not matter."

His forehead pinches into an expression of alarm. "What do you mean? You told me this summer that it mattered. That each stem had to be of equal length; that the writing had to equal the beauty of the words."

"You are copying historical facts, Findekáno: years, names, places."

"Yes?"

"So the words are not particularly beautiful."

It is a flimsy excuse, and he knows it. I have taught him well, as my father taught me, to deconstruct faulty reasoning, to expose the truth below, the seed within the rotten, fleshy fruit. He sees my lack of motivation for what it is.

"If you do not teach me, then Atar will send you away and force me to take a new tutor." His eyes fill with tears, and I sigh.

He is right. I asked for this position after all; I volunteered my services, and who would deny the eldest son of Fëanáro, who is one day expected to be revered only beneath his father for his intellectual achievements? And a tiny voice beneath the one that sings of pride mutters that peace between the Houses of Fëanáro and Nolofinwë is important, and that friendship between Findekáno and me will heal ills brought about before we had even entered the thoughts of our fathers.

I press my fingers to the parchment, and angle it to better study my cousin's letters. My sleeve scrapes dryly across the page. It annoys me; I ignore it. I take each letter into my brain and turn it around, appraising it beside its siblings, the way of the Noldor, to judge and strive ceaselessly towards perfection. I dip my quill in red ink and make a violent circle around one such letter on the page.

"Here, you approached it at too steep an angle. Remember that the quill may not stray above or below forty-five degrees; that is the scholar's hand. Copy it again, Findekáno."

"The whole page?"

"Yes."

His face collapses in dismay and then rises into a slow smile of relief as he lifts his quill and begins again.

~oOo~

One of Nolofinwë's servants disrupts the lessons an hour before the appointed time to end, to ready ourselves for supper with our grandfather. I make the appropriate show of disapproval before turning over Findekáno to his nursemaid and retiring to my own chamber to bathe and dress.

I take my time. Even Atar, who believes such frippery to be a waste of time better spent in the forge, prepares for suppers with Grandfather Finwë. He washes the soot from beneath his nails and dresses in his good robes; he puts his silver circlet over his hair. I am equally careful, conscientious of the fact that I have sweated beneath the heavy robes and am developing a pungent odor beneath my arms. I am grateful for fresh robes—perhaps this is why the lords of Tirion change their clothes so often?—and to braid my damp hair off of my neck. I wear my good robes—a deep blue, trimmed in threads the color of flame—and even examine and wipe the dust from my boots before lacing them onto my feet.

I descend the stairs to the parlor where I was told to wait for my half-family. Nolofinwë is there already, and he looks startled to see me, caught unawares, as he is, without the defense of a parchment to read.

"Russandol," he says, "you look well."

I settle to nod my appreciation, and there is an awkward moment of silence.

"I trust my son did well in his lessons this afternoon?"

"He was a bit slovenly in his letters, but he did well otherwise, yes."

Nolofinwë raises an eyebrow. "I will watch after this, then. I will have him do a page of calligraphy for me each day. Or perhaps two?"

"Two would be well."

Nolofinwë admires my sternness; I can tell by the nearly imperceptible widening of his eyes, by the way he inclines his head. I am a son of Fëanáro: I am expected to be both stern and enigmatic. They are the Noldorin components of genius. There are no lighthearted geniuses.

Or so they think. They have never seen my father with my baby brothers; they have never been held in his arms to pick shapes from among the clouds or been taught songs to remember the names of fruit. They have never seen him dance with my mother to the silly anthems that Macalaurë composes. To them, he possesses the curtained mind of a genius.

I suppose that, to Nolofinwë, I possess the same. I do not know my half-uncle very well, I realize. I do not know him, and I do not like him. He does not know me and—judging by the rigidity in his shoulders and the way the corners of his mouth constrict upon sight of me—he does not like me either.

"Your studies, I trust, are going well?" he asks, to disrupt the heavy silence. It is a question borne not of interest but the notion that an uncle is supposed to ask it of his brother-son when his brother-son is preparing to recite before Manwë at the year's end.

I smile and lie: "Of course. They are going very well."

Atar would perceive the lie but Nolofinwë does not—or perhaps he does, and it is I who does not perceive it his notice.

"You are reading in …" He hesitates, determined to prove his interest by answering correctly. "History and … metallurgy?" he finishes finally.

I laugh without humor. "No, metallurgy was last year. This year is history and letters."

His eyes widen. "Two in the same season?"

"My father did three. And he was younger than I am."

"I suppose he did. I was there, you know," he adds suddenly, loudly, as if boasting and attempting to prove something to me about his character. "I was at all of your father's recitations."

Your father. Not my brother. Not even half-brother. There is a disconnection between the eldest sons of Finwë that cannot be reconciled by the notion of shared blood alone. That Nolofinwë needs to brag loudly about his presence at Atar's recitations—and no doubt, he was forced by my grandfather to attend—furthers that notion.

Amil used to tell me when Macalaurë and I fought in our youth—over toys or attention, silly things—that we had no choice in being brothers, but we had the choice of being friends. "Being brothers takes no effort on the part of either of you," she would lecture, with one of us on either side of her, an arm around each of our angry, quivering shoulders, "and you will be brothers even if you despise and raise your hands to the other. It is love and friendship that takes effort; it is pledging to understand one another before allowing your tempers to surge. I ask you both to make that effort and assure you that you will not regret it."

My brother is now my best friend, but neither my father nor my half-uncle ever made such an effort with each other. I try to imagine myself in this room, at this moment, if they had, and cannot.

I smile. I force my hands to lie in peace in my lap, not to clench upon themselves. "Your brother has never told me of this," I say, of Nolofinwë's attendance at Atar's recitations.

Nolofinwë's brow furrows. "Arafinwë?" he says, puzzled.

"No. Fëanáro." Nolofinwë flinches, almost imperceptibly. If I was not used to hiding my emotions in a similar manner, perhaps I would not even had noticed. "But, then again, he speaks little of his recitations before Manwë."

Nolofinwë smiles wryly and says, "No, I suppose he would not," when I sense that there is much more that he wishes to add on the subject.

I shrug. "Why should he? His work remains the same, whether he is named on the stone in Taniquetil or not. Even were he never honored, his work would be the same, and it would be honored, and that is what he cares about."

"Yet you seek the same honors from Manwë."

"Because I have not his skill with my hands and the Noldor are not easily persuaded to read the words of one unproven in his knowledge. One day, hopefully, I will no longer need to care for being honored by Manwë either."

My half-uncle has no such honors, and likely, they would mean much to him if he did, much more than they mean to my father, certainly. He speaks the names of the Valar in reverence, as do many of the Noldor. My father does not. He read before Manwë to please Grandfather Finwë, who attaches great importance to such things.

Nolofinwë opens his mouth to reply, but my aunt arrives then, and we both settle back in our chairs, akin to two children who drop hands raised to slap and claw to their sides upon arrival of a parent.

She pauses, though, and I believe that she senses the tension. She smiles at me and goes to my half-uncle; his arms circle her and hold her close. She kisses his cheek, but their foreheads press together momentarily and betray emotion that they usually don't display in public. It must be possible to like my half-uncle, I realize; to love him even. Anairë loves him: This I see in her eyes, even were she not obviously carrying his child, and the way her hands linger on his body as she sits beside him. Grandfather Finwë loves him, and Findekáno does too, I suppose, despite his resentment towards his father. Yet I cannot. Love for my own father bars any chance of Nolofinwë earning similar regard: I, who find it difficult to dislike even those with the most heinous flaws, who love my father even in the moments when Atar makes it seem impossible, cannot love my half-uncle.

~oOo~

We arrive at Grandfather Finwë's precisely at the Mingling of the Lights, for in place of my father's gifts for creativity and skill, Nolofinwë was granted a penchant for punctuality and good manners, which he considers extensions of each other.

Of course, the same is said of me, so perhaps I should not be so scornful. Grandfather Finwë told me once, when I came to Tirion with Atar, that I am very courtly in my manners: Atar laughed and was surprised, if not pleased. "I believe your blood and that of your wife mingled in perfect proportions in your eldest," Grandfather Finwë had said to Atar, taking my face into his hands, "both in looks and temperament. Your wife's hair, your face." He'd pondered me. "His eyes are his own, though. He has your wife's wisdom, and I believe I see, in those beautiful eyes, a bit of your fire. He is perfect, Fëanáro. Absolutely perfect."

I doubt that now, of course.

Grandfather Finwë meets us at the gates. He embraces me last and holds me longer than usual, waiting until Nolofinwë has walked away to whisper in my ear, "I am glad to see you here." Findekáno stands beside us, looking up at us with his wide blue eyes, twisting a strand of his hair, and overhearing.

Grandfather Finwë releases me and hoists Findekáno onto his hip. "How's my next-to-smallest grandson?" he asks, covering his face in kisses. Findekáno giggles and buries his face in Grandfather Finwë's shoulder. "Next-to-smallest, not for long," he says. "Soon, you will be my middlemost grandson and not long after, I imagine, counted among my eldest, alongside Russandol."

With a start, I realize that he speaks the truth: In only a few months, Macalaurë, Tyelkormo, and I will be the eldest. The next child born will give Findekáno the same stature. Findekáno's eyes widen in alarm, and he turns to look at me, as though asking me to confirm Grandfather Finwë's remarks. I laugh and pat his hair and kiss his cheek. "He is right, little one, but fear not, for being the eldest comes with great responsibility but also greater freedom."

It is a beautiful evening, and we are led to a wide balcony facing Ezellohar, where we may watch the perfect white light blaze against the horizon. Lady Indis waits for us there, and Findekáno squirms in Grandfather Finwë's arms until he is released, and he runs to her and buries himself in her embrace.

With the Mingled Lights at her back, framing her in a soft halo, and with her stiff poise evaporated for the moment, consumed by the joy of holding her only grandchild in her arms, I am forced to regard her as my grandfather must have once, surfacing from grief to behold a woman with the brilliance of a Vala, on the slopes of Taniquetil, and unable to lose himself after that to wholly dark thoughts.

Nolofinwë is selecting a wine from those set out by Grandfather Finwë's sommeliers, and Anairë is answering inquiries about her health, and so I am spared their attention, and it is good because my poise collapses in that moment, and I stand as helpless on that balcony as I did on the night I asked Annawendë to marry me. I stand as a vessel long sealed and suddenly uncorked, and understanding fills me: The spirits of our people are resilient, I realize, and we are made so that we need not suffer in grief forever.

Tears course down my face in twin streams, and I walk with haste to the balcony's railing, to look out over Ezellohar and erase the dampness from my cheeks with my thumb and forefinger. To the left of the panorama is the forest, and I can see the top spires of our house, but I cannot summon the guilt I know I should feel for betraying the emotions instilled in me by Atar. I imagine him, bustling about the kitchen, preparing supper, probably answering the ceaseless inquiries of Tyelkormo or soothing the relentless demons visited upon Carnistir, a tea towel tossed over one shoulder and a wooden spoon clenched between his teeth to free both hands; I imagine telling him what I just thought of Indis and try to feel guilt, but I feel only sorrow for his spirit alone seems incapable of healing its hurts.

Tears dried, I turn back just in time to take a glass of wine being poked in my direction by Nolofinwë. "An excellent vintage, you must try it," he tells me, and his lips are very red from it. Indis has straightened, her hand lingering in Findekáno's hair as he presses into her skirts, and her hand in on Anairë's belly to feel the baby moving. Without the Mingling Lights at her back, the magic of the moment prior is lost, and she is Lady Indis once more. Her tiny shoulders look hard and relentless in a full gown the color of violets and trimmed in silver; her golden hair spills down her back in carefully arranged waves.

I take the wine and sip it. Grandfather Finwë joins us. "Ingwë sent it for Indis's begetting day, and she wished for us to enjoy it tonight," he says. "It is the finest Taniquetil has to offer," he says with a laugh, raising his glass in the direction of the mountain on the horizon. I try to join him and my half-uncle in laughter, but my throat freezes, and I can only smile, stiffly and feeling a bit silly, while my hand clutches the glass so hard that I fear the crystal might shatter in my fist. Grandfather Finwë's eyes are on my face; Nolofinwë is moving away from the railing, to answer an inquiry of Indis', but I am frozen in my place, enduring Grandfather Finwë's stare. It feels as though my spirit is being drawn from my body and being turned over for appraisal by soft, warm hands. He lifts his hand to my face, and with the backs of his fingers, gently traces a line from my temple to my chin; his eyes are a very deep blue, and looking into them is like being trapped in an empty, white room, with nowhere to hide.

A single word squirms into my mind, past my stubborn defenses, as though forced.

Hope.

~oOo~

After an elaborate supper, we sit in on the balcony, overlooking Ezellohar, which is brightening as the night deepens. I am supposed to leave tonight and ride home; I have lessons with Atar tomorrow and a begetting day gift to make for Carnistir, but I am reluctant to leave. Memory of that moment with Grandfather Finwë, touched for a second by hope, forces me to linger. Many times, his eyes find mine over the course of the evening, and while I never feel as exposed—or as soothed—as I did at the balcony railing, I take solace in his blue eyes and the knowledge that he felt grief much deeper than mine, yet his eyes still shine with happiness.

Even Nolofinwë is relaxed, his shoulders slumped, and toying with the stem of his wine glass while he laughs with ease I have never heard.

A light rainstorm passes over Tirion, nourishing the gardens and the crops, and we move indoors, to one of the parlors. Findekáno's head is heavy, and I carry him drooped against my shoulder and murmuring sleepily. Soon, I will be able to put off leaving no longer. My own head is fuzzy with weariness, and I wish not to ride after Telperion's zenith in such a state, nor do I wish to chance Atar's jealousy that I lingered so long in the company of his half-brother and stepmother when surely I could be of greater use at home with him.

I try to set Findekáno beside me on the settee, but as soon as I sit, he scrambles back into my lap and is asleep within minutes. The cushions are soft and hug my body; my chin rests in the dark silk of his hair, and I am soothed by the rhythm of his breathing. Soon, I am being disturbed by Grandfather Finwë's hearty laughter, and I realize that I too have fallen asleep and sit up with a start, awakening Findekáno in the process.

He whines and lets out a little sob belonging to a child much younger than he is and nuzzles my neck with his sleepy-warm face. I feel a soft hand on my knee and turn to see Indis kneeling on the floor beside us. "I will put him to bed, Russandol," she says, but I shake my head.

"I will do it, Lady Indis," I say, rising carefully so as not to disturb him, "for I must be leaving soon. There is no need for you to leave your company. I will put him to bed and return to give you my farewells."

"There is a bedroom, in the northern wing, that he prefers. You will find nightclothes to fit him in the bureau there," she says, smiling softly and leaning over to kiss Findekáno's forehead. "Good night, my beautiful little one," she whispers, and again, I find my heart reluctant to despise her.

The northern wing belongs to the family—Macalaurë and I lived here once, for a week, during that strange time when Atar and Amil were nearly estranged—and so I find my way easily. The hallway is lined with closed doors: I pass what was once Atar's bedroom and where I slept as an infant, in the cradle at the bottom of Atar's bed. Nolofinwë and Arafinwë had their chambers here, before marrying and moving to houses of their own, but they are likewise closed now.

At the end of the hallway is the master bedroom suite that belongs to my grandfather and Indis. Once, it belonged to Grandfather Finwë and Grandmother Míriel, and my father was conceived there, I imagine, as were my half-uncles, strange for me to consider. Grandmother Míriel … Lady Indis … I cannot imagine anyone but my mother sleeping in my parents' bedroom. I try to imagine Anairë or Eärwen beside my father, in their big bed—for I know that Grandfather Finwë entertained the idea that Atar would marry one of them, never expecting that he should find extraordinary love in the most ordinary of places—and the thought is jarring and unpleasant, almost nauseating, and I quickly think of something else.

Findekáno's bedroom is one of the smaller rooms, but the outside wall is nothing but open windows, and the curtains dance in the evening breeze, billowing into the room. I lay Findekáno on the neat, perfectly made bed, where he curls into a ball without protest, and go to the bureau to find nightclothes for him.

The bureau is filled with clothes, but they will not all fit Findekáno. Some are big enough for Tyelkormo and others small enough for Carnistir. I realize with a sinking guilt that my step-grandmother has prepared to have all of us stay with her, even though Atar would never allow it. I lift out a blue-gray nightshirt that Macalaurë wore, during our week here, that is embroidered at the cuffs and neckline with lines of music. I lift it to my face and sniff it, but the peaceful, powdery baby smell that was once Macalaurë is long dissipated, and the shirt smells of the wooden bureau and faintly of Indis' perfume.

I stuff the nightshirt back into the bureau without giving it any more thought and select a set of clothes that will fit Findekáno. I am long practiced in dressing small, sleepy children, and he barely stirs as I remove his robes and slip his limbs into the nightclothes. Lifting him gently once more, I pull back the coverlet and tuck him into bed, but his small hand lifts and slips into my hair, where it snags in a knot neglected when I prepared for supper this evening.

I bite my lip to keep from yelping and gently loosen his fingers, and he whimpers and says, "Do not go, Nelyo."

Nelyo. Had he called me Maitimo, I would have been able to kiss him goodnight and leave, trusting that sleep would make him forget by morning that he had asked me to stay. I would have been able to bid farewell to my uncle and aunt and Grandfather Finwë and the Lady Indis and found the road with little guilt and regret. But he called me Nelyo … I sit upon the bed and stroke his hair. "Little one," I say, "I must go home. I cannot stay for much longer."

"Do not go." I do not know what to say to him, and so I silently stroke his hair, smoothing it thinly over his pillow. Realizing, perhaps, that I have little choice in remaining, he says, "Stay with me until I sleep, then?"

"I will do that," I agree, perhaps foolishly, but my insides still feel jellied and vulnerable from that Nelyo.

"Sing to me?" he asks.

I think of protesting, for my voice is not beautiful—not when one shares a house with Macalaurë, or even with Atar, who does not often sing but has a beautiful voice—but he folds my fingers into his little hand and draws me down next to him. I sigh and close my eyes and begin a lullaby.

I remember waking from nightmares and screaming as though Death were upon me. I remember Atar running into my bedroom and taking my quivering body into his strong, safe arms and carrying me to his bedroom, to sleep between him and Amil. He would sing me this song, and Amil would smile in her sleep and move to circle me with her arms and rest her chin in my hair, and I don't think I felt safer or more peaceful than I did in those moments.

I let my voice find the melody, and in only a few seconds, Findekáno is breathing deeply, asleep. My own eyes are heavy, and I close them for an instant, under the pretense of making sure that Findekáno is asleep before departing. I trust myself to remain awake; after all, my feet still dangle to the floor, and it is an uncomfortable posture. I will remain for only a moment, just to be sure; then I will leave. The lullaby, though no longer being voiced, nonetheless twines through my thoughts, entering a stream of memory, and I fall with it—a pebble carried on a current—to a time long past, where I hear Atar's voice and am no longer the one who is depended upon to keep others safe but am kept safe myself, his arms tight around me.

A few minutes later, I open my eyes, and Laurelin is bright in the windows.

I jump up and nearly fall out of the bed. I am alone—Findekáno's sheets are rumpled, but he is absent—and someone thought to remove my boots, lift my feet onto the bed, and arrange an afghan over me. Nonetheless, I was supposed to be home last night, and it is deep into the afternoon: My robes, having been slept in, are in a state of horrid disarray, and I hastily smooth them while stepping into my boots, to little noticeable effect. My hair is matted on one side of my head and a bundle of tangles in the back. I will have to change my clothes and retrieve the rest of my items from my uncle's house. Shame burns my face at the thought of falling asleep in the bed of my fourteen-year-old cousin, in my good robes, while attending a supper at my grandfather's palace, and sleeping until afternoon. Am I not supposed to be the most dignified of Finwë's grandchildren?

Findekáno left a comb on the bureau, and I use it to straighten my hair as best as I can. Despite the wrinkles and tangles, the reflection in the mirror looks more like me than it has in days. The shadows beneath my eyes have faded and there is color in my cheeks, no doubt brought on mainly by shame in having fallen asleep in the manner that I did. It occurs to me that I must walk down the street in this state, in my wrinkled robes, and I feel momentary horror, then a new, sharper guilt, for Atar would be angered by my vanity.

Stepping from the room, I pause to listen. Somewhere inside the house, a harp is being played; the music is bright and effortless, like the rare rains that fall during Laurelin's hours and appears as drops of gold falling from the heavens.

I walk quietly, torn between hoping to encounter my grandfather—and apologize for my behavior last night—and managing to escape undetected. I can then send a message from home, making the same apologies. Even as I think this, my shame deepens, and I decide that I must find him before I leave.

I follow the music to a courtyard where my step-grandmother sits, beside a fountain, playing a song that complements the laughing melody suggested by the water. I try to turn and leave before she sees me, but a careless footfall alerts her to my presence, and her hands fall still on the harp strings and she turns.

"Russandol!" she says, smiling and rising from beside the fountain. I fumble for words and settle for a lackluster "Lady Indis …"

"You look well this morning," she says. Had the words come from anyone else, I would think it a clever way to chastise me for last night, but her voice is soft and genuine. I avoid meeting her eyes.

"I apologize, my Lady, for my behavior last night."

She laughs. "There is no need for apologies! One who is tired should sleep."

I cannot argue with that. I look up, into her bright blue eyes. She is not dressed as stiffly as usual, and her hair falls in natural waves around her shoulders. She is almost pretty.

"I am sorry too for disturbing your music," I add. "I should like to find my grandfather and be home, if I may."

"Finwë is holding council today, but he will be finished in time for supper. Might I beseech you to wait until then?"

"I should not. My family expected me yesterday, and the hour grows late."

"No mind about that," she says. "Finwë sent a messenger to your father last night, bearing word that you would be staying the night with him. Your father sent no reply but his consent."

It is my stomach that decides for me: Having missed breakfast and the midday meal, it constricts suddenly, threatening to let forth an embarrassing grumble if I do not feed it soon. I try to inconspicuously clamp my arms about my waist, hoping to silence it.

"I will need to go to Nolofinwë's for clean clothes," I say, hoping that I do not look too odd in my wrinkled robes, hugging my belly.

"Perhaps you should wear something of your grandfather's?" she asks. "Come, follow me. I will show you to our chamber and allow you to choose something that fits."

As we walk, she finds a maidservant and asks that a bath be drawn in my chambers. My chambers. They are actually Findekáno's, I think, but surely, he will not mind my use of them.

At the thought of Findekáno, my startled mind suddenly realizes that he is missing. "Where is Findekáno?" I ask Indis as we walk.

"Ingoldo came for him early this morning. Findekáno had his first lesson with the sword today." She gives me a careful look. The Vanyar, I know, do not understand the Noldorin fixation with weaponry and our history in the Outer Lands. They feel that such things are better forgotten; that memories of dark times will dim the joy we feel here in Valinor. Yet, Indis married a Noldo, despite this. She married a Noldo who has swords from the Outer Lands in his study, who corresponds with his eldest son about martial strategies, survival, and Orcs.

We arrive at the chambers that she shares with my grandfather. I stand aside, not wishing to enter her private rooms, but she holds open the door for me. She raises an eyebrow in amusement: You are family, are you not? I can almost hear her thinking. I follow her, through the sitting room and into the bedroom, where I try hard not to look at the wide bed with its blue coverlet and piles of pillows. I try not to think of my grandfather lying with her here, when so many tiny details of the room—the ornate embroidery along the edges of the drapes, the small box on the bureau that is meant to hold needles and spools of thread and now, doubtlessly, hold Indis's jewels—scream of memory of Grandmother Míriel. I wonder how he does not close his eyes while Indis caresses him without feeling the touch of hands more callused but also more skilled; how he strokes the silky hair spilled beneath his cheek upon awakening and does not agonize that the hair is golden and not dark when at last he opens his eyes to behold her.

She draws out a set of robes from my grandfather's armoire and holds them out for me to inspect. Without really seeing them, I nod and take them. My stomach is churning, and I wish to be gone from the room.

I am dismissed to the safety of my cousin's chambers. As promised, a steaming bath awaits me, scented mildly with salts that remind me of the Telerin havens on the shore. I cast away my wrinkled clothes, and the thought occurs to me that I can linger and soak my body for as long as the water will hold its heat, for once, without being interrupted by Macalaurë wishing to query me about some silly detail needed for his lessons or Tyelkormo demanding attention for a new trick he has learned or Amil wishing me to calm Carnistir and leave her in peace to work. As my body sinks into the silky-warm water, I find myself wondering at my eagerness to leave at all.

I have never considered living inside the city walls. Not really. I have considered its negative aspects, taught to me by my father: the constant scrutiny of the lords, the heat that lingers about the streets even at night, the lack of privacy to go as one wants, in whatever state makes one the happiest. I have never considered the peace of solitude. It is not the way of my people to live outside of our families. I would be thought strange to live alone, but then, I am used to that.

My fiftieth begetting day draws near, only two springs away now. I remember my father's fiftieth begetting day feast, for I stood at his heels, already six years old. No one knew—or would have imagined!—that his second son was less than a year from being begotten, another of many impressive accomplishments in so short a life. Impetuous, people called him, for why spend one's talents in only a few years when they can be stretched and savored over the length of eternity? I stood at his heels, his eldest son and heir, in the first of many official ceremonies as such, feeling proud with my copper circlet over my hair and my best robes pressed and worn in a perfect imitation of my father. I think now of my own accomplishments and how people will look upon me as I stand for my own fiftieth begetting day, to receive the blessings of my father and my leave for independence. How will they think of me? As a disappointment, perhaps, in the shadow of one who had done so much by the same landmark in his life.

I remember my father's fiftieth begetting day. I was too young to think of it then, of the irony of Grandfather Finwë speaking the words that gave my father his leave and granted him the rights of an adult. For what rights had my father not already received? He had married. He had begotten a son. He had devised a new alphabet and embarked upon the path of gemcraft. Grandfather Finwë's words to him were empty, I see now. Atar's own words to me will not be so.

But what freedom will he really be willing to grant me? If I ask to move inside the walls of Tirion, will he allow it? There will be little he can do to stop me, after granting me my leave, but is that any consolation? Do I wish to seek something against the wishes of my father? Do I wish to bear his grudge forever in what is only a passing fancy to ease the momentary pain of losing the one I wished to give my love?

Of course, if Annawendë returns to me, this decision will matter naught. We will be married after a betrothal considered appropriate for the heir of a high prince. We will live where we wish—probably outside of the city, so that Annawendë may pursue her trade in peace—and receive my father's blessings. But I will not—cannot—think of Annawendë's return. I cannot afford to hope, no matter its comfort to me, for the ache that it soothes now will be compounded if my hopes are destroyed.

~oOo~

I do not leave the bath until the water is tepid and my skin rises into cold-bumps. Shivering, I dress in my grandfather's robes, selected by his wife, and find that they fit me perfectly.

Grandfather Finwë wears mostly white or light colors, whereas Atar dresses himself—and his sons—in darker shades: in deep blues or greens befitting a midsummer forest; in dark red or black even. I do not often see myself in white—only in work tunics long yellowed from my labors—and examining my reflection in the mirror, am startled to observe the similarities between my appearance and that of my grandfather, if not in features than in carriage. Atar seems to crackle with nervous energy while Grandfather is content to wait, as patient as a rock, seeming as changeless and stoic as a statue, worn only by the gentle hands of time.

Is that me? The reflection in the mirror makes me believe that it could be.

I go to the dining room and am directed by a servant to the courtyard. Indis is already there, and I take the seat she offers me, and we wait—without speaking but silently appraising each other with sidelong glances—for my grandfather.

Her thin, pale hands are folded in her lap; her ankles are crossed primly. I resist the urge to align and realign the silverware or turn the plate so that my grandfather's seal at its center is perfectly even. A servant comes and pours us each glasses of water with bits of ice in it; another comes and offers me both red and white wine. I nod at the white, thinking that—for all his love of wine—even my father does not often have it at the midday meal.

"Russandol." My name in Indis's voice plunks rudely into the silent space between us. Always, I wish to cringe to hear her use my epessë, the use of which I allow her only because it was Grandfather Finwë who asked, pulling me aside in my youth, his breath warm in my ear as he whispered that Indis felt awkward being the only one still calling me Maitimo, and would I allow her to call me Russandol? It was not Indis who was made awkward by it—indeed, Maitimo never sounded strange in her voice but rather natural, like the ringing of bells, fittingly beautiful—but Grandfather Finwë. Heart pounding and mouth dry, feeling nervous and treacherous, I did not then possessed the courage to refuse, and she has called me Russandol ever since.

Cautiously, I look up from my plate and meet her gaze. She is scrutinizing me, but it is not painful scrutiny like that of Atar or Grandfather Finwë: I feel like a page being scanned and read only to learn the knowledge written up it, not with the intention of finding mistakes and painfully erasing that which is declared undesirable. I clear my throat lightly and reply, "Yes, Lady Indis?"

"I have heard of your—" she begins, then suddenly halts and ducks her head, as though embarrassed by those still-unspoken words. Smiling, she begins again: "Should you ever need repose, take this," and I feel her small hand in mine, pressing something crackly and dry against my palm. I turn open my hand and see a small netted bag filled with dried leaves. "Boil them for five minutes and drink the water," she tells me, "and sleep will heal you."

Sleep will heal you. Am I so obviously in need of healing?

I have heard of your—

Of course she has. It has probably spread over the entire city by now, the story of my loss, of the second disappointment of my hopes for marriage. My hand clenches on the bag of leaves, and they crackle as though in admonishment, and Indis does a surprising thing then and folds her hand over my fist.

"Russandol," she says, "time will wash away your pain if you are willing to let yourself heal."

It takes me many moments to realize that she has called me Russandol, and yet I had not flinched at the sound of it any more than I would flinch at a trill of birdsong on the breeze. I glance down at her pale, slim hand on my larger, callused one; I feel the intimate warmth of her skin on mine; I think of Atar's horror at knowing where my freedom has taken me, but the guilt is distant, outside this room even, in a place far away from me.

The door to the courtyard bangs open, and in the next second, I am caught in the tight, bearish hug of my grandfather, giggling like a small child—as I stand taller than he—at the loud kiss that lands inside of my ear. Indis's hand has been torn from mine, and the bag she had given me is clenched inside of my fist once more. "Russandol!" says Grandfather Finwë. "It is indeed an unexpected joy to dine with you today!"

I let my arms rise to return the embrace and wish to be small enough to be lifted into his arms and nuzzle into his shoulder, letting loose tears that I would dare not admit in Atar's company. I used to do this as a child, weep against him as though my heart was broken, and Atar would say in a hurt, puzzled voice, "Why, Nelyo!" a false laugh in his throat, bright with the guilty hope that he had not been the cause of my capricious outburst.

Always, Grandfather Finwë would pass me back to him, and it would be Atar's hands on my back and Atar's voice in my ear, soothing my tears, his electric scent contrary to the notion of comfort filling my nose and my lungs—filling me—until even now, the scent of his discarded tunics still warm from his body soothe even an angry heart into submission.

Anger likely inspired by Atar and soothed by him; it is a contradiction—but then, that is Atar.

I release Grandfather Finwë first and am eager to take my seat and begin the meal, dissatisfaction momentarily quelled, suddenly aching for home.

On the way back to my chambers, I draw the bag Indis gave me from my pocket and open it. The leaves have mostly crumbled to dust by now. A faint, almost soapy scent rises from the bag—the smell of clean, warm sheets on a chilly night—but I am not comforted much less healed, and before I can think better of it, I overturn the bag into one of the potted plants and spread the contents thinly among the soil.

~oOo~

I have traveled Aman enough with Atar to know the importance of being a good guest: I erase all signs of my existence from the chamber that I have shared with Findekáno, removing even the few strands of coppery hair I'd left in his comb. Indis must have had my things brought from Nolofinwë's because my satchel awaits me, and I am glad that I will not have to face my uncle before leaving. I put on my ordinary tunic and riding breeches and carefully fold the robes borrowed from Grandfather Finwë, leaving them on the bed to be taken to the wash, and I wipe my riding boots in the basin so as not to leave even a trace of dust in Grandfather's palace.

The hour is growing late when I go to the stable to saddle my horse and swing astride him, giving a last glance to the palace—grateful for the peace and rest I have found there—eager to return to my home and my family.

Hope has flowered within me, unfolding from the contentment I have found here the way a tiny plant pushes from fertile soil in the spring, and although I long to tear it out by its roots before it becomes large enough to strangle me, I lack the heart. Why? It is such an innocent thing, hope, curling tender and warm inside of me, awakening a delicate fluttering sensation in the space around my heart and sending a weightless energy coursing through my limbs. Visions come upon me and I do not scatter them with dark thoughts or rote recitations: a small house outside the city, four rooms, with stones mortared tightly to forestall any drafts. And there I am, turning my parchment to fit the patch of light from the small window above my desk, my hair unfettered, a strand curling upon the page, at home among the letters. Strong, soft arms slip around me from behind and I am caught in a warm embrace, between hands pressing my chest and the swell of her belly against my back.

There are tears on my cheeks, and I convince myself that the wind has put them there. I even ride harder to heighten the illusion.

In other imaginings, I ride through the gates to my father's property, and she waits for me there: waits with a pulse of lamplight in the window of her cottage, her forge tunics fluttering on the line, her horse nickering to my stallion from the pasture. And I will run to her, and she will pronounce her foolishness for leaving—and mine, for doubting her return.

Hope: such a tiny, innocent thing, growing more profound as the rains fall harder and the wind carries the barest chill, a memory of the winter that has fallen upon other lands, as time marches onward, hand in hand with hope, dragging it—and me—to the New Year and the gratification or death of both of us.

For if the New Year arrives amid the leaping flames and screaming music of the New Year Festival and I am alone, then so shall I be for the life of Arda.

I ride to the north, to my father's house, with time hard on my heels and overtaking me even as I urge my stallion faster, leaning low over his neck, hating suddenly the hope that now will not die within me.

~oOo~

Nighttime lies gauzy and silver across the land when I arrive home, slowing my horse to a walk as we come through the gates. It has begun to rain lightly, and mist rises from the earth and rubs the landscape clean of all distinguishing features. The dark shadows of trees march out of the gloom at me as I ride up the path, and my father's house sits, dark and misshapen, a sprawl of twisted logic. In the front room, lamps make the windows glow as fuzzy squares of blue light, but the rest of the house is dark, and no sound betrays the potential for life behind that light.

The apprentices' cottages alongside the house: also dark.

As I ride up to the stable to untack and groom my mount, though, I note that the forge pulses with the faint, primitive glow of firelight. I hasten to the stable and, admittedly, am shoddy in organizing my tack and hasty in wiping and currying my horse before turning him loose into the pasture. I pause and try to count the shadows of horses at the bottom of the hill, but the mist swirls thickly around them, obscuring one horse even as it reveals another, and all are scattered in a pounding of hoofbeats seemingly muffled by the mist as my stallion plunges into their midst, the mist rushing to fill the empty spaces where they once stood.

Sighing, I realize that the gentle rain is slowly drenching me—droplets racing each other from my sodden hair and down my face—and I turn for the humid glow of firelight from the forge.

Hammerfalls suddenly ring clearly through the night, and I half-expect the gloom to be shattered and fall in water-bloated, fuzzy pieces around my feet, but the fog persists—does it deepen even? Wrapping the sharp sounds as with the safety of a blanket? As I trudge to the forge, hands shoved into the pockets of my breeches, seeking the primitive comfort of my father, I match my footsteps to the rhythm of the hammerfalls and, beneath that, the double-time patter of my heart and rattle of the rain, all of it clattering in the rhythm that has become my life—heart, forge, Arda—all pushing time forward in their own noisy way.

I reach the forge and tug the heavy door open. The place is lit by the glow of hot coals and, above that, a primitive lamp with a candle stuck inside of it. A figure bends over the table, hammering more quickly now, and I call softly so as not to startle him, "Atar?"

But the figure that straightens is not my father, it is Vorondil.

"Maitimo!" I hear the hammer tumble from his hand and to the table. We both ponder each other from across the room, and the silence chokes the words from my mouth for many moments before I finally manage to fumble, "I—I thought you were my father."

"Yes … but no, I am not. Your family is listening to your brother play, but I thought to come and do some work alone."

"Oh, well, I am sorry to interrupt—"

"No, Maitimo, that is not what I meant."

Vorondil is tall and narrow, dark hair secured neatly in a braid down his back, and yet he strives to fill my father's image: Vorondil, whose colors—were he a painting—would neatly fill the lines drawn by his creator, never spilling into the white spaces forbidden him. His forge gloves match, I notice, biting my lip to keep from laughing, because my father's forge gloves never match unless random chance would have him grab both a glove and its mate from the disordered pile by the door; sometimes, he even puts his gloves on the wrong hands and seems not to notice how his fingers don't properly fill them, tugging at them and cursing as he works, oblivious in his genius. I went once and removed the misfit glove and slipped a proper one in its place, as though I was the father and he was the absentminded child, and we both laughed and he surprised me with a kiss on the cheek for gratitude. And, logic restored, I was the child again.

Vorondil waits for me to speak, but what is there to say? And I realize how I must look: my wind-torn hair dripping and stuck to my face and neck; my tunic soaked and outlining a frame that has lost some of its shapeliness for skipping too many meals. I lift minutely trembling fingers to push my hair behind my ears and restore some measure of a dignified image, clear my throat, and say, "I will leave you, Vorondil, to your work."

But as I turn to leave, he says quickly, "It is really no bother, Maitimo. I am finished, actually."

In the flickering lamplight, I can see the piece on which he was working—the beginnings of an ornate handle for a hairbrush, by the looks of it—hammered only partly into shape. Following my gaze, he quickly adds, "This was not my reason for coming here but merely a distraction to keep me busy while my 'reason' cools." His lips twitch into a smile. Vorondil never smiles for long, as though he hasn't the effort to spare for prolonged hilarity. But I wait while he bustles about, putting things away (as Atar has a tendency not to do—or to do only partway before becoming distracted by something more exciting), and even wiping the table clean of dust. I note the supplies that he returns to their proper hooks and drawers, and I realize that Vorondil's secret task will emerge from a mold in the shape of a ring.

So I am not the only one who harbors secret hopes. But he is sensitive enough to keep his back between me and the ring, slipping it immediately into his pocket, as though understanding that betrothal rings awaken painful thoughts for me. But of course, I realize after a moment—during which Vorondil removes his apron and hangs it neatly on the peg beside my father's—he was here for both Lossirë and now this.

We walk together, slogging along the muddy path through a rain that falls brisker now, Vorondil with the prescience to have brought a light cloak to keep his hair and clothing mostly dry. Passing closer to the house now, I can hear the sound of Macalaurë's harp, the notes falling in rhythm with the rain. I should stop in to announce my return at least, I realize, and Atar would no doubt be irritated to know that I am home and possess no intentions of making my greetings, but then I would be coaxed into coming into the sitting room, into the blue halo of lamplight, then urged to sit on the chaise with my mother to hear the end of Macalaurë's song, and before long, Tyelkormo would be curled in my lap, sleeping, and Vorondil would walk forth in the rain without me. And suddenly, I don't want that.

The apprentices' cottages are alongside the house, and I realize that I have never been inside of them, despite the fact that Vorondil has been my father's apprentice for almost twenty years now. If asked, I wonder what I would call him: Would I name him a friend? Vorondil is only slightly older than me and was likewise proclaimed a prodigy at a young age—hence his appointment here—and the convergence of our studies has caused us to work closely at times over the last two decades. But is he a friend if I know not the interior of the place he calls home and could not name his two younger brothers if pressed, much less recognize them among the throngs of Tirion? I realize that, although I know he is courting a woman because Annawendë told me as much, I do not know her name or how they met; in fact, I cannot imagine him meeting a woman at all. Most of his spare time is devoted to study, and when he manages to accompany Macalaurë and me to a picnic, he is drawn to the tight, conspiring circles of other craftsmen—mostly male—more so than the dance.

He lets me into his cottage, and with a bit of fumbling and the sound of metal scraping metal, a lamp is opened and meager light brings the room into dim focus. There is a desk against one wall and a stove against the other; old blankets strung along a line partition the single room into living and sleeping areas. Against the remaining walls, shelves stretch from floor to ceiling and are filled with books and crafts.

As Vorondil opens the second lamp, the greater light reveals a room surprisingly cluttered—for Vorondil anyway. At his desk is a bowl with a spoon stuck to the bottom by congealed porridge and a chipped mug; the cozy rag rug in the middle of the floor sits askance and three pairs of identical boots are tossed alongside it in a tangled heap. Vorondil is blushing and already hastening to the desk to sweep away the dirty dishes. "Ai," he says, "I am sorry for the mess, but I was not expecting company." He ducks through the curtain to where presumably the lavatory is off of his sleeping area, a suitable place for abandoning mess in the basin.

On his desk is humble charcoal sketch of a girl encased in an ornate gold frame. She looks very familiar to me, and as I struggle to retrieve her name from the mire of female-sounding syllables suddenly sloshing through my brain, I am struck with an image of a forest clearing lit by lamps strung overhead and Macalaurë playing a bright song and a girl in my arms too shy to say much and I, too distracted to coax her: "Nimerionë," I whisper, and when Vorondil reemerges from the back of the cottage, empty-handed, I realize that the portrait is in my hands, and I am touching her face, careless of the smudges I might leave. I set it hastily back on the desk.

"I had that made the day after our return, when your father was kind enough to give me a day off to meet Nimerionë in Tirion. An artist in the lowest district did it for a lampstone." He bustles around the small cottage, putting a teapot onto the stove and gathering various bottles from the shelves around the room. "She is lovely," I say in a voice that sounds flat even as I try to rouse it to enthusiasm but Vorondil—so often flat himself—casts me one of his flickering smiles and doesn't appear to notice. "Thank you. I happen to agree. Blessed was I on the day of that last picnic before we left for Formenos, although I did not then know it. I was so miffed over Annawendë—"

He stops and bobbles and nearly drops a bottle of clear liquor. "I am sorry."

"Do not be."

"I suppose you knew I fancied her." He has turned away from me to retrieve two cups from the shelf over the stove, but I can tell he's blushing by the pink tips of his ears.

"Yes," I say hesitatingly.

"But she saw only you. And I cannot fault you for that, so do not worry. In fact, I am now grateful, for when I awoke the next morning, it was not with thoughts of Annawendë but Nimerionë."

And had I not, I would be in your painful predicament.

He does not say this, but we both sense it, unspoken, between us, and he blushes darker, and I quickly change the subject. "Nimerionë … what does she do?"

"She is a silk dyer. Oh, her work is beautiful!" Relieved by the change of subject, he darts back through the curtain and returns a moment later with a tunic done in a delicate pattern of drifting shades of green. I cannot imagine Vorondil—who seems to live in gray and brown tunics of coarse cloth and plain design—wearing something so splendid, and as though sensing my thoughts, he laughs and says, "Not that I imagine ever wearing it. It would look wonderful on someone like you, but me …" He looks at it and shrugs. "She remains convinced, though." He carefully folds the tunic and places it on his desk amid the books and clutter, returning to the stove and the teapot that is beginning to steam.

"I will help you?" I offer.

"No, please, sit. In the chair! I should have offered." The only chair in the room is at his desk. I reply, "Nay, you—the host—should have it."

And so we both end up on the floor, mugs of tea clasped in our hands. I idly blow on mine—knowing that such an insignificant action will do naught to cool it—watching the ripples my breath makes on the surface. The scent of it stings my nose, and I know that he has poured more than tea and cream into it. I sip it—risking the tip of my tongue—and find that it is so good that the blistery feeling on my tongue and lips is easily ignored to delve in for a second sip.

"This is delicious!"

"It is an old recipe common in our town. It warms and soothes, or so is said."

Neither of us look at the other, but the word is there—soothes—between us. I realize how I must still look: dripping hair and sodden clothes, trembling slightly with the cold, certainly not the beautiful and collected prince of rumor. But Vorondil also recalls to me a device slipped from its track, his usual stoic manner betrayed by the way he hugs his knees with one arm and stares into the mug clasped in the opposite hand as though looking for answers in the Tengwar-swirls of cream upon the surface, his brow actually furrowing in an image of concentration. If I look intent, perhaps he will not speak to me. Then why did he invite me here, if not to speak?

"I would like to see your ring?" I ask, and he flinches, sloshing hot tea on himself. "If you would show it?"

And then grins wryly. So he has learned something from my father. "Is there nothing that you do not see? Even that which would harm you?"

"It will not harm me. And your 'secret project' was fairly obvious." I have experience in these matters, or do you forget?

He sets his cup carefully on the rug and pokes his fingers into the pockets of his trousers, coming out with a ring pinched between them that he drops into my palm, saying, "I can't help wondering if it is too soon—"

"Do you love her?"

"Of course."

"Then it is not too soon."

The ring is two bands twined together, the banal symbol of interlocked spirits, but I cannot deny that it is beautifully made. "I intend to engrave it," Vorondil says, "one band with her favorite line of love poetry and the other with mine." I nod; so he is capable of original thought after all. The thought startles me. Do I begrudge him? Of course I do. I hand the ring back to him.

"It is beautiful. And if she accepts? What of your ring?"

"I will make it then and let her choose the design." The ring is slipped back into his pocket, close against his body and away from my jealous eyes, and with it gone, we each lift our eyes to the other like shy maidens contemplating the object of our desire in front of us—belonging to us—for the first time.

We speak long this night, on topics ranging from metallurgy to my father, our words coming faster as our bellies—and brains—fill with the intoxicating tea. Annawendë slips into the conversation with all of the aplomb of a leaf falling upon our heads, and I speak for the first time outside the family of what happened—or perhaps, what didn't happen—between us and am surprised to feel Vorondil's hand suddenly clasp my wrist, his fingers bony and slightly cold but the touch so obviously meant to be comforting that I put my hand atop his and feel his growing warmer beneath it.

It is only when our inebriation drags us toward sleep that I reluctantly rise to leave, and he walks me to the door. "Maitimo," he says, as I fumble the doorknob, "I have heard no word from her."

Indeed, I know this. I nod and manage to thank him through lips and tongue thickened by drink, and words slip out after this: "I'm sorry. For the loss of your friend."

I step into the night. The rain has stopped and the land is sodden, the air heavy with the earthy odor of rain-soaked soil, the sweet-pungent scent of wet grass beneath it. Behind me, Vorondil says something, the meaning of which refuses to seep into my brain, instead bumping against it with the futility of a moth against a lamp, barred from the flame.

"She may yet return."

My mind is yanked from the depths of sleep, and I awaken in Atar's arms. I have been conscious, all night, of sleeping with Atar for he is like no other: Lying beside anyone else, their thoughts leak into mine; their emotions color my dreams unnaturally, but Atar does not. Indeed, I do not even dream in Atar's arms; I cannot. My dreams are lost and distant, the way a star that is bright in the sky will disappear in Ezellohar, beneath the Light of the Trees.

We are in his study, sleeping in the rocker in which I imagine he rocked each of my brothers in turn before me, when they interrupted his work with their troubles. Do I have troubles? I do not completely remember how I ended up here. I remember slipping from bed and creeping down the stairs on soundless feet for a glass of water, crouching at the bottom to watch Nelyo pass—unseen—crimson hair against a sepulchral face, clutching the banister for balance, smelling of the stuff that Atar uses to clean our wounds that burns and that he drinks while in reverie. And when I looked up again, I was looking up at Atar, sitting behind his desk with his quill pressed to the parchment and leaving a big blot of ink, his eyes empty as the sky. I mewed and he looked up and walked around the desk to lift me into his arms as though he'd been waiting all night for me to arrive to do just that.

And then … now. Here I am, with his cheek pressing against my hair and my head resting against his chest, his arms wrapped around me just tightly enough to keep me from toppling onto the floor. He has removed his boots, and the thick socks that he wears to the forge are dingy with sweat there is a hole in the toe of the left one. I can see his hands where he holds me in place, and there is a dark scratch of ink on his thumb. He doesn't move or twitch but I know that he's alive by the delicate whisper of his breath in my hair.

And the light: white light, so bright that I cannot look upon it for long and it seems to rend the very air, revealing that which existed before the beginning of the world, as though this room, this world, this life is nothing more than a thin fabric stretched over the secret Fire about which Eru whispered to the Valar. To be surrounded in such light for too long is to go mad, to lose one's sense of direction, unable to tell up from down or left from right, senselessly turning in every direction at once and reaching for what cannot possibly be there. But it is. I shake my head and hear myself whimper, but Atar doesn't stir, and I shift—trying not to awaken him—until I can slip out of his arms and to the floor.

His arms remain clasped in a circle, as though I am still there, and his head lolls and his hair falls upon his wrists. But I do not stay long to ponder. I scamper from the room and into the corridor that is pale with early-morning light.

My feet slide on the slippery hardwood floors that Atar and Amil polished to a bright sheen yesterday, working from one end of the hallway to meet in the middle, pressed back-to-back and shooting furtive, angry whispers from the corners of their mouths at each other. They did not see me as I crouched in the doorway to Atar's study, watching them and listening to their words: all of their words. Atar spoke of my begetting day—which is next week—and said something of Nolofinwë and not needing Nolofinwë's blessing upon the begetting of his son, and beneath it, a thought had crackled; if words written on a parchment crumpled in a fist could speak, they would sound like that, and I sensed a thought of Nelyo, who remained in Tirion with our uncle and grandfather, connections made with the same senseless fury as lightning joining the sky to the ground.

It seems that Uncle Arafinwë, Aunt Eärwen, and the King and Queen of the Teleri will be coming to a supper tonight in my honor. The road between our house and Tirion rang with hoofbeats yesterday, Atar scribbling notes to Uncle Nolofinwë while standing in the forge and shoving them back into the hands of the tired messenger who refused to meet his eyes. There was a feast scheduled next week in Tirion, for my begetting day, but there was strife between Atar and Nolofinwë, and sparks riddled the white light that is my father's spirit, painful to behold, and I looked away.

Sparks … jealousy? Images flickered like pages riffled by one's thumb, becoming blurred: a golden woman; two bright, interlocked rings; a brown-haired boy on a robe-clad knee; a sketch of a pale-faced, raven-haired woman with her eyes closed in charcoal smudges, never to open … Atar's voice to my mother later, though, cracked the air like a whip: "cannot bear him," words sketched over an image of Nelyo.

I wonder if there will be a feast next week; if I will see Grandfather Finwë and my cousin Findekáno. The road between our house and Tirion is silent.

~oOo~

There is much to do in preparation for the arrival of my aunt, uncle, and the Telerin royalty, and I do not have long to wander the hallways—pressing my hands to doors and tasting the dreams of the ones sleeping within—before I hear footsteps in the hallway. Atar. I am standing in the kitchen, and I scramble beneath the wooden table and crouch there, watching Atar's feet enter through the doorway—clad again in his boots, although they are untied and he keeps treading on the laces and cursing—and hear them walk to the sink where the pump squeaks, and I know that he is putting on a kettle of tea.

Softer footsteps, almost shuffling, enter a few seconds later. I press my cheek to the floor to watch them. It is cold and dusty; Macalaurë was last appointed to dust the floors, and it is like him to neglect the spaces under the furniture. I suppress a sneeze.

Amil's feet in tattered slippers join Atar's in boots at the sink; one slips between his, pressing toes to arch. "You did not come to bed last night." Her voice is soft, regretful. He traps her foot between his and there is a long silence during which I close my eyes and watch them with my other eyes. Amil's delicate purple threads weave into the white light that is Atar; he should overpower her, but he seems almost to dim instead, as soft as Telperion, and I feel my body sag as though relaxing towards sleep.

"I had all intentions," he says at last.

The ankle of her free foot wraps his. "I wanted you."

"As I wanted you. But our little one had other ideas." His whisper barely reaches my ears but trickles into my mind instead, loud and cold like water, and I shake my head at the surprise of it. "It is early. Macalaurë sleeps late and Nelyo was late getting in last night—"

"But you neglect to remember your Tyelkormo, who insisted that he could comb his own hair and dress himself for breakfast." Her foot tugs from between his, and she walks away, but their colors are separating only with reluctance, and I imagine their arms stretched between them, fingertips pressed together until the last possible moment. "And Carnistir is still afoot," she adds.

The kettle whistles, and they come to the table, sitting side by side on one of the benches. I smell the strong aroma of the bitter tea that Atar likes to drink in the mornings. "It is like a spark on a fuse," he is fond of saying, laughing. "The leap that propels me into the day."

Their feet—slippers and boots—come beneath the table. Amil's foot is only inches from my face; I could bite her toe through the worn slipper and watch the splash of surprised colors at her reaction. But I do not. I listen with one ear pressed to the floor and the other opened to the air—thought and sound—and I sense the movement of words between them, but it travels deeper than that which I can detect, although I feel my whole body tense with the effort, and my legs—stretched behind me—curl to my chest, my clothing making a faint rustle against the floor.

A moment later, Atar's face peers beneath the table. "Little one!"

I open my eyes wide in feigned innocence and pop my thumb into my mouth: Of course I was not thinking of biting my mother's toe. It works—he longs to believe the best of us, his sons—and he reaches beneath the table and carefully extricates me and sits me on his lap. Amil laughs and picks clumps of dust from my hair. Now I feel the thought quite clearly, zipping between them: It is well that I resisted you after all.

Atar kisses the crown of my head and ruffles my hair with his laughter, even as he circles Amil's shoulders with his arm.

It is not long before Turko is leaping onto the bench beside us, clasping Atar around the neck with his arms and asking, "Can you guess from which step I jumped today?" and Atar guesses—voice tentative with hope: "The … third?"

"No! The fifth! And I landed on my feet!" and Amil gasps and pinches her eyes shut. "Tyelkormo, no! You will break a leg."

Macalaurë is next, yawning and scratching in his uncombed hair. His eyes are puffy and narrowed grumpily as he pours himself a glass of juice without so much as a greeting. There is music in the air about him like a swarm of gnats, and he cannot bat them away. Nelyo arrives no more than a half-minute after him. He looks composed—his clothes are tidy, his hair neatly plaited—but there is an expectant pause when he arrives, as though we are waiting for him to crack in half and planning how we shall repair him.

Macalaurë passes the half-finished juice to him without a word.

"Well," says Atar, his voice exploding in the silence, making Macalaurë wince and the music swirl faster, "if we all work together, we need not prolong these ordeals of breakfast and tidying the house." In the next moment, my feet are on the floor, and I am so surprised that my legs collapse beneath me and spill me onto my backside, but Atar is already striding to the stove, empty teacup in hand, and Nelyo must set his juice aside to come and lift me back to my feet, planting a kiss upon my wobbling lip.

~oOo~

"I do not understand why the house must be impeccable for guests who only announced their arrival at the last moment."

Macalaurë is grumpy and distressed today. It is much later—Laurelin is bright in the windows—and we four brothers have been sent to the kitchen to prepare the ingredients that Atar will need to cook supper. A cart driven by a silver-haired Elf arrived this morning shortly after breakfast, and Atar proudly set the crate of fish upon the table. Macalaurë and Nelyo are cleaning them now, and the kitchen reeks of the garbagey odor of fish.

"And all this for family, nonetheless."

"King Olwë and Queen Birildis are not family," Nelyo says, and Macalaurë rolls his eyes.

Nelyo and Macalaurë had been charged with cleaning the fish; Turko and I are supposed to be shredding lettuce for salads. King Olwë has a preference for iceberg lettuce, and Turko and I have found that the outer leaves fit perfectly on our heads like green caps. Turko punches holes in another leaf and puts it over his face like a mask, moaning like a wraith and pressing his cold, green-fleshed "face" to mine.

Nelyo should be minding us and chastising us for playing with the food and neglecting our work, but he is knuckle-deep into a filet of fish, brow rumpled, extracting tiny bones that he leaves in a little pile. Macalaurë is also rooting around for bones, but he is yanking them out and slapping the de-boned filets into a precarious pile twice the size of Nelyo's. "Why do we have to have fish?" he gripes, his opportunity to complain about the familial nature of our guests and the subsequent excessive cleaning thwarted by Nelyo. "Picking out these tiny bones is ridiculous."

"Seventy-five percent of our guests are Telerin … would you suggest serving venison steak?"

Macalaurë glowers.

"Then Atar should hire servants like a normal person."

Nelyo ignores him and plucks the topmost filet from Macalaurë's impressive pile, pokes into it, and immediately comes out with a fingerful of threadlike bones. "I would be more careful with these filets," he says, giving Macalaurë a stern look and poking the bones in front of his face. "You're going to choke someone."

"Hmph," says Macalaurë, but he goes back to his "finished" piles and scours more carefully.

Turko has punched a mouth-hole in his lettuce mask, and he pokes his tongue through it and licks me, so I slap his ear and make him yowl. This makes Nelyo look up, at last, his face wearied. "Tyelkormo … Carnistir …"

"Why do you always say my name first? Why is it never 'Carnistir … Tyelkormo …'?" Turko's impersonation of Nelyo's sweet-patient voice is skilled enough to be insulting, and Nelyo quickly retorts, "Because you are the oldest and should therefore know better."

I try to view my brothers through my outside eyes only, but that is becoming harder as I get older. I must wrest the inner eyes shut, like pressing shut a lid rigged with heavy springs, and simultaneously widen my outer eyes. It is a good thing that Turko and I have already been acting silly because, otherwise, I might look odd. As it is, he sucks in his cheeks and makes fish-lips against my cheek, trying to provoke me to slap him again. But I will not succumb. I stare intently at Nelyo and Macalaurë instead: one of them noble and patient and the other childish in his impertinence. Or are they? Macalaurë's face is set into a frown; he received a letter yesterday from the girl he fancies saying that she would be returning to Alqualondë before his punishment expires. (This I know because I sneaked into his room and read it under his bed while he was weeping into and punching his pillows.) He rips the bones from the fish as though they are guilty of provoking his pain. I wish to cringe at the sight of him because his temper needles me in a way that is most atypical of Macalaurë.

Nelyo sits with shoulders rigid and scarlet hair secured neatly back from his face so that it doesn't drop into the food; his face is placid and wiped smooth of concern, but when he looks up, his eyes are shadowed and bleary. He blinks several times at the piece of lettuce on my head before smiling with what might be patience or might be weariness (with my inner eyes closed, I cannot know) and reaching across the table at me, while I watch with eyes stretched open wide—expecting him to pluck away my "cap"—and instead pats my head and goes back to delving his fish filets.

It is beginning to hurt watching him like this; my eyes are becoming dry from not blinking, the muscles of my forehead tense and sore. He is a master of facades; I could almost be convinced but my strength fails then and my inner eyes pop open, and his color washes me: silver streaked with blood-red pain, and I find my lips tremulous and no longer under my control. I can smell it—his pain—like hot copper, and my throat closes in disgust, and it hurts me. A sob escapes past my lips, and Nelyo lets his head drop into his hand in frustration, ignorant of the fact that he has smeared his brow with fish parts.

Turko's mask drops from his face and he is pondering me with wide, guilty eyes. He smothers me in a hasty embrace, whispering in my ear, "Don't cry, Carnistir. I'm sorry; I shouldn't have put fish-lips on you or licked your face, just don't cry and make Nelyo more sad."

That quickly, the tears are gone from my eyes, washed away in the cool relief of green, and from the safety of my brother's arms, I again ponder Nelyo with all eyes wide open. He is smiling sadly at us, and I know that he has heard Turko's apology and that he is surprised—yet not dismayed—that we have perceived his pain, even through the peaceful mask he wears. And Macalaurë is wiping the fish parts from Nelyo's forehead with a tea towel and griping about how clumsy and senseless he can be, but his annoyance is clearly contrived, and his hands are gentle on Nelyo's face.

There is peace between the four of us now, and Turko and I even set to our appointed work on the salads, although we leave our green caps on our head. Macalaurë stops complaining so much. It is difficult, I understand, to muster complaints in the face of someone far less fortunate than you.

In the new peace, I can detect all of their thoughts, although they remain only vague scratchings, a clear word here or there. Macalaurë is counting days; his mind is a string of numbers repeated over and over again, hoping for a different result: days left of his punishment, days left until his girl's leaving, and the space between. He sighs. Turko's thoughts are a target and an easy shot that he should not have missed. He replays his failure over and over. And Nelyo is reciting bits of lore, which should not surprise me, as he is apt to spend his idle hours in such pursuits, and he does have recitations coming up in two-month's time. Only I am not fooled into believing that he is studying and not simply distracting himself, for his repetition is feeble, and the facts he recites are simple lists that I am beginning to learn now. I pry deeper, trying to find the thought that underlies the string of names—the Unbegotten Elves—that makes him wish for distraction, but he looks up sharply, and I withdraw before he senses me.

Still, his eyes happen upon mine, our fingers moving in a place beyond our perception, shredding lettuce and prodding for bones. I blink, not liking the intensity of his stare, and a voice as subtle as a shiver ripples through my mind: Little one?

Lettuce falls from fingers suddenly numb, and I cannot break his gaze even if I wished. Never before has he "spoken" directly to me like that, in acknowledgment of my prying into his thoughts.

I test it with the same wincing curiosity as I imagine I might have once spoken my first word, uncertain of the results: Nelyo? I do not remember my first word because I spoke long before I discovered that only by giving voice to one's words, others listened and responded. Only Grandfather Finwë was different: I remember him looking my way and smiling, then wrapping me with his cloak while Atar said, puzzled, "It is sweltering!" and Grandfather Finwë replied, "Nonetheless, he is cold."

Nelyo smiles at me, and I feel the connection between us renewed, humming in the same way that a wire will transmit vibrations even at the slightest touch—so the lightest thought enlivens that which is between us. I imagine lips parting to speak, a breath drawn, giving life to the words waiting on the tongue, but Atar pushes into the kitchen then to check our progress—grimacing and poking into Macalaurë's filets to see that the bones are all removed—and Nelyo's attention is snapped elsewhere and the frail connection between us is severed.

I wonder at what has occurred between us: only three words, but my heart is pounding with an excitement I rarely feel and I am enveloped in a feeling that looks like the sparklers that Olórin gives us at the Winter Festival, when we write our names against the velvet-dark shadows, the feeling that crackles around Atar when the pieces of his research come together into a solution. I have wondered at these "gifts" of mine, testing them as of late and wondering to what extent—if any—others experience the same. Could they also pry open my secret thoughts with the ease of opening a jewel box, revealing that which lies glittering within? Jealously, I guard my thoughts, wrapping them in darkness, just in case. Lately, I have discovered a perverse joy in concentrating as hard as I can in Turko's direction and willing him to do something innocuous, to see if he responds: Put your hair behind your ear! His fingers slipped his hair behind his ear, and he did not look up from his lessonbook.

I like to listen also to thoughts beneath speech, at the supper table, for instance, where Atar often chucks me under the chin, grinning, and saying, "Why so quiet, little one? You are worrying me to Lórien!" It amuses me, what people will reveal in thought that they will not put into words, like the time that Atar gave Amil highest praises on the new grain blend she was using for our breakfast bread—making her blush at the lavishness of his praise—while secretly planning to eat the bread first and in as large of bites as possible to get it swallowed before his throat thought to be offended by its dryness and gag it back up. Or the way that Macalaurë will compose song lyrics while Atar is instructing him or how often Turko thinks of the endless forests outside our doors while his eyes are unerringly intent upon his books.

But then, there are the thoughts that I cannot bear to hear, and I turn away and imagine hands over my ears, shutting them out: Amil looking at Atar, his face livid with temper, and wondering, Can I bear him until the ending of the world? Yet, just as hands cannot bar the sounds of shouts and screams, so I cannot always help but to hear the secret thoughts in people's heads, once I am listening for them.

When did this start? Although I have only recently taken to honing my skill, it has always been there, and it was long before I realized that I was odd in it. Atar once asked me, when I was first learning to write, to recount my first memory. He'd tucked the quill into my hand and smiled at me to begin, and I scratched away about a weightless world full of gentle, violet light, and a bright hand reaching for me, palm pressing the space before me, and I'd stretched with arms weighed as though mired in mud to press my own hand against it (although I have no memory of the hand, only of wanting to touch the light), yet I could never quite reach, and eventually the light had gone away, the handprint fading in the rushing blood that never left my ears. But I knew that the hand wanted to touch me as much as I wanted to touch it, and it had also been disappointed.

Atar puzzled over those words and even took them to Amil to be discussed behind closed doors. "He has invented it." Amil's voice was reassuring, and my memory again returned to that gentle, violet light. "Either that or recounted a dream. You know where his dreams take him."

Atar was not convinced, and Amil knew it, yet they spoke of it no more.

Feeling brave, I reach out for Atar's mind, wincing at the light, and try to speak into his thoughts, but he is busy showing Macalaurë the proper way to filet a fish, and he does not hear me.

The guests arrive an hour before the Mingling of the Lights, and by this time, the meal is cooking and the stink of fish has been washed from our hands. We have been stuffed into our best robes, and Atar has braided my hair as I sat in his lap on his bed, listening to him chatter to Amil, trying to hear their thoughts beneath their words but suddenly too weary and dropping to sleep to the soothing feel of his fingers twining through my hair.

The next that I know, I am on Nelyo's hip in the vestibule with a strand of his hair that I hope tastes like cinnamon (again, I am disappointed: it tastes like hair) tucked between my lips. I am dreaming, and I am much older and love a woman, only she had ridden away and will not come back. No matter how I search—beneath fallen horses and scraps of metal with the stink of smoke clinging in my hair—she does not come back to me, and on the brink of tears, I awaken.

Nelyo is speaking to Uncle Arafinwë. Their carriage must have arrived while I slept, and as soon as I jerk from sleep, Arafinwë turns in my direction and says, "Look who has decided to join us!"

I decide that this should offend me and that I should cry, so I do, but Nelyo doesn't seem very convinced and gives me two half-hearted bounces before resuming his discussion with Arafinwë about the variety of uses of spinach in cooking.

I wriggle, wanting to be put down so that I may scurry about the legs of the Telerin king and sample his thoughts to see how different they are from others—not to mention touch the shimmering robes and see if they feel like water, as they appear to be—and Nelyo obliges by letting me slip to the ground. My flight across the room to where Olwë speaks with my father, though, is cut short by a collision with Aunt Eärwen's knees, and I am hoisted once more into the air.

"Oh, precious little one!" she exclaims, her laughter as bright as bells pealing through the still air of morning, holding me beneath my arms and spinning me around, her unbound hair fanning silver behind her. I can feel her belly against my legs, and her silver color is mixed with something else, subtly, at its center: something golden and yet not as bright as Uncle Arafinwë but softened, soothed, the way the mingled Light of the Trees has the tendency to make me forget that I ever found Laurelin's light alone beautiful. I reach to touch her belly, to touch the source of the light, and the memory is upon me again of the bright hand that I could never reach, and I wonder how he—her child—sees my hand. What is my color? Just as without a mirror, one does not know the look of his face except by the warped reflection grudgingly given by a pool of water, I cannot judge my own color. I shall ask him when he is born, I decide, how he perceives me.

As though in assent, something flutters beneath my hand, and Aunt Eärwen laughs again and holds me closer, more like my mother than my aunt, if I am to judge Aunt Anairë as the example by which all aunts ever after shall be judged. "To think that in a matter of a few months, I will have one just like you of my own!" she whispers to me, but Arafinwë overhears her and teases, "Not just like him, dear, but a good deal smaller. Or I should hope, else you are likely to be split in twain."

"You know what I mean, Arafinwë," she quips back, and they kiss as though I have ceased to exist, and there it is again: that little flutter, like a butterfly loosed beneath my hand. Arafinwë caresses her cheek, and I am tempted to bite his knuckle but—having bitten Atar's knuckles before—I know how quickly a jerk of surprise can catch my lip against my teeth, drawing blood, and so I resist.

I never make my way to the Telerin king because I am passed into a new pair of arms, arms strong around my body and hard with muscle; I take a deep breath and smell something like ozone, lightning: Atar.

Aunt Eärwen is linking her fingers through the fingers of my father's free hand and tugging him in her direction, trying to press his hand to her belly to feel his brother-son kick. He is laughing in my ear even as I watch the muscles in his forearm tense and resist. Aunt Eärwen is allowed liberties with Atar that other people are not by virtue of the fact that they have known each other for the wholes of their lives. Still, there is a limit, and I sense his unease at the intimacy, laughing to cover it even as he lets her win: "Come now, Fëanáro, it is not as though you do not have experience in such matters. And you should know your brother-son, for he will rightfully adore you." Her tiny fingers are threaded with his much larger ones; he is trapped now. I reach for their linked hands and wrap my fist around his thumb and try to pull him free. "Well, it seems you have an obligation to your little one," she says, laughing and releasing him.

We slowly make our way to the dining room. Amil is entertaining the Telerin king and queen. Atar braided her hair for her, extra-tight at her bequest, and she looks remarkably neat and collected except for the tiny threads of hair at her temples that curl on their own accord, no matter how she or Atar might try to intimidate them into behavior. Still, there is splotchy color in her cheeks at the top of her bosom, and there is a bit of sheen to her forehead. She is nervous, unaccustomed—unlike Atar—to entertaining such illustrious company, and I feel him watching her sidelong, not wishing to embarrass her or attract attention to her unease, even as his elbow is caught by my Aunt Eärwen.

It is Amil who will have to entertain our guests while Atar and Nelyo prepare to serve the meals. I am whisked into the kitchen on Atar's hip, and the door has barely swung shut behind him and he is loosening the collar of the high-necked tunic that he wears beneath his robes. "This embroidery is atrocious," he says to an amused Nelyo, scratching at his reddened, irritated neck. "Well, do not scratch it," says Nelyo over his shoulder, already going to stir the gravy and pour it into the ceramic dish that is shaped like a miniature swan ship with perfect, intricate detail. "You will only make it worse." Nelyo wears the same style of dress as Atar, but he does not tug at his even though it must itch at least as much. Macalaurë insists that Noldorin robes are only permitted to be called Noldorin if they are adequately constraining or itchy.

Atar stands me on the rough wooden bench at the table at the center of the room. He kneels in front of me so that I am taller than him. I put my hand atop his head: warm hair and cool, silver circlet. "Carnistir," he says, attempting to look serious but with a smile teasing his lips, as he catches my hand and kisses my fingers. "Can I trust you to behave and not play with your meal? No spilling your wine or splashing your gravy? No tearing your roll into tiny bits and scattering the crumbs upon yourself?" He pinches my chin, and I bite his fingers, and he lets me. "I would not like to present you to the King and Queen in your brother's old, stained tunics, but neither do I wish to ruin your best robes." His fingers taste like soap, so I bite harder and taste Atar. "So can I trust you? You are nearly five years old, love."

Yes, and this supper is in my honor—although I like none of the dishes that Atar has prepared with the exception of the crusty rolls that are fond of disintegrating into crumbs and therefore easily swept to the floor—and so a reminder of this landmark age: fives years, an age where most young Elves are expected to have refined, proper manners and not have to wear their brothers' old, stained tunics to supper.

So I nod, and Atar extracts his fingers now damp with spittle, clasps my head in his hands, and kisses my forehead. "That's my precious little one. I knew that you would not be a disappointment."

Amil looks mildly interested when I emerge from the kitchen in my good robes, but she doesn't dare question Atar in front of the King and Queen, even to lift an eyebrow in surprise. I will be fed by Atar, even though he fed me also last night, because I am less likely to fuss under his scrutiny than with my mother, who is easily flustered and distracted. Nelyo will sit across from me, and Uncle Arafinwë is beside him, looking at me with bright blue eyes over the top of his wineglass. "The guest of honor," he says, bowing to me as he might to one much older and respectable. Amil laughs and Uncle Arafinwë's eyes are sparkling with mirth, but I cannot laugh.

Uncle Arafinwë unsettles me.

His eyes are too intense, and I sense my thoughts being stolen before I have even realized them myself, without my knowing it, the way a strong, sudden breeze might whip a parchment across the room before a hand can be put down to stop it. I look away and shut my mind, imagining a walnut shell shut tightly against prying fingers. (I like to think of minds as walnuts because Nelyo's books on anatomy show the mind to look silly and wrinkled, like a walnut. To think that my thoughts come out of a walnut!) I let the shell peek open a crack: Stop! I hiss. Uncle Arafinwë looks away and prattles in his quick, musical voice to my aunt.

The Telerin King and Queen are exclaiming over the platter of fish that Atar is setting on the table. The platter is also shaped like a fish, its green scales glazed as bright as emeralds. I wonder how the King and Queen can eat fish while looking at the likeness of what it once was; even if I could make it past the odor of garbage, I think that being reminded that my meal was a wriggling creature beneath the waves, whisked to the surface to die in pain for my sustenance, would steal my appetite.

Still, Atar puts a piece of fish on my plate—a small piece, but fish nonetheless. Turko is at the other end of the table, and so I cannot slide it onto his plate when no one is looking. Nelyo—with his shoulders stiff, picking over the carefully arranged silverware—does not look like he would tolerate it. I sigh. I would sooner eat venison or pheasant or turkey or anything but this.

The Teleri do not eat their meals organized into courses like we do, and so everything is served at once, and the Telerin King puts a bite of lettuce into his mouth before he is fully finished chewing the fish. I grimace. Atar sets a bowl of salad in front of me—granted, it is smaller than everyone else's, but it is still salad—and I prod the tomatoes lurking blood-bright and wet among the greens. There is vinegar on it, and vinegar makes me drool in a way that is not pleasant and has a tendency to dribble past my lips and make trouble with Atar and Amil. I take my fork and poke around. There are walnuts in there! I can't eat walnuts; what if they have thoughts like mine and start screaming at me when I close my teeth?

I look at Atar to see if he might excuse me from the walnuts at least, but he is crunching one between his teeth, so I guessing he won't have much sympathy for my situation. I listen for screaming but it's hard to hear anything. The volume of the room rises as the level of the wine decanters drops. Soon, it is impossible to detect individual voices, and when Nelyo throws his head back to laugh at something Uncle Arafinwë has said—leaning, elbows on the table, close to his ear—it is King Olwë's voice that I hear coming out of his mouth, then Amil's answering him, then Turko begging Atar for more wine. Beneath that are thoughts; I listen for them: The fish is actually quite good … I could steal Carnistir's wine … I hope no one requests to hear the harp tonight because I have a blister from that forsaken sword …

I hear everyone's voice but Arafinwë's, even Atar's, wondering why we are well into supper and I have only nibbled two bites of salad. Should I draw attention to him? he wonders, pondering my hypothetical punishment. I send a thought back—No—and he seems convinced because he takes another helping of fish and says nothing.

But Arafinwë can hear me; I become suddenly aware of that. He knows that I am listening around the table like a spying, naughty kid putting a water glass against doors and hearing the secret conversations within. He is plucking my thoughts from the air like raisins from a bowl, and I cannot stop him; even when I shut my mind, he hears me.

Yet I do not hear him.

I look at him and expect him to smile, but his face is grave, and in that moment, he more resembles Nolofinwë than Arafinwë, and I scream.

Above the din of conversation, no one notices but Atar and Nelyo. Nelyo gives me a concerned look and Atar prods my knee hard beneath the table. "Little one! For Manwë's sake, behave!"

I watch the resentful thoughts toward my father unravel like a spool of dark thread and watch Arafinwë draw a slow breath, the threads slipping into his nostrils and his being, as though he thought them and not me. He smiles at me in understanding, and when Atar rises to bring a new bottle of wine and no one is looking, he slips my piece of fish from my plate to his.

~oOo~

There is music after supper of course—no mercy for the blister on Macalaurë's thumb—the light kind that people dance and drink to. (There is no dancing but extra drinking, perhaps to make up for it.) We are in the parlor with Atar's best trinkets all around, aglow in the light of Telperion—brightening toward His zenith—scrambling it around, and casting it forth in pale, many-hued halos. There is a small blue bauble on the table near my hand, and I hold it for the way it fills my hands with light. I am curled in Nelyo's lap, allowing myself to look sleepy if only to go unbothered, pressing into his chest and trying to detect the warmth of his body beneath the stiff, heavy robes.

His arms wrap me and hold me close. He sighs, and I look up into his face, and he smiles down at me, almost conspiring, as though we share some secret, some kinship besides the blood pounding through our veins. But, of course, we do: We are the two least understood people in the room perhaps. Macalaurë is understood in his song, and Turko never hesitates to make his opinion plain in his braying voice, but Nelyo is thought of as collected and happy while I am regarded as impish and devious: Yet we are none of those things. I imagine us, two pariahs, striking out across Valinor, leaving our brothers behind and Amil and, yes, even Atar.

But my heart won't let me dwell on that too long before it begins to miss Atar (and he is only just across the room from me, speaking with the Telerin King) and pounds in a way that it seems like it is trying to wriggle into my throat and make it hurt like crying. Nelyo—his arms tight around me—must feel it, for he holds me closer to his own relatively steady heart and whispers in my hair, words that I do not understand but an emotion that I feel like cold water, comforting me and sending my limbs into a flurry of tingles. It is like water wrung from a stone, though, and takes great effort on his part, and so I choke back the whimper that wants to tumble into the air and take deep breaths until I feel my body relax and his arms relax in turn.

His color, silver like Telperion, is all around me, marred by threads of crimson, yes, but mostly silver, like the Nelyo I met (and loved) on the day that I was born. How like Telperion he is: We all revere the Mingled Lights and many worship Laurelin also, but in Telperion's hours, we hide in our houses and close our drapes against the light to sleep. In the hours of the day, no one wants to remember Telperion except when we need comfort and reprieve from Laurelin's heat. Across the room, Atar gestures with his wine glass and speaks to the Telerin King of gemcraft, and Nelyo watches him, and I know—although my exhausted mind cannot perceive his thoughts—that he sets himself beside Atar and comes up lacking; Telperion forgotten in Laurelin's splendor.

Perhaps he perceives also that I would rather be in Atar's arms than his, although I am enduring him and hope that he does not know this.

Turko is sitting on Nelyo's feet with his head against his knees, and I know that Nelyo's feet must be numb, but he doesn't move or complain. Turko's braids are loosening because he's been tugging at them, and he is hiding yawns behind his hand, knowing that if Amil catches sight of one, then she will send us both to bed. Telperion is brightening, and the breeze bearing the curtains into the parlor is scented with honeysuckle; the silvery darkness beyond is thick with the sound of a symphony of night insects. I feel my eyes getting heavy and make up my mind to stay awake, to learn what adults do at the zenith that makes it worth forestalling sleep, and deciding that the best way to do this is by letting my eyes rest. Just for a moment.

"—to bed."

It is a moment later when Amil's voice forces me to jerk awake. Telperion is many degrees brighter than when my eyes closed the moment before, and I feel Nelyo lurch beneath me and to his feet. I whimper and he shushes me and stoops to lift Turko in his other arm.

We are carried to Atar, who kisses our cheeks and wipes a rivulet of drool from my chin with the ornately embroidered cuff of his robes. I catch one of his braids in my fist, and he tickles my knuckles with kisses until I do not notice that he has extricated himself from my grip.

"Sleep well and I will see you in the morning," he whispers into the space between us, his breath sweetened by wine. I breathe deep and draw it—him—into me.

Nelyo takes us to his room, insisting that I will not be bothered by Turko if we sleep on opposite edges and do not roll into the middle. "My bed is big enough for the both of you. You sleep closer than this when we are traveling, and you are not bothered." I moan a low protest, and Turko ponders me from Nelyo's other shoulder with sleepy blue eyes.

Nelyo undresses us and puts us into our nightclothes. Turko is asleep as Nelyo tucks his arms into the sleeves of his nightshirt, sitting up with his head lolling onto his chest, drooling on the coverlet. Sleep sits like a rock inside my head, but it is shrinking, becoming insignificant. Night is a time for wandering, and with the adults distracted in the parlor, I can wander the house with nothing between my bare feet and the icy floors, stealing as silently as a breeze into the places forbidden me by day.

Turko is tucked into one side of the bed, turning on his side and shriveling into a little ball. Nelyo turns his attention to me, and draws the cool, satiny nightclothes over me. I could cooperate, but I like the feeling of him moving my body for me, as though his presence eliminates the need for thought. "Now sleep, little one. None of your antics."

Nelyo is often kept awake at night too, though not out of hunger for secrets. He covers his insomnia with a ruse of "studying," but hours will pass during which he will never turn a page, and sometimes, he will stare at a book upside down or at a blank page for just as long. I imagine that he sees written there what he wants to see … or maybe he is waiting for words to appear, imparting knowledge so far elusive. Knowledge of what lies in the future, perhaps?

Sometimes, I see that, although it is hard to tell where the future ends and the dark dreams of him begin. I cannot—will not—believe that he is in our future.

I could tell Nelyo if his beloved will ride around the corner and through the gates of our property one day; I could tell him if he will be alone at the New Year Festival. But maybe he already knows.

Sometimes I dream of wonderful things—of marriage and love and new life—and sometimes I dream of strange things that cannot be real, of a wild land beneath a fierce light like Laurelin but crueler, merciless, scented like dust and rousing our skin into burns. Other times, I dream of darkness, and those dreams I forget, for they cannot be real. Not here.

So says Atar, when I wander to him and night and sleep in his arms, in the rocker where he has held each of my brothers and now me, soothing our troubles with a blaze of white light. The dreams of darkness … those are naught but stories. Myths. His voice in my ear might be my own thoughts. It is hard to say where his voice ends and my thoughts begin. It is hard to say, he says, where myth ends and dreams begin.

Nelyo kisses my forehead with cool lips and draws the covers to my chin. I was wrong: I am still tired, and I might sleep. Turko curls on the other side of the bed from me, dreaming of playful winds running across a meadow as wide as the sea. I might sleep if only to sample his dreams. Nelyo leaves us to close the drapes—saving us from Telperion's brightening light—and in the secret darkness, I slide across the wide bed and press against my brother's back, ever closer, until his golden hair is silk against my cheek and I can smell the sweet scent of the grasses and the air comes alive with birdsong.

~oOo~

It is a place underground, yet not dark; a place where the rocks in the walls seem alight, where candles twist and dance in senseless rhythm, bowing at me as I pass. Yet I am not me; my thoughts are strange: Turko. My limbs are heavy and clad in metal; even my head is clad in metal, although a swatch of golden hair lies upon my shoulder with the splendor of a banner. With a screech of metal on metal, there is a sword in my hand, and I am walking forward, cutting away shapes like Elves as the arrows hit me one by one—chest, leg, shoulder—there must be a hundred of them, a thousand. Elves fall away in front of me with the same passivity as grass fronds bending and twisting in the wind. There are screams and the cacophony of steel on steel, but it is whispers that I hear loudest of all: the sound of arrows cutting the air and imbedding themselves in me, but I do not feel it. I will not allow it to hurt until he is before me, the King. I will not allow it to hurt until he is dead.

When I awaken, I expect pain, and my frantic hands inspect my body for wounds, for protruding arrows, but there is nothing: I am wearing the nightclothes into which Nelyo tucked me an indeterminate time ago and my flesh is unbroken, although it tingles in places with the same sensation as a scar might remember the pain that created it. With the drapes fastidiously closed, I cannot tell the time. Turko's arm is tossed over me in the dead weight of sleep, and he moans in his sleep as though in pain.

I duck free of his arm, and his pinched expression loosens, becomes peaceful again. My feet are on the floor, and before I take a step, I cock my head and listen. Laughter like music: the party must be going on still. I roll my foot onto the floor, refusing to wince at the cold floorboards, avoiding those that will creak and announce my presence.

Once downstairs, I slip into the shadows and crouch to watch the party: Macalaurë's harp has been abandoned, and Nelyo is lost in earnest conversation with Uncle Arafinwë; their faces are inches apart. The Telerin Queen laughs at something my father has said, and Amil smiles and puts her hand on his knee in an involuntary declaration of possession. His hand covers hers, holds it there.

It is not long before I am bored by it and slipping through the front door and into the dew-damp garden. The grass tickles the bottoms of my feet, and I have to concentrate to keep from leaving silver tracks that will be easily followed. I imagine my body as light as the wind, moving over the ground, and the grass stands stern beneath me. Telperion has exceeded His zenith and is dimming; I allow my imagination to drift where it will and the trees and shrubs becoming hunkering shadow monsters. There is a stick beneath one of Atar's cherry trees, and it will work as a sword, and silently we battle—the shadow monsters and I—and I become so fearful that I allow my weight to drop and my feet to trample the grass into a hollow. Thwack! Thwack! One by one, I imagine them falling; my feet are stained red on the bottoms by cherry juice, and I run my finger through it to taste it, preferring to taste it as metallic—not sweet—like blood. The wind stirs the shadow monsters into action, and I fight until my arms ache and my heart is pounding so hard that I can feel my pulse throughout my entire body.

The path beckons me, and I toss my sword aside, content to leave the remaining monsters for another time. My bare feet leave red prints along the flagstones; I imagine myself limping and wounded, trailing blood … but I am triumphant; I am a hero; he curses my name from the depths of his dungeons.

The apprentices' cottages loom before me, and I visit them one by one, pressing my palms to the door, breathing the air that comes through the cracks, but no one is awake. Annawendë's is empty; has been empty since the day we left for Formenos. I breathe the tiny bit of stale air, unstirred for months, that is allowed to escape from the crack between the door and the doorframe, but I detect nothing of her, only a confused array of memories involving my brother Nelyo and my father and an endless, orange-hued land steeped in heat, where music is harsh with the tones of hammer striking anvil.

And, then, I am at the forge.

I do not remember seeking it, but I am there, tugging at the heavy door and opening it with great effort. The place smells of memory, of both passion and fear, and my mind creates a shower of sparks where one should be, for a place like this should not be lost in darkness.

Atar has his workshop here, the place where he comes with Nelyo to make things that are forbidden for us to see and handle, supposedly for our safety, although I detect a thrill of defiance in them sometimes, of doing that which is illicit, of sating curiosity as strong as thirst. The door locks; doors are not locked in Valinor, but this one is rarely anything but, and as I tug the handle—expecting resistance of steel that can be subordinated only by a slender brass key—I wait to be disappointed yet again, but the door falls open so easily that I tumble onto my backside and crash into a worktable, knocking something fragile and glass to the floor, where it explodes in a spray of silver slivers.

Whimpering, rubbing my head that struck the merciless solidity of a table leg, I sit up. The door has swung closed again, and it is easy to imagine that it never opened at all. Surely Atar would not be so careless. His mismatched clothes and slovenly, careless appearance do not confer a similar negligence of his work. He will forget meals or to tie his boots but never to lock his laboratory or to close his secret volumes when someone enters the room.

I crunch through the broken glass—leaving footprints now red with real blood—able to ignore the pain because of the singular focus of the featureless gray door with its heavy knob punctured by a keyhole that always reminds me of a mouth stretched in surprise. Glass pops beneath my feet, slipping gracefully to latch into my skin, and I reach out for the door and gently tug it open and slip inside.

It is not that I have not been in here before; I have lessons in here, sometimes, and other times, am permitted to watch Atar work, moving between open volumes strewn across the tabletop, making notes that I often cannot decipher, written in a shorthand that even Nelyo does not know. Now, the books are shut and stacked on a table; the worktables are mostly swept clear of debris. Curtains have been drawn over all of the windows, and the sole source of light in the room, at the moment, is a single lamp in the corner neglected and left open—or perhaps this was intentional?—and casting the room in pale, blue light.

I go to the worktable and kneel on the bench, exposing my bloodied feet to the cool relief of the air. I open a book; it is written in a language that I do not know. The foreign syllables writhe in my mouth, twining around my tongue, reluctantly holding on and not wanting to fall forth into the air. I spit and force them in an awkward, halting voice, but the words are ugly and remind me of how Turko will scrape his fingernails against metal when he is upset with Atar, knowing that Atar hates the sound and that it frenzies him to senseless rage, banishing a tearful, triumphant Turko from the room. Such are these words, and I clap my hands over my ears even as the words continue tumble from my mouth, hideous sounds without meaning except a ghost of a thought—Atar? Nelyo?—perhaps the memory of he who read them last.

Still, it is dull work, and I close the book and sigh loudly. I do not know why I have come here, but then, I do not know why I do many things. Sometimes, my actions and words seem to precede any sort of thought during which thoughts and actions are supposed to be planned. Mine are not planned; it is as though I am being led by something beyond me, and even as I've seen Nelyo's skin raise in welts where I've scratched him in my rage, I've regretted it.

My feet are beginning to hurt, and I whimper into the silence before realizing that there is no one to hear me, and what is the point of sad sounds if not to elicit sympathy? I turn on the bench until I can examine the bottoms of my feet. They are smudged with a thin sheen of blood mixed with dust from the floor; I can see the glimmer of glass still caught in my flesh. I tug at the largest piece—the size of a fingernail torn off in a fit of nervousness—but it hurts, and so I yelp and leave it.

That is when I see it, in the corner, something shrouded beneath the dark cloths that Atar uses to protect his works in progress from dust and prying eyes.

Even as I see it, it is growing larger, and I realize that it is because I am walking toward it, and I realize that I am walking toward it because the glass is stabbing the bottoms of my feet with each step and hurting me. Still, I walk, leaving evidence of myself in the shape of bloody footprints across the floor. The object grows ever-larger, and I see that it is quite perfectly spherical, beneath the cloth, like the boars' bladders that Atar fills with air after a successful hunting trip (which is also followed by glorious, crispy bacon so salty that my mouth shrivels for want of water, so good that I will eat it scalding hot—grease still popping—and raise blisters in my mouth) and lets Turko and me bat around. Turko punches them high into the air and watches them drift slowly back to us while the wind plays with them; I cry, for I'd rather play alone than share with the wind, and Turko and I usually fight over this.

So when I reach out my hands to touch the object, I expect it to be soft and pliant, and I am prepared to be delighted, to seize it and play alone with it, leaving patterns tracing my delight across the workshop floor and printed in blood. But it is hard, harder than any stone or steel that I have ever touched, and cold—even beneath the shroud—so that I draw my hands back, convinced that I have been burned, only realizing the frigidity of the sphere when my body dissolves into a shiver.

I tug at the edges of the shroud, wanting it to fall away but not to bear Atar's wrath when it does. This thing is meant to be a secret. Even if it was not hidden, it is bathed in a penumbra of secrecy, of cautious elation, a thrill of creation coupled with a fear of discovery. This emotion known to all of us but most of all to Atar, who will answer a knock at his workshop door with his face a bleary mask of boredom as a euphoric pulse hops at his throat.

I tug at the shroud; the thing beneath is smooth, and it is not hard to start the cloth slipping, and I leap back and watch gravity do its work. The bulk of the shroud—with my assistance—has fallen to one side; the remainder slowly cascades after it, tumbling and folding upon itself until it is a pool of cloth on the floor and the thing is revealed.

I step over the shroud and carefully survey the black sphere. It is like a giant marble, about a foot in diameter, and as dark as the velvet sky of rumor, in the Outer Lands, away from the Light of the Trees. It is featureless black … and yet not. I lean forward until my nose is almost touching it. Is there something moving within it? In layers deep inside, shifting, conspiring? Tentative hands have lifted without my knowledge, and wincing, waiting for the bite of cold, the pads of my fingers press lightly against it.

There is something moving inside; there is no mistake about that. The sphere is as profound as the sea, which can appear colorless and flat on the surface even while—beneath—the waters ebb and eddy, convoluting upon themselves in whorls like a fingerprint, lifting and moving an insubstantial grain of sand or guiding the leviathans that we once watched surfacing—silver backs as slick as glass beneath Laurelin's light—off the coast in the north. I cried and Atar thought that I feared that the beast might rear up beneath our tiny boat—for it was just Atar, Turko, and me, casting nets into the water and playing at being "Teleri," as Atar teased—and capsize us, but I'd feared for Turko, leaning far over the side with his splayed fingers stretched and reaching: "Their world! There is a whole other world under there—they speak of it to me—and I want to know it!" the sea spray misting his face and his hips a tenuous fulcrum between keeping him as my brother in our boat and pitching him over the side to become one of them in the mysterious depths of the sea.

Like the sea, this thing, this sphere hides another world beneath it surface: a world operating alongside mine but separate and—until now—unknown to me. And like the sea, it takes only a deep breath and a bit of courage to tip the balance of my body and spill forth into this other world. I might not be pulled again to the surface, but I cannot fear that. Not if I wish to plunge hands-wrist-being into the dark swirls beneath the surface of the sphere.

Temptation whispers to me.

With my cry, Atar at last turned and seized Turko by the back of his trousers, dragging him back to the bottom of the boat. "You fool! Do you wish to drown?" But Turko—palms wet with seawater and lip quivering—had not thought of that.

As I cannot. I place my hands on the sphere. And plunge.

On an ordinary morning, a month before the New Year Festival, Nelyo and I depart for Alqualondë from Tirion. It is late autumn and as bland a day as any in Valinor: The morning is warm and the breeze just brisk enough to stave off perspiration; a menagerie of birds call, unseen, from the trees; Telperion has just faded, and I am tired, and Nelyo is grumpy. The golden light reflecting from the white brick streets of the royal quarter sears my eyes.

It is an ordinary day in Valinor.

It was our intention originally to ride together to Alqualondë, departing from our father's home on our horses, but Grandfather Finwë would not hear of it. "I will not see my eldest grandsons on their way to honor our family by taking the beggar's road," he said, "staying in questionable inns and probably coming home with fleas." And Nelyo laughed and said that he doubted we'd get fleas but that we would gladly take Grandfather Finwë's offer to have us ride with his daily messenger to Alqualondë, who travels in the relative comfort of a coach pulled by our grandfather's fastest horses. And our accommodations were changed also from the music school—where they said that Nelyo could room with me, provided that he had no qualms with sleeping on the floor—to staying with King Olwë in the Telerin palace.

Atar looked uneasy at Grandfather's offer. "More than forty years, I have kept my sons' feet firmly on the ground, and now you spoil them?" he asked, not entirely joking, but Grandfather Finwë gave him a look that silenced any further arguments and plans were arranged.

I was surprised: How unlike Nelyo to give up the chance for a journey! For adventure! And secretly, I'd looked forward to it—despite my griping about saddle soreness and campfire food—for those three days in the company of my brother, riding fast beneath a sky so vast that even agony—even madness—became inconsequential.

But Nelyo looked away from me; he went to his room to study, to hide inside books of monotonous lore that he doesn't really read so much as stare upon. But I am not supposed to notice that.

And so we departed our father's house yesterday—Atar lifting the little ones to kiss us farewell and Amil holding us each a bit overlong in an embrace—and last night stayed in our usual rooms in Grandfather Finwë's palace, to rise at the Mingling of the Lights to find that our trunks had been loaded into the messenger's carriage, and he waited only for us.

By carriage—without the excuse to linger long over meals and wine beside the campfire at night, to sleep late in the mornings, until the light is so bright that we can see the blood beating inside of our eyelids—we will make the journey in a day. The road unfurls before us, the horses' hoofbeats becoming a sound as routine as my heartbeat, practically unheard. We do not speak much. Even Nelyo, who often rises early to meet Atar in the forge or to ride to Tirion for lessons with our cousin, is bleary-eyed and taciturn. His normally robust red hair is limp and tied back loosely from his face. His robes are rumpled. We each put on our circlets—to be presentable for King Olwë—and Nelyo's is crooked. I will fix it for him when we enter the city limits, but for now, I am too tired to care.

I expect that we will stop for a midday meal, but we do not. Nelyo opens a cloth sack that is filled with food enough for the two of us—thick-sliced breads, rich cheeses, fruits so ripe to be as bright as gemstones—and we drink water from the waterskin that he has also packed, water that has grown warm by now. It tastes slightly stale and I grimace; Nelyo does not seem to notice and drinks long after me, staring out the window at the tree trunks flashing past, the hand on his knee unsteady and trembling with the movement of the carriage.

I eat because there is little else to do, until my stomach is so full that it almost hurts. Laurelin is at her zenith, and the Treelight scalds my eyes. Nelyo draws a shade over the window, leaving a crack at the bottom to admit a bar of light to spill onto his book, which he presses open with stiff fingers to keep it from shaking with the movement of the carriage. Nelyo can do that—read while moving, while walking even—but I cannot. Focusing on the words, my eyes feel like quivering jellies in my head, and nausea ripples through my sated stomach, until I must close my eyes and swallow hard to keep my meal from spilling itself onto the floor in a single heave.

The road between Tirion and Alqualondë is dull, and with the day warm and windless and the shades drawn, my head is tipping toward sleep before long, coming to rest on Nelyo's shoulder. In the incoherent place between sleep and dreams, I feel his arm circle me, holding me close. I am glad for it. He smells of starched, clean robes, but beneath that, he is inerasably Nelyo: daylight and green leaves shivering in the wind.

Dreams come to me. In lucidity, I will not think of Alqualondë. I will not think of the many meanings that Alqualondë holds for me; I will not dually dread failure and success, of returning home to tell my father that the Teleri were mistaken in believing that I measured them in musical gifts … of returning home to tell my father that I am nearer to them than him and will be leaving his home for Alqualondë.

I will not think of Vingarië and the image I have built of her—and she, of me—and my certainty that I shall discover that elusive thing that Nelyo used to call, sighing, true love. I will not wonder if that love is a construction much like my songs: a single thrilling note—a pounding heart and shiver of ecstasy—that fades in the moment after impact until it is no longer detectable, naught but a dubious memory.

But in dreams, my heart indulges itself in hopes and fears, and even as I feel Vingarië's arms close about me, chaos erupts behind us: my father, screaming at my mother, rending the peace of the house, refusing me my dream. He is my son! My son! Mine!

I awaken with a start to Nelyo's shoulder bone jabbing me in the tip of my ear. The light is low now, fading into evening; I have slept long, in a fitful delirium of dreams. One side of my face is sticky with drool. I swipe it away and look guiltily, blushing, at the mark I have left on the shoulder of Nelyo's otherwise impeccable robes.

With no one to watch him read, he has allowed the book to fall shut on his hand, to be opened quickly with a flick of his wrist, to restore the illusion of diligence. His arm around me has fallen against my back, but I am still pressed close to him, and when I awaken, he says, "Macalaurë, your heart is pounding frightfully."

I press my hand to my chest, as though I do not believe him and must feel it for myself. Or maybe I seek to calm it, the soothing hand upon the beast. Clearing my throat, busy fingers smoothing my hair, and tug away from him. "Where are we?" I ask.

He pulls open the shade, and I gasp: We are cresting the hill, just passing through the Calcirya, and in front of us is the sea, like a swatch of spangled silk draped across the horizon, and Alqualondë before it, with its low pink-pale buildings and senselessly meandering streets, still small in the distance. It is evening time—the Lights are beginning to mingle—and even as we watch, the lanterns in the streets begin flickering to life like fireflies sparkling against the night. On a brisk breeze comes the scent of the sea, and as I close my eyes and settle against my brother, I imagine that I can even hear the bittersweet shrieks of the seabirds circling the harbor but never forgetting the horizon—where velvet sky meets dark sea—where the stars pierce the blackness.

My heart squeezes excitedly, nervously, for a number of reasons. I will at last meet my tutor and prove my mettle—or my worthlessness. My brother will recite his exams in history and letters, and I am not unwise to the fact that he has barely studied since returning to Tirion when each of his spare moments should have been devoted to his books. And I will see Vingarië for the first time since our picnic in the forest, since each of our opportunities to meet since my return at the beginning of autumn has been ruined. I was first punished for my foolish fight with Vorondil in the kitchen—and for my disobedience to Nelyo—and the one time that Vingarië returned to Tirion for her mother's begetting day, I had to go with Atar to the healer, to hold my shrieking, squirming baby brother while the healer extracted bits of glass from the bottoms of his feet. (The fool went walking barefoot in the forge and left a trail of bloody footprints all throughout the gardens and house. Nelyo, of course—the usual assistant in such matters and a much greater comfort to our little brothers than me—had to "study," and so word was sent to Vingarië's house that, once again, I would be detained.)

As we draw closer to the city, Nelyo wipes my face with his handkerchief, smiling feebly at my childishness, at still needing his ministrations, and I straighten his circlet and tuck the loose strands of hair behind his ears, where at least they do not make him look as unkempt. We have passed beneath the gates of pearl and are in the city now, and people are standing aside to watch us pass, clearly fascinated by our bright Noldorin carriage, the horses' hoofbeats sundering the quiet Telerin air. It is evening time, but the light is different here, warmer, and the streets shimmer with lamplight. The houses are close to the streets, their doors propped open to admit guests and let escape the sounds of laughter and music played lightly upon a harp. The wind that meanders between the buildings, along the snaking, cobblestone streets, is sharper than in Tirion, and when a chilly breeze from the sea slaps my face, I gasp and taste salt upon my tongue.

Alqualondë is a capricious city, prone to the moods of the sea and the winds that push dark clouds over the water, searing the land with lightning and washing the streets with rain. Life is less measured here, and the Teleri raise their arms to the sky and sing to Ossë and Uinen, standing upon frail wooden docks being battered by the waves, confident in Ossë's mercy, that they will not be swept away.

The carriage draws to a stop in front of the palace, and I see that King Olwë is waiting for us. He steps forward and takes Nelyo's hands and kisses his cheek, then turns to me and does the same. "Grandsons of my dearest friend Finwë, I welcome you to my home and hope that you shall think of it as the same while you are here and ever after."

Nelyo says something appropriately gracious, for which I am grateful because—despite my gift with song—words do not come easily to me.

King Olwë is slight compared to my brother—and only a bit taller than me—and his unfettered, silvery hair flutters lightly away from his face, borne on the brisk sea breeze. His robes are lighter and simpler than those that we wear, the color of the ocean behind him, and for jewelry, he wears only a delicate silver chain and a pearlescent pendant in the shape of a bird. In his presence, I feel clunky and overwrought. Nelyo speaks fluently in the Telerin dialect and his accent is flawless, but his effortless speech nonetheless sounds heavier than King Olwë's, and even if his red hair did not betray his heritage, there would be no doubt that he is a foreigner, a Noldo.

Through a maze of hallways that seem to open always to the sea, King Olwë leads us to our room. "I will give you separate chambers, if you want," he says, "but I assumed that you would wish to stay together, to ease your loneliness." I look at Nelyo's face for the answer—for he is the one who will need peace to study, away from me, perhaps—and his eyes are bright as though with tears.

"I will remain with my brother," he says, "unless he prefers otherwise," and I detect gratitude in his voice, even if King Olwë's demeanor betrays nothing.

Quickly, I nod my head in assent, and we are led into a garden filled with fountains and up a long flight of shallow stairs. There is an external walkway canopied by gauzy, white cloth, and a double doorway at its end made of a light wood that is carved with the images of ships and the Ainur who control the sea. I touch the bold, perfectly shaped bicep on the figure of Ulmo, and King Olwë laughs. "Familiar, is it? It should be—the work is your mother's."

Of course. The Teleri were content in simple huts on the sand for centuries after their arrival in Aman. It was Grandfather Finwë who insisted that they have a city, "to match the splendor of their ships," he'd said. He gave his finest engineers freely to Olwë— his brother in spirit, he was fond of saying, even if not in Eru's thought—the finest of whom was our own father, who was but a child yet already precocious and trusted with the design and detail of some of Alqualondë's most beautiful buildings. I'd studied the designs of the Telerin palace in architecture lessons long ago—and long forgotten. And where Atar went, so did Amil: hence this door.

I marvel at it, at the skill beyond anything I could ever hope to possess. I marvel also that there is so much of us—of the Noldor—in this city, and yet so little of the Teleri in ours, in our white spires pushing insolently into the realm of the sky, in our neatly ordered streets, precise paintings, and carefully constructed anthems. Most Noldor will not even taste Telerin foods, and the great weeds and beasts of the sea earn their disgust and derision.

Yet King Olwë welcomes us, holding open the door and letting us walk before him, a servant to a lord.

At sight of our room, breath is stolen from my lungs, and I step inside, enthralled. The room is wide and opens to the sea, and I gasp, and Nelyo and King Olwë both glance at me and smile. Gauzy curtains, mostly drawn aside, are the only barrier between our room and the seemingly endless expanse of ocean. Beyond the drapes are a balcony and a set of stairs that lead to the King's beach. Scattered across the winking blue water are the white ships of the Teleri, those for which they are renowned, glittering lamps lit at their bows, the calls of the mariners faint upon my keen ears.

"I hope it is not too open for you. I know how you Noldor love everything neatly sequestered behind walls," says King Olwë, teasing, his hands folded at his waist and his eyes crinkling with pleasure at my delight.

"No," I say. "It is perfect."

As I walk to the balcony to stare at the sea stretching to the dark horizon, Nelyo says, "Many times we joke that Macalaurë was born wrongly and belongs among the Teleri. Atar believes that our spirits loved each other before birth, and so he chose to forsake his rightful place with your people so that we may be brothers in blood as well as spirit and, thus, forever united."

This is truth: It is said that in the melody of water, one can hear in the delicate undertones the Music of the Ainur. "Each of us was granted a note in that song," Atar used to tell me, in the peaceful times of early youth—before his expectations began to exceed what is in my nature to achieve—when I would curl in his lap and ask to hear Rúmil's legends. Atar must have had many notes, I always thought, a whole song unto himself. And when Nelyo sang, I was the first to answer.

Watching the white ships cut dark lines across the surface of the sea, I wonder if Nelyo might be persuaded to stay forever.

I do not realize the King Olwë has approached behind me—so silent are his footfalls or so deep my distraction; perhaps both—until his voice in my ear says, "On a clear day, you may discern the shores of the Outer Lands," and when I turn in surprise, he winks to show that he is teasing. "Only in song," he adds before bidding us not to hesitate to ask for whatever we need and leaving us to settle in.

Without asking, Nelyo chooses the bed farthest from the balcony and the sea and begins unpacking his trunks, smoothing his robes carefully and hanging them in the armoire. I leave my trunks untended and lean against one of the posts marking the end of our bedroom and the beginning of the balcony, letting the drapes swirl around me, and I watch spangles of light on the water that are so brilliant that Atar might have scattered a handful of his gemstones across the surface of the sea.

~oOo~

I must have slept, for I awaken in my bed, tucked neatly beneath the blankets, but I have no memory of lying down. There is seamlessness to my memories of staring out at the sea and then falling into dreams of the same, fingers twitching restlessly upon the pillows, trying to capture the melody that shimmers just beneath the surface of the sea. Even now—with thought alone of it—my fingers begin to move, and I wonder what song will come forth once I place them upon my harp.

Nelyo is awake already and quietly unpacking the trunks I neglected last night. A tray of breakfast—of sweet rolls and mangoes, which we rarely get at home—waits on the table by the window.

"Macalaurë," says Nelyo, "you are still alive!"

The water is now afire with innumerable points of gold; it is drawing near to the afternoon. I am supposed to meet Vingarië within the next few hours.

"I slept," I say, and after I say it, I realize that is sounds silly, but it feels as though I have never slept before last night, not in the way of awaking refreshed, with exhaustion scoured from my body and mind with the same relentless vigor as soap washes a body of filth. Nelyo, though, seems to understand. He folds the last of my trousers and comes to my bedside, where I sit gazing at the sea. He wraps his arms around me and presses my head to his chest. "I know," he says, and we remain like this—he is standing and I am sitting—until the surging sea and his heartbeat become indiscernible from each other in my mind.

At last, he releases me—with a crooked grin meant to be playful—hastens me into my clothes and presses into my hand a knobby fruit that I have never seen before that—upon tasting—is quite sweet. He is busy all of the sudden, snapping with energy and hustling me from the room, pleading the need to study in quiet when, really, I know that he is aware of my plans to meet Vingarië and wishes not to be the cause of further disruption.

I leave the palace by the beach, climbing up to the streets of the city. At this time of day, the streets are crowded with fishermen and vendors proudly displaying their wares. I am offered a basket of oysters and two pearl necklaces before I am even out of sight of the palace. A trio of musicians plays harps alongside a fountain, and I pause only briefly to listen, unable to be entranced fully by the music when I know that Vingarië waits.

Her father is lord of the House of the Albatross, and I am pointed in the direction of his house by a pretty woman who sits and mends a sail while her two young sons offer me fish and take turns ogling the sapphire ring on my finger, tugging my fingers in their eagerness. "It is bright," says one, and the other follows with "Like an eye."

"Do not bother the young man," their mother says, swatting lightly at them. They glance at her and resume inspecting my ring as though she had said nothing. She smiles an apology at me, and I twist the ring off of my finger and place it in the hand of the older of the boys.

"I have no need for fish," I insist, but now she will not let me go without giving me the three largest, wrapped in paper, while the wide-eyed little boys turn my ring in the light, cupping their hands around it and watching the blue spangles dance across their palms.

"You did not have to—" the woman begins, and I quickly interrupt and say, "I have many like it. It is worth less than these fish."

It is only a short walk from there, down a slight hill, toward the beach. I arrive in a courtyard between the houses of the lords, and immediately, I see Vingarië, sitting on the edge of a fountain, looking towards the sea, pretending to read a book that is held loosely in her hands.

For many moments I stand and watch her. The last I saw her, my head was whirling with inebriation, and I assumed that my heart seemed to thrill at the thought of her because of intoxication. But then her letters and constant thought of her … my heart thrills again, and I have naught in my belly this time except the sweet-but-ugly fruit and a few swallows of pineapple juice. The last half-year has led up to this instant; every second was just another trudging step on my way to her.

The breeze catches her dark hair and plays with it. When the light lies properly upon it, I can see the silver streaks of her father's people, although it is predominantly black and braided away from her face like a Noldo. One of the straps of her gown is slipping from her shoulder, and suddenly I wish for nothing more than to put my hand upon the creamy skin beneath it and slip it back into place, but not before gracing her with a kiss.

As though she can feel the weight of my eyes upon her, she turns, and our gazes meet. For a long time, we merely ponder each other, as though ascertaining that the other is a being of bone and blood and not the ephemeral substance of dreams. Then a grin lights upon her face, and she is on her feet, her book deserted, tumbling to the ground, and we are racing, laughing and colliding into each other's arms, careless as to who observes our joy.

So long I have waited for this moment that I expect my arms to slip through her and to open my eyes to nothing, and I want to weep with gratitude to feel her body filling my embrace.

"Macalaurë," she says. "Oh, Macalaurë, I have—" but I kiss her before I can consider the wisdom of so bold a move, and a small cry escapes her lips that quickly relax and return the kiss.

My mouth moves over her face, her eyes, her hair; her hands press my back through my robes, warming flesh that might never have been touched or loved before. Certainly, this is the first time that it has chosen it, love that is not dictated by blood and loyalty but by my own volition. Although, even as the thought occurs to me, I realize that I had as little say in my feelings for Vingarië as I do in my love for my father, my mother, or my brothers. Something larger than me has placed us together and determined that I shall love her. And I shall.

"Macalaurë, I have missed you," she says into my chest, and then, realizing that one of my arms is wedged between us, takes a step backward and ponders the paper-wrapped package in my arms. Her nose wrinkles. "Fish?" she says.

My cheeks burn. "I gave a sapphire ring to two small boys, and their mother would not let me escape without taking some fish," and she laughs. "A Noldo without his rings?" she says, taking my naked hand in hers and kissing my fingers.

Heat erupts in the place of the kiss and races down my arm with the fury of fire catching dry wood. But despite the heat, I shiver, and the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is not an unpleasant sensation.

She takes my arm and leads me toward one of the smaller houses that faces the sea. "Have you eaten yet?" she asked. "We can have them for midday meal, on the beach, if you'd like?" and I realize that, although I had that bit of fruit an hour ago, it was not enough, and I am ravenous.

"That would be wonderful," I tell her.

"But first, you must meet my brothers. They have decided that they must approve of you." She rolls her eyes and presses into my arm, to whisper in my ear: "Although, you should know, I care not what they say. My choice is made."

She adds, as we walk, "My father is away, shark-fishing off the southern coast."

"Shark fishing!"

"Yes. Shark is excellent. You have never had it?"

"I probably have. My father probably didn't tell me it was shark because he didn't think I'd eat it." We do not enter the house but climb a walkway that leads past it, to the beach behind. I swallow hard, speaking before I have time to consider whether I have the courage for the words that follow. "When your father returns, with your permission, I would like to ask for his blessing upon our courtship."

I can hear her brothers' voices on the beach, but she stops me before they come into view. "Macalaurë, my father is a Teler, and their traditions are far more relaxed than those of the Noldor. He does not expect such a thing from you."

"Yes, well, I am a Noldo," I say, hoping my voice doesn't sound as high and scared to her as it does inside my head, "and you are half-Noldorin, and I would prefer to observe my traditions on this matter. It seems discourteous to use your father's lineage as an excuse to escape my obligations."

"Very well, then," she says. "I give my permission." I am glad that she hugs me and presses her face into my chest so that she cannot see the wide, grateful grin that stretches my face nearly to the point of pain.

Hand in hand, we walk to the beach, where she instructs me to discard my boots or chance having them fill with sand that is impossible to remove entirely, she says. "One hundred years from now, you will still be getting blisters," she says, "from the same bit of sand." Embarrassed by my pale feet callused and misshapen from many years in boots, I argue weakly but end up sitting on the sand, doing as she says and hoping that yesterday's travel (and the lack of a bath, I suddenly realize, embarrassed) doesn't have them smelling too putrid. There is a long pier behind the house with several boats tethered along its length. The tide is low and the waves are gentle; Laurelin is fading, and the water almost green, frosted at the peaks of the waves by light. Her brothers stand at the edge of the pier, armed with bows for some reason, and shouting with excitement. They are tall and dark-haired and Noldorin by all appearances except that they wear the light, casual clothes of the Teleri. They too are barefoot, and as they run up and down the pier, the hollow slaps of their feet and the mingled joy of their voices make a great ruckus.

The elder of the two is past his majority by a few years, and on his right hand, he wears a silver betrothal ring. The younger is Nelyo's age and already as tall as his brother—lanky, with a quick, mischievous grin—and as we approach, he shouts to his brother and waves him over, and they stare into the sea with arrows nocked and ready, releasing simultaneously into the water.

The older gives a triumphant cry, and I see that they have tied ropes around the fletching of their arrows, and he has speared a fish and is drawing it, flopping weakly, onto the dock.

"Ho! That is the third today! We shall eat as kings for the week!"

"How unjust, that I should spot it and you should steal it like some mangy alley cat—"

"That is your fault, Brother, for being impetuous and taking poor aim."

They spot us at the same moment and fall silent, dropping their bows to their sides and appraising me in an identical manner, letting their eyes slide from my bare (white, deformed) feet to the silver circlet on my hair, which is being torn from its braids by the brisk breeze off of the ocean. They look next to my hand clasped in Vingarië's, and their eyebrows lift. Their eyes are like Vingarië's: very bright gray, like the Noldor, but touched at the edges by the sad blue color of the Teleri.

The older composes himself and steps forward, hand extended. "You must be Macalaurë Fëanárion. Well met," he says. "I am Turonén."

My heart is pounding, and I am afraid that the palms of my hands are damp but it is too late to wipe them dry on my trousers. I take a deep breath and try to imagine myself with Nelyo's grace, to make myself aware of how every muscle moves in my body. I smile in what I hope is a warm and not overeager manner and grasp his hand in what I hope is a firm and not painful grip. I am not sure of the strength of these half-Teleri who look like Noldor, whether they wield hammers as they wield bows and thus have strong arms. I bow slightly, which is not like me, but I have seen Nelyo do it when meeting the fathers and brothers of the girls he courts, and people are always impressed by his manners. "Well met also," I echo, and when I look up, he is smiling, and so it seems that my technique has worked. I send a silent word of gratitude on the wind and wish it received by my brother.

I look at Vingarië, and she is smiling also, broadly, as though with relief.

The younger brother grasps my hand quickly. "I am Tindanén" He looks at Turonén. "Do we not have a tradition of tossing Vingarië's boy-friends into the water?"

Vingarië shrieks with indignation and slaps him in the chest. "Stop it! I do not have boy-friends!"

Tindanén appraises me. "It seems that you do."

"Yes, but none before him! And if you touch him, I will cast you into the sea!"

"I would not test her, Tindanén," says Turonén. "You have heard of the woman scorned."

"Ah, well …" says Tindanén.

"In actuality, Macalaurë," says Turonén, "we are glad that Vingarië has taken her first courtship with a good, solid man of the Noldor."

"Yes," adds Tindanén, "none of these Telerin lads with their hot blood and notions of bonding and such before marriage to 'see if it works.'" He snorts.

"Now, now," says Turonén, "my wedding is this spring, and I want full assurances that the bond will take before standing and making a fool of myself before all of our families." Both brothers laugh.

"But you, Vingarië," says Tindanén, jabbing his sister in the shoulder, "are permitted no such liberties."

"Yes, we want neither of you hiding your eyes at the wedding, thinking no one will notice, and we want no premature but overlarge sister-sons arriving before your first anniversary—"

"Yes, like some brothers we know," interrupts Tindanén, pointing surreptitiously at Turonén.

"I was an appropriate size for a child born three weeks prematurely!"

It feels as though all of the blood has drained from my body and is pounding in my hot cheeks. I cannot bear to look at Vingarië, but she is shifting from foot to foot, suddenly very silent, and I imagine that she feels the same. Tindanén reaches out and pinches her cheek, and she slaps his arm. "Ah, no mind, Vingarië and Macalaurë. We only jest! You cannot be more than forty," he says to me, "and my wee, delicate sister is but thirty-seven."

I force myself to say, "I am forty in four weeks."

"Yes, because we know your brother Maitimo, and he is my age," says Tindanén. "We have warned our sister about the prolificacy of King Finwë's descendents, but she claims it matters not to her."

Vingarië hisses, "Hush, you!"

Turonén sees the shame in our faces and takes pity. "Ah, Tindanén," he says, "leave them be. They are still too young to fully comprehend the pleasures of the flesh, and I do not think that we should hasten that knowledge. Macalaurë, Vingarië," he adds, "forgive us?"

I hope that in the meager late-afternoon light, he cannot see by the flush in my cheeks that this summer—using thoughts of his sister as the catalyst—I began to grasp such pleasures.

Vingarië grumbles something, and I say softly, "I forgive you."

"We have caught three fish today," says Turonén, "using the improved and far more exciting method of fishing that we developed—the merger of our Telerin and Noldorin skills, if you would—and we will gladly share them with you, so that we may become better acquainted with Macalaurë."

"Macalaurë also brought fish," Vingarië mumbles, raising her eyes to her brothers in reluctant forgiveness.

"Then we'll have a true feast! Come, Tindanén, the chill of evening will soon be upon us. Let us start a fire on the beach before our dear Vingarië learns more innovative ways of finding warmth!"

In the faint, mingled light, there is a hollow thud and a shriek and laughter, and the brothers are racing up the beach, their long legs allowing them to easily outrun their little sister, who nonetheless gives brave pursuit.

~oOo~

We eat until our we can hold no more, gorging ourselves on the fish and fruit and the sweet wines that are preferred by the Teleri. For many hours we stretch upon the sand, making music with naught but our voices, accompanied by the roaring waves and the jealous wind that seeks to tear our words from us. After the Mingling of the Lights, when the fire flickers and threatens to die, Turonén nudges his brother, who feigns a wide yawn and stretches and says, "I hope you will excuse us, Vingarië, as it seems that tomorrow will be an early morning for us if we hope to catch more fish to replace what your boy-friend ate."

Vague insults and threats are exchanged in play, and Turonén drags Tindanén towards the house, both laughing in joy borne of living beside the sea and having free access to great quantities of heady wine, nearer in taste to candy than to any spirit we have at home, while Vingarië shakes her fist at their retreating forms and swears at them in Telerin.

At last alone, Vingarië and I lie on the sand, next to the guttering fire. The ocean roars at our backs and from the streets above comes the occasional call or arpeggio of laughter. The lamps of the city create a rose-colored haze over the city. "I am sorry for the behavior of my brothers," Vingarië says.

"No mind," I assure her. "I found them pleasant company."

"They tend to fictionalize things or at least exaggerate. I mean, we never discussed your father's prolificacy. Not really. Well, of course, everyone knows of it. That's not to say that my brothers and I gossip! But we certainly didn't make suppositions about you." Her words are coming in a rush; even in the meager silver light of evening, I can see a blush rising into her cheeks. "That's not to say that I don't want children. Your children. Any children. Mostly yours. I mean, they would all be yours, naturally, if we were to marry. That's the way of things. Of course, that's not to say that you have to marry me—" With a sound that might be laughter or a sob—or maybe a mixture of both—she buries her face into her hands. "Oh, Macalaurë!" she says, and it comes out muffled because of her hands over her face. "I don't know why I say such things! I am so very sorry! It seems I am always apologizing to you for my stupid—"

I remove her hands as gently as I can and hold them in mine. They are trembling, I notice, and the firelight is very bright in the streaks of tears on her cheeks. "Hush, Vingarië. Do not apologize for what you say. The thought of marrying you gives me great joy."

"Does it?" I nod and erase the tearstains from her face with my fingertips. She closes her eyes.

"It does. I have—" I pause, for the lump of words in my throat, ready to spill into the air—where they cannot be revoked once they have been turned into the little buzzes of sound that will burrow into Vingarië's ear and, from there, into her memory, "I have always been afraid of marriage."

Her eyes widen. "Me too, Macalaurë. I thought I was alone in that," she says in a whisper. "It is not that I fear sharing my life with someone. At times, I would weep for the loneliness of what I perceived to be my fate. But the thought of bonding, of bearing children—I have always thought that I would never be a mother, Macalaurë."

My heart is pounding, to hear my secret thoughts in another's voice, one whom I am convinced that I love, lying beside me, with the firelight playing in her blue-gray eyes. "I have doubted that I would be a father," I whisper.

"I am still afraid," she says. "It is like putting on a blindfold and leaping into space: You do not know if you will safely land, and by the time you realize that you have fallen too far to survive, you cannot take it back, and it becomes your fate until the ending of the world. When I was little, I dreamt sometimes that I shared the fate of Míriel Þerin—" Her eyes widen, and she falls abruptly silent. Her fingers press her lips, as though wishing to stuff the words she had just spoken back into her mouth, like a rude dribble of food allowed to escape in noble company that one hides behind a napkin and hopes no one has noticed. "I have done it again. I have spoken heartlessly. I am sorry. I forgot—"

"I did not know my grandmother. I share not my father's grief."

"You do not miss having a grandmother?" she asks.

"How can one miss what he does not know? And I have my mother's mother, and she has always been good to my brothers and me." I hesitate. "I am not one to challenge fate, Vingarië. What is is, and all the rage and tears I could spare cannot change that. Better to devote that energy to the present, to love and happiness, I think, than regret and grief."

She smiles weakly and clasps my hands between us. "It is easier to take that leap when you trust the person who leaps beside you. At least you know you will not be alone in eternity."

"No," I say, "you will never be alone."

Lying on the soft sand, beside the dying fire, I embrace her and feel the joy of having my heart unfettered at last, free to love her, Vingarië of the Teleri.

~oOo~

When I return to King Olwë's palace, it is late, and I creep abashedly through the courtyard and up the steps, half expecting him to appear from the shadows and question my whereabouts. But no one manifests; even the servants, it seems, are sleeping, and the palace is quiet. I had no intentions of remaining out so late tonight—indeed, I have my first lesson early in the morning with my tutor—but a moment in Vingarië's arms turns out to have the weight of hours to the rest of the world. I cannot help but to scorn them for that, wondering if envy is what caused time to hasten against us. I have thirty days here, and one now is gone, erased, and still, time plunges onward, dragging me along with it.

I let myself into the bedroom that I share with my brother. A lamp burns beside his bed, and Nelyo lies, fully clothed, atop the bedclothes with a half-dozen opened books scattered around him. His face is pressed into his outstretched arm, and his audible breathing betrays the depth of his slumber.

I walk silently to his bed and gather his books, marking his places and stacking them on his night table. I untie and remove his boots as delicately as I can; short of awakening him, it is impossible to tuck him into bed, and so I remove a blue throw from the armchair in the corner and drape it over him. He stirs and turns onto his back, clutching the afghan to him. His face is very pale, but it has been for weeks now; I should be used to it, and yet, I am not. With his eyes closed and unable to note my study of his face and lead him to protest, I realize how thin his cheeks have become, how dark are the bruises beneath his eyes. He turns his cheek into the spill of satiny, unfettered hair across his pillow: Against his white skin, it looks to be the color of freshly shed blood.

I lean over and kiss his forehead. A tiny smile touches lips that haven't smiled—truly smiled—in weeks, and he sighs. "Thank you," he mumbles. "I love you."

"I love you too," I whisper, before extinguishing the lamp, going to my side of the room, and undressing for bed, watching the pale shape of my brother, sleeping across the room, as Laurelin gilds the horizon and I drift into guiltily joyful dreams.

Nelyo awakens me only two hours later, and he is dressed already in light robes, near to what the Teleri wear, and his hair is neatly secured away from his face. He appears as every bit of the prince and scholar that he is supposed to be: proud, dignified, impeccable. But I, who know him, note the paleness of his skin and the bluish circles beneath his eyes and am not fooled by the clean, stately façade he presents. He is falling apart, I know, but he is putting on a show of strength. For me.

"Come, Macalaurë," he says, nudging my shoulder gently. "You asked me to wake you."

I had expected to be exhausted but I fairly spring from bed and feel a little guilty for my enthusiasm when Nelyo can only manage to shift backwards to escape my flailing arms and clasps his hands at his waist and appraises me in what I think of as a most lordly manner, with his eyebrows raised and an insincere smile on his lips. One thousand emotions assault me at once, and I emerge from the onslaught, uncertain which I should feel. Thrilled from last night? Dreading today? Curiosity or eagerness? Within me, all of these duel, and I fidget, as though my body cannot contain the myriad emotions that suddenly coexist within it.

"I take it you had fun last night?" Nelyo asks, wandering over to his bedside table to retrieve his books.

"I did." I hesitate. I could gush for hours about Vingarië, about my love for her and my certainty that a few decades will see us married, but it is hard to for my levity to weasel past the somber shroud Nelyo has wrapped around himself. Nor do I completely wish it to; I wish for my joy to triumph over all else, even the anxiety of the placement tests today. Finally, after many long moments of silence where neither of us speak—and I sense that he is waiting for more details with the dutiful obligation of one who has taken many such liberties and now must grudgingly return the favor—I add, "I met her brothers."

"Ah. Yes. Turonén and Tindanén. Many times did we meet, during Atar's and my stays here, during the construction of the quayside. They are great companions. Relay to them, if you will, my fondest wishes."

You could do so yourself, I think, but do not say it. Nelyo is here to study and will not have much time for socializing.

Swiftly, hoping he will not notice, I change the subject. "When will you go to Taniquetil?"

He notices. He smiles. "When I am ready," he says. His expression changes, and he resembles more the brother that I left behind in Formenos, the brother who—briefly—appeared to me at the sea. "Look at you, Macalaurë, with your hair in disarray and still in your nightclothes. You will not do well to be late on your first day."

My first day.

My stomach clenches, and joy makes way for dread. My reason for being here, after all, is not Vingarië or her brothers or the wide sea roaring beyond our balcony; my purpose, for once, is much like Nelyo's: I am supposed to be the proverbial sponge, soaking up knowledge and lore as though it is the reason for my creation. "To bring my music beyond mere instinct," my tutor once wrote to me, and I'd wanted to scrawl back that I had had instruction, and no, it wasn't from anyone eminent in music but Atar, and he'd taught me with his warm hands over mine, and for those short moments every week, the songs that sprang from my mind as ideas for craft spring from his had been important enough to warrant his attention. And obviously, I would write, if you believe that music born of mere instinct is somehow inferior, then you have never had to capture and hold the elusive attention of Curufinwë Fëanáro.

Of course, I did not write those things, and I was in fact loud in my desire to come here and learn among my peers rather than squeezing my lessons between the "Noldorin" pursuits in my day: sculpting, forging, penning endless diatribes on inane minutia. I dwelled on those same bad habits that my tutor was convinced must exist and Atar's unsuitability as a music teacher until he gave in. But—here at last—I am not so sure that I belong in either place.

Nelyo has gone to his bed, to sit and open one of the books amid which he slept last night. But I see his eyes lifting constantly to watch me removing my robes from the armoire with considerable care, turning my back to him so that he doesn't see my hands shake. "Macalaurë?" His voice is barely a whisper, but I whip around to face him, as though he's shouted. "I will walk with you?"

Even as I open my mouth to say no—I am almost forty, after all! I arranged this myself! I hardly need my hand held on my first day of lessons!—my chin betrays me and dips into a hasty nod, eyes lowered, quickly turning away to hide my gratitude.

Breakfast is delivered while we dress, and Nelyo makes me sit and eat and keeps up the chatter so that I do not have to. Of course, my thoughts trickle beneath his voice, and I am keen to the possibility of failure. I do not belong here. Neither the Teleri nor my own father wants me here, but my "gift" is such that they feel I should not be denied. So why am I here?

Today, I will be assessed, or so my tutor said, to see how I will be placed amid the other first-years. And unlike the admission audition—which was done as a performance in the public square, on the instrument and song of my choosing—this will be done with my tutor alone, in a room small and close with perfect acoustics so that I cannot dismiss errors as the play of the wind or being mired by an impertinent burst of applause. I will be made to play the same songs as my peers, and without my father's warm hands over mine, my slovenliness will be exposed for scrutiny.

I am eating the kiwi that Nelyo has put into my hands, and with a quivering panicked squeeze of my stomach, I almost regurgitate the whole thing, saving my clean robes—and Nelyo's across from me—only by swallowing violently until the nausea passes. I set the fruit aside, any vestige of appetite gone. "Macalaurë," Nelyo's hands cover mine, "you belong here. You must know that."

I do not, but I nod. "I am just nervous."

"Why? You have played hundreds of times for audiences of lords and kings … and Atar who—for not knowing a whit about music—is quite a formidable critic." He winks; squeezes my hand. I am not assuaged.

"Yes, but—"

"I know. Anxiety lives in a place where logic does not exist." Glancing at the light in the window, Nelyo folds his napkin and stands. I follow him, locking my knees to keep them from trembling. Standing in the pale golden light of morning, Nelyo appraises me and smiles. "But you are ready."

As we pass them on our way out of the palace, the servants bow to me and wish me good luck. I imagine—hope—that I have replied in an appropriate manner, but I find that I take two steps and cannot remember. Nelyo and I walk without speaking; the streets are cast in pale golden light—feather soft and soothing upon my skin already grimy with nervous sweat—and I wish that I could breathe it in, let it wind its way through my blood and my body. I imagine that I would be weightless then and my hands would be as fast and light as rain upon my harpstrings. Faultless.

We walk with a distance between us, and we do not speak. Passersby might think us companions by happenstance only, certainly not brothers (not with my brown hair and slight build and his imposing height and red tangle of plaits; we look nothing alike) if not for the fact that this is Alqualondë, and we are united by our strangeness: fiery eyes and oddly colored hair tall above the silvery sea of Telerin heads milling around our shoulders.

The conservatory is at the end of the street, a building—like the palace—designed by my father. I know this by the logic of its structure and the senselessness of its beauty, by the way it is built and situated to capture the Treelight upon its windows and throw it forth like the sparkles on the sea. I wonder, when he made it, if he ever envisioned that his son would attend here. Or did he even envision a son, my father who was adamant for a long while that he did not want children, who set his thoughts against the possibility, even? Would he have laughed at the notion of a Fëanárion in its long halls … or would he have smiled and built it for me?

This is something I dare to never hope. No, he wouldn't have imagined me at all; even if he believed in my existence, I would be inconsequential to him. Even in the recent months, as our reluctant companionship has bloomed into something that closely resembles friendship (sometimes, in the reverie of weariness, in the silvery night, I dare to hope that it is friendship), I do not believe myself a significant force in his life. His life would be no less without me.

My heart lies now like a brick in my chest; any anxiety of the imminent audition overwhelmed by thoughts of Fëanáro, as Fëanáro has—chief of his many gifts—the power to overwhelm nearly anything.

We stroll toward his building, Nelyo and I, pressed close by the crowd and slowed to meandering. Fishermen are already in the streets, waving about the morning's catch and trying to entice the sharp-eyed cooks and servants to wander their way. "Swordfish! Grouper!" one calls. His eyes happen on me, note my harp and student's ledger, and skip away within the space of a second. A moment later, he is bartering with a maid, who wrinkles her nose at his offerings but presses pearls into his hand and flits back in the direction of the royal quarter. The whole transaction takes all of five seconds.

"Watch it," Nelyo says, catching my arm, guiding me around a kettle of blue crabs that a vendor has set out on the sidewalk. Engrossed by the sights of downtown Alqualondë—so different from demure Tirion, where besides the playful fountains, one is apt to hear only the distant sounds of the forge—I would have fallen right over them. "Uh," I say as I step carefully around, grimacing at the slow-wriggling creatures scrabbling one over the other within the pot. "They look like spiders."

"Oh, come off it. How do you think the crab salad you adore so much begins?" Nelyo holds fast to my arm and navigates me through the crowd, bringing me closer and closer to Atar's building, and—pressed involuntarily close to him—I cannot elude the sharp nudge he gives me with his elbow beneath my ribs. I nudge him back, and like two small children, we carry on that way for some time: our faces portraits of dignity; our childishness hidden by our voluminous robes and our close-pressed bodies.

Shortly, the crowds are thinning and most of the other pedestrians appear to be students, like me, with instruments upon their backs and music ledgers in their hands. They greet each other in loud, joyful voices—Telerin accents brighter than the song of the water playing in the fountain in front of the conservatory—but they ignore Nelyo and me, two Noldor not like to them at all and inconsequential in their world.

Nelyo laughs softly as a tiny maiden pushes past me to embrace her friend and fellow student, as though I am invisible, insignificant at least. "They have no idea, do they?"

"No idea of what?"

"Who walks among them?"

I look at him, my heart prodded into frenzy once again. "I do not deserve that, Nel—"

"Do not tell me—who heard your voice at your first cry and every song after—what you do and do not deserve." Our steps, made languid in the crush of bodies earlier, hasten. He still holds my arm, less for guidance, more for companionship. We have stopped nudging and walk like Noldor, briskly and with purpose, toward the jewel-bright conservatory, our feet loud and important against the cobblestones. I hold my music ledger tightly, until I can feel my pulse fluttering as fast as butterfly wings against it.

We do not need to climb any steps to enter the conservatory, and this feels strange to me, to step into one of the biggest moments of my life so far without having to first endure a wearying climb. The Noldor feel the need to preface the entrance to any important building with long flights of stairs, offset by brief plateaus with statues and tasteful gardens. Always a fountain. But the pathway to the Telerin conservatory is just wide enough for two to walk and is lined with lamps; not the oil-burning variety common around the city, I see, but Fëanárian lamps, those that glow perpetually with the light of stars. It is practical, I think, how the buildings of Alqualondë are designed. Constantly tramping up and down marble steps becomes tedious after a while, and I'm not sure that my quivering knees could take it.

We pass another student, a Telerin boy a bit older than me. He nods gravely at me, and I nod gravely back. On the path to the conservatory—Noldo or not—he must assume it is obvious that I am a student. If he is surprised by me, his face does not show it, and when I turn to watch him hasten down the path and into the street, he doesn't likewise look back. We are at the door now, and Nelyo is holding it open for me to step into the vast foyer beyond, where soaring ceilings and breathtaking seascapes make me gasp with their beauty. Heart pounding, I am inside the Telerin conservatory at last, this moment long and painful in its arrival.

A soft-voiced woman directs us down a hallway where other students wait, some playing softly, agitatedly at instruments. Nelyo does not ask if I want him along, and I do not tell him to leave. From beyond the small room comes the sounds of music being practiced and played; imperfect music designed to reveal the flaws of the musician who attempts it. It stops; begins again. Stops. Begins again. On and on, maddeningly, as we wait, I hear the same theme at least a dozen times, and somehow, each subsequent time sounds worse than the one prior. I hold my harp in my arms and rest my fingers upon its strings but dare not play, even a restless tune that might distract me from the endless, jolting stop-start theme being played deeper within the conservatory, lest the others in the room—heads bowed over instruments and sheet music—raise suddenly to stare in awe. I imagine their words: Why is he here? My arms tighten around my harp as though to assert again that, yes, I belong. I have earned this. Have I not?

Nelyo and I stand beside each other, leaning against the wall (for the few benches have already been claimed), and before I can think better of it, I press my cheek to his shoulder and whisper, "I am afraid."

He abruptly takes my arm, and we leave my harp and ledger and stroll down the hall, where we are afforded more privacy. He stops suddenly in the middle of the hallway and turns to me. "Of course you are." He fixes one of my plaits behind my ear, smoothes the collar of my robes. "And you have every reason to be. So, then, you must convince your body that it is not afraid and hope that your mind will follow." Without giving me time to reply, he pushes me against the wall with a hand at the center of my chest. "First, breathe. You have not breathed properly since we left the palace this morning, and—although I am no expert—I suspect that this is important for a singer like you." He winks at me. "And when you breathe, it slows your heartbeat. Now close your eyes …" Ghostlike, tender, his fingers brush my eyelids shut.

I let air sink to the depths of my lungs that—Nelyo is right—I have starved all morning. I cannot see him smile but I hear it in his voice. "See?" My heart, pounding against the flat of his hand, has indeed slowed.

"Now relax each of your muscles in turn, starting here." He rubs my forehead, moves his fingers over my cheeks and jaws, down my neck and to my shoulders, rubbing from my arms to my fingertips. "How did you learn to do this?" I whisper, opening my eyes to ponder him.

He smiles wryly at me and does not cease his work on my fingers. "Do you think I never feel afraid?"

Once I would have insisted, No, I do not think you've ever been afraid, not about something like this. Matters of erudition have always been a matter of course for Nelyo, never me. Now, my gaze skips away from his haunted silver eyes, and I believe him. He fears more than I know.

From down the hall, my name is called in a Telerin voice, beautiful and terrifying in its pronunciation: "Macalaurë Fëanárion?"

Nelyo does not hug me or squeeze my hand or any of the things that I would expect; he wrings the last bit of tension from my shoulders and opens his hands as though casting it away, then steps aside, already moving toward the foyer and the exit. He will not be here when I am done; I am alone.

"Breathe," he says over his shoulder and smiles, turning for the door.

~oOo~

Diligence and discipline, I learn, do not belong solely to the Noldor, and many hours later—shoulders aching and fingers aflame with the beginnings of blisters—I make my way up the palace stairs in the meager light of evening. How can my legs be aching, after spending a day seated in front of my harp? They do. My arms are laden with a pile of parchments that must be completed by tomorrow, to evaluate my understanding of theory and history.

I fumble the doorknob and, with great relief, step into the bedroom that I share with my brother. The room is dark except for the quivering halo of a gas lamp on Nelyo's bedside table: a dark room opening to a dark, heaving sea, sparkling faintly with Telperion's weak light. Nelyo is curled beneath his blankets in bed, propped on his elbows and reading a thick, formidable volume filled with inscrutably small text. He looks up when I enter, eyebrows raised, brow rumpled with concern.

"So? How did it go?"

I go to my bed and dump tomorrow's assignments upon the neatly-made bedclothes. "I placed well," I say.

"Good! Have a few assignments there, it seems?"

"Yes. It seems that what I have spent the entire spring, summer, and autumn doing is inconsequential and I must prove again that I know the material." I want a cup of tea, a hot bath, and to sleep between cool sheets, but at least three hours of work are sliding from my bed onto the floor. My neck aches and my mind rebels at the thought of music. And this is just the first day of a month-long stay yet!

"Ai, welcome to academia, Macalaurë. Proving yourself once is never enough. Why do you think I am here? You would think that somewhere between the books I've written that I would have proven that I know Eldarin history. Or at least the language in which they are written. But no, it is never enough." I hear the rustle of bedclothes as he rises; the whisper of his feet sliding into his slippers. A moment later, he is pressing a goblet into my hands. "Here. This will help your headache."

I do not even care how he knew that my head hurts (and it does); I gratefully sip the beverage—expecting the fermented sweetness of wine—and nearly spit the liquid across my bed when I discover that it is only water.

Nelyo laughs at the surprise on my face. "You may have a glass of wine when you are finished with your work. It will only make you sleepier and your head hurt more. Have you eaten or drank anything since breakfast?" Delicately, I shake my head. "That is why you are uncomfortable. Sit down and begin your work. Sip the water, and I will bring you something to eat. I saved you something from supper." He gives me a quick kiss on the temple before dashing out the door in his nightclothes.

But I am hungry, and if he is fetching me a meal, he can do it naked for all that I care.

I peel my boots from my feet and settle onto the bed with a sigh, uncorking a vial of ink and preparing to follow Nelyo's instructions. I begin work on my first page. For each question that I answer, I reward myself with a sip of water. I think of Vingarië—whom I barely have time to think of, much less see—and wonder at my foolishness in thinking that we would have droves of free time to spend together, that this experience would somehow be a break from the discipline demanded of me by my father. I begin to wonder at my wisdom in wanting to take the one thing that I have unquestionably loved—music—and make it something more than "instinct."

Nelyo comes back then with a tray: more fruit and a plate of something that smells divine as he draws closers. I sit up straighter to see what it is, and with a wicked smirk, he sets down the tray and says, "Crab salad."

Together, we laugh so hard that I collapse on the bed and rumple my pages without even knowing it.

The weeks are a colorful rush after that, passing breathlessly, with a moment expiring before I have adequately prepared for the next. I, who am used to lying about the house, playing my harp and writing music in my leisure, am suddenly required to hustle, rushing from place to place to be on time for lessons or to sit for recitals. At midday, I squeeze the moments at either side of the noon hour aside to make time for Vingarië, and we eat together by the fountain beside the music school. My harp lies forgotten at my side and her flute lies forgotten at hers; we eat Telerin meals that we buy from vendors in exchange for pearls and gems, and we talk with food in our mouths, for the hour is short and as many things must be fit into a moment as possible. She laughs and sprays me with wine and blushes and wipes my face with her handkerchief, and I laugh and choke on my salmon wrap, and when we both recover, she says, "If we have until the ending of the world to live, then why must we rush so?" and it is an answer I cannot give but makes my heart quiver fearfully anyway.

Who says we have until the world's ending?

I shake my head. It is as though Laurelin had dimmed for a moment, but that cannot be. I blink and smile and force myself to forget it.

My lessons are harder than I expected. My tutor is not willing to settle for what I am able to do but constantly demands more of me. When I play a certain complex melody at the proper tempo, he increases the tempo again, and my hands are reduced to feeling as though the muscles in my fingers are bunched into knots, and I know by the pinched expression on my tutor's face that he is not pleased.

At our midday meal that day, Vingarië reassures me, "No one can please him," for she had a friend who studied the harp with him and is now renowned as one of the most skilled of our cohort in Alqualondë. "Still, he complains about her technique; you would think she's learned the harp sitting in the gutter, plucking tentacles strung in a conch shell!"

"One of the most renowned, you say?" I ask, feeling a pinch of jealous curiosity to know the one who exceeds me in skill.

"Well," says Vingarië, swallowing her food before answering, "she was the most renowned. Then, of course, you came along."

I laugh and Vingarië looks at me with confusion, as though she doesn't understand what is so funny.

Daily, I have theory and history lessons with other students from the school—Vingarië is among their numbers, but the instructor is careful to keep us across the room from each other, perhaps having observed our midday trysts at the fountain—and I dread those two hours of tedium, for they invoke more memories of mathematics and lore, first with my father and then with Nelyo, than I care to recall in Alqualondë, far from our house in Tirion, where I hoped such negativity could be forgotten. Here, all of the lessons I did in the months before, preparing for this month, are put on display, deconstructed, and my faults flaunted to the group. Of course, everyone's work endures similar scrutiny, but as the only Noldo in the room, I feel as though the gazes and the expectations are heavier upon me, when my name is called, than when one of the Telerin students—or even Vingarië, a half-Noldo—is placed in the spotlight.

Evening meals I take with Olwë. He made the offer during our first days here, to both Nelyo and me, and there was a hollow longing in his eyes. "I am lonely with my wife and my children all so far away," he confessed to me one night, after many glasses of wine, for his wife is with my Aunt Eärwen in Tirion, awaiting the birth of Eärwen's first child, and Olwë's two sons have sailed to the south of Aman to enjoy the superior propensity of fish there.

Sometimes, Nelyo joins us, but usually he pleads out of it by reason of having to study, or suppertime arrives and Nelyo simply doesn't appear, and King Olwë and I begin eating and do not mention it. Telerin customs are relaxed when compared to ours, and perhaps that is the reason for Olwë's silence, but I know Nelyo, and it is not like him to be so inconsiderate, to ignore an invitation without making his excuses to our host.

I do not see Nelyo much. Usually, when I return late at night, exhausted, from having bid Vingarië a good night (which never takes fewer than two hours), he is studying by lamplight. He will pause to ask me questions about my studies, about Vingarië, while I undress and collapse into bed, and more often than not, I fall asleep while answering. I leave the covers off of my body in an effort to stave off sleep—I miss my brother and the conversations we used to have that would see the arrival of morning with the feeling that no more than an hour had passed—but the sound of the sea is hypnotizing, and before I realize what has happened, I feel Nelyo's practiced hands tucking the coverlet around me and kissing my forehead, and then I am awake, the Trees are mingling, and it is time to begin another day.

Once, I saw Nelyo in the square as I sat with Vingarië, eating my midday meal. The streets were crowded, but if my brother was easily spotted in Tirion, then he was impossible to miss in Alqualondë. He stood a head taller than the tallest of the Teleri swarming around him, and his hair blazed like fire in the midday brilliance. Vingarië was speaking about some atrocity committed by her brothers, and I caught Nelyo's gaze and opened my mouth to call out to him, to invite us to join us—for he has yet to be formally introduced to Vingarië—but he raised his hand by his hip in greeting, fluttering his fingers at me, and quickly looked away, slipping into the crowd and somehow managed to disappear among the diminutive, silver-haired Teleri.

That night, when I returned home, I meant to mention it. I opened my mouth, and the words sat like weights upon my tongue, ready to tumble from my mouth, but something made my teeth click shut, some glimmer in Nelyo's eyes that begged me, please do not ask why I ignored you.

And so I said nothing. I allowed him to ask whether I was being treated better in my theory lecture and told him my dismaying tale of the day, about being caught daydreaming when I was supposed to be pondering chord progressions, and he groaned and made the appropriate comments, and my heavy eyes dropped shut, and the next thing I knew, I felt his hands tucking the blankets around me. Then my eyes opened and it was morning. Time to begin again.

I ask sometimes after his lessons, but he is always vague and quickly changes the subject back to my studies and my romancing of Vingarië, laughing perhaps too loudly and smiling too brightly at my jokes to fool me, who knows him best of anyone in the world.

~oOo~

I meet Vingarië by the fountain, at our accustomed time, and her smile is brighter than usual. She skips into my arms, squeezes my neck in a hug, and plants a kiss on my cheek with more enthusiasm than usual, and I back up and grin warily. "What's the celebration?" I ask.

"My father has returned!" she chortles.

And so that day's theory lecture is ruined, and I am caught at unawares twice during questioning. In the mire of lessons and lectures and my attempts at romance, I have forgotten about Vingarië's father and my plans to ask formally for his blessing of our courtship. Sitting in lecture—the day is unusually hot, and a fly keeps buzzing around my head, as though trying to further distract my attention from the lecture—I ponder the wisdom of my plans. He is a Teler. The courtship rituals of the Teleri—even those of the court—are far more relaxed than those of the Noldor. Noldorin children are expected to ask for the blessings of their parents. The Teleri, who lived lawlessly much longer in the Outer Lands than we did, place little value on such formalities. Still, I am of the Noldor. A Noldo of the court. A descendent of the High King. I must be expected to uphold our traditions, not to use the convenience of the Telerin customs to escape my discomfort.

"Macalaurë?" the instructor calls. He is pointing to a passage of music drawn on the slate at the front of the room. It means nothing to me. After three ticks of uncomfortable silence, he turns to someone else for the answer, but his eyes come back to me shortly after, full of disappointment.

King Olwë is dining with his lords this night, and so I take my meal with Nelyo, on our balcony. He is rumpled and unfocused in the way of one whose sole conversation this day has been with books. He braided his hair in the morning, but the braids are coming undone on one side, and he looks crooked, skewed. There are spots of ink on his lips that would annoy Atar, and I resist the urge to blot them away with my napkin. They will be washed away by wine soon enough.

We eat in near silence. Several times, he tries to start a conversation, but my replies are uninspired, and he is not motivated to maintain his half of it, and so we fall into silence again and again. I am busy with my own thoughts this night; what weighs upon the mind of my brother, I do not know.

Vingarië is home with her father and her brothers, enjoying a supper together, and so I remain in our room with Nelyo. He settles onto his bed after supper with a book of history held open with one hand while the other hand slowly unwinds his braids, allowing his hair to spill over his shoulders and onto the pages of his book, where he flips it away with practiced annoyance.

After a half-hour or so of reading, he looks up, and surprise lights his silver eyes. "You are still here?" he asks, as though I am a figment of his imagination, a construction born of reading for too many hours without a reprieve.

"Yes," I say. I am working on my theory lessons for the next day, determined to make up for my poor showing today, and trying to force thoughts of Vingarië's father from my mind. "I have much to do for theory lecture."

He smirks with amusement. "Enough to forsake the lovely Vingarië?"

I swallow. Something in my throat clicks; I open my mouth, but in my mind, where there should be words, there is only music, a crashing cacophony of sound, and I sit with my mouth open for a long time without speaking.

The amusement drops from Nelyo's face. Immediately, he is on his feet, crossing the room to my bed. I am held in the half-circle of his left arm, as though by his superior size and strength, he can protect me from something. But what? I am here; the protection I fear I need is from myself.

"What is it, Macalaurë? Did you have a row? Did you—" He doesn't want to say "split up," but I feel the word as keenly on the tip of his tongue as though it were on my own. That's what people have been saying of him and Annawendë: They split up in Formenos. Maidens in Tirion have taken to smiling at him with guilty hope, but Nelyo averts his eyes in the way of a Fëanárian: Our faces do not fall when we are shamed but lift, in pride.

"No, no," I assure him. "Nothing like that. It's just—"

Tears sting my eyes. I am overtaken by alarm and surprise. Why am I crying? I imagine my heavy accent, the ponderous words of my plea, in the home of Vingarië's Telerin father. Suddenly, I feel large and graceless, with awkward, graceless customs. Suddenly, I feel very Noldorin.

Nelyo fumbles in the deep pocket of his robes and extracts a handkerchief. It is spotty with ink, but I raise my face to him and let him blot away my tears.

"You are so beautiful, Macalaurë," he tells me. "Do you know how beautiful you are?"

"No, I am not," I say in a thick voice. "I do not belong here. I should not have come."

Where do I belong? If not in the House of Fëanáro—the father of strong, capable, skilled sons, like my brothers—than surely with the Teleri. But my worthlessness here too has been proven, many times, every time that I fumble an answer in lecture that I should easily know—after all, I am a Noldo, and we are the people who invented titles to reward our own skill; we are the people who are unaware of the Light of the Trees on some days, so closed are we in our libraries and workshops—and it is further proven as I walk like a large, gangly beast beside petite and musical Telerin girl that I love.

It seems that I belong nowhere. Perhaps I should wander, as do the great bards of lore, with nothing but my harp and the clothes upon my body, singing hymns to the sea.

As though he perceives the dire and melodramatic nature of my thoughts, Nelyo squeezes me tighter. He rests his forehead against my temple; his breath tickles my ear. "I always think it a shame, Macalaurë, that you never get to hear yourself sing. That you never get to sit where I sit, off the stage, and watch the light on your face when you raise your voice in song. That you never feel the way your songs ripple against the very substance of our spirits, as though it is Eru—and not one of his children—who sings to us.

"No one belongs here more than you, Macalaurë."

I do not know what to say, and so I lift my arms and put them around him also, pressing my face into the warm hair that tumbles against his neck, and we hold each other for a long time.

I draw away first. Always, I draw away first.

"So," says Nelyo brightly, putting my hair behind my ears, "what is the problem then? That has caused you to stay here this night? It is not your insecurity in your lectures that causes you to seek my arms instead of those of your very lovely Vingarië."

I laugh. "No, it is not. She is not available this night. Her father has returned from theSouthSea."

"Oh?"

"Yes. And so I—" I look at him, hoping he will understand where my words are going, but his brow remains lifted and his eyes expectant. "I foolishly told her that I would like to ask for his blessing of our courtship."

"Foolishly? There is nothing foolish about that. It is proper to do so."

"The Teleri do not think so."

"They do not think it improper and beside, Macalaurë, you are not a Teler."

"But I have never even met her father!"

"Barely had I met Laiquiwë—excluding the very awkward instance of being caught naked by him, with his daughter's legs wrapped around my head—until I asked for his blessing." His words have the desired effect, and I blush and laugh. "By contrast, your meeting will be relatively easy, I should think." He stands and, taking my hands, pulls me up beside him. "This is what we will do, Macalaurë," he says. "We will rehearse your meeting. I will be Lord Lantanén. You will be yourself. And you will ask me for my blessings to court my daughter."

Nelyo rolls his shoulders and tosses his hair aside, and in a moment, wears the soft and plaintive look of a Telerin lord. I giggle.

He looks puzzled. "Do you mock me, Prince Macalaurë?" he asks in a slightly appalled manner.

I bite my lip—suppressing my giggles—and fall silent. I bow carefully. "Lord Lantanén," I say, "as you might know, I have affections for your daughter."

"Affections? No, I do not know this." He contemplates me and shudders. "Hopefully, you are not like your brother in expressing them."

"Oh, no, no …"

"Then what is it that you have come to ask? Vingarië is not old enough to marry."

"But courtship—"

Nelyo's eyebrows spring up. "Courtship?"

"Yes, I would like to ask your blessing. On our courtship."

"You ask my blessing on something that you have already done? So my opinion matters naught?"

"No, it is just … you were fishing … you weren't here," I finish lamely, and the next thing I know, Nelyo has charged me, yelling, and knocked me onto the bed, my wind exiting my lungs in a single, painful gust, and he is sitting atop me, laughing.

"Why did you do that?" I snap, and he presses his hand to my heart.

"Well, Macalaurë, it seems that you are still living," he says, and I can feel my heartbeat against his hand. I scowl at him, and he goes on, "I cannot imagine it being much worse than that, can you? And still, you lived."

"You are despicable," I say, but he can see in my eyes that I do not mean it, and he laughs.

"You worry too much, Macalaurë," he says, rolling off of me to lie beside me on the bed. "Talk to him like you would anyone else. Do not make the issue of your courtship your sole reason for visiting but, rather, try to know him. Speak honestly; ask after his family, and his fishing, and be sincere. Be respectful but warm. He will not refuse his blessings. And, certainly, you have talked enough times to lords of the Noldorin court, and the Teleri are nothing compared to them. You are a son of Fëanáro, and I believe that Atar might be the person in Aman most dreaded to meet for counsel. I think that Eru has given Atar only sons because he feels sorry for the eventual husbands of his daughters.

"Now," he says, glancing at the silver light of evening beyond our bedroom, "I have much to do before I may sleep. Many chapters to read. May I trust you to be able to do the same?" I nod, and he throws his arms around me in a hug, kissing my nose loudly, before spiriting back across the room to settle at his desk.

"I will be happy when you are married and settled with the poor girl, Macalaurë," he teases and turns back to his work.

~oOo~

And so I forgo my usual two-hour study session in the afternoon to walk nervously to the house of Lord Lantanén. Vingarië and I shared a green salad scattered with miniature shrimp for the midday meal, and it is churning in my stomach and rising to burn the back of my throat with scalding bile. I wish that I had eaten nothing at all. And despite drinking a full goblet of wine—which I also regret because my head now feels heavy, and had I gone to study, I likely would have fallen asleep on my papers—my mouth feels as though it is lined with cotton. I can hear my heart pounding in my ears.

Vingarië hugged me and kissed my cheek when I told her of my intentions. "You are sweet," shed said. "I said nothing to him of you and me, but I cannot pledge the same for Turonén and Tindanén."

I arrive at the courtyard and houses that have now become familiar. Many nights I have spent in that house now, drinking wine with Vingarië in the parlor or playing a game with her and her brothers, an addictive game that involves cards and requires no strategy at all, only luck, at the big table in the dining room. Another afternoon I spent in her brothers' bedrooms, looking at their new longbows, passing on the way a closed door that made Tindanén nudge me in the ribs and say, "That is my sister's chambers. Note its location, for the windows will be reinforced with steel upon your leaving."

"We are half-Noldor," added Turonén, "so do not think us incapable of doing it."

More nights, I sat in the parlor with Vingarië, thinking of her bedroom directly overhead (for it was) and wondering what color were her bedclothes and how she looked lying among them, and I felt a visceral, quivering sensation deep inside my gut that was not unlike the feeling I got when I drank the strong spirits my father gave me at the welcoming feast in Formenos. I wanted to offer to follow her to her bedroom and kiss her goodnight, knowing full well that I would behave innocently, but knew that it was nonetheless improper.

And now, I find myself in front of the same house, watching the wind stir the curtains in the room that belongs to Vingarië, feeling as though I have swallowed a lump of hot steel.

I make myself walk the path to the front door. I concentrate on the colors of the flagstones beneath my feet and force myself to step only on the blue-gray ones. That makes it so that I am less aware of the door coming towards me until I am in front of it, watching my fist rise and rap on the door.

A maidservant answers. She smiles and chimes, "Prince Macalaurë!"

Of course. She has played the game with us on some nights, joining us after feigning reluctance and agreeing only after Tindanén had grabbed her hand and pleaded, both of their cheeks flushed pink and their eyes shining in such a way that made Vingarië and Turonén exchange smirking glances.

I nod at her. "Greetings. I was wondering if Lantanén was in?"

"Of course he is! He is exhausted from his trip and will not be returning to counsel until next week."

"Would you ask if he would see me? If not, I will gladly return—"

"I will see you," says a deep yet melodic voice from behind the maidservant. She smiles, bows, and steps aside. "He will see you, Macalaurë."

Part of me was hoping that she would tell me that he was exhausted from his journey and refusing visitors. I hoped to be sent away to more days of distraction and agony—but at least, I would be spared for the moment. Like a craven who postpones his torture from fear, I hoped to be walking down the street by now, both relieved and tormented.

Instead, my heart pounding at such a frenzied volume and pace that I am convinced he must be able to hear it, I step into the house.

He is taller than I expected, with silver hair darker than most Teleri. He wears the casual clothes of the Teleri: loose white trousers, a blue tunic open to mid-chest, and only a silver scallop shell on a delicate silver chain for jewelry. He leans on the doorframe, a goblet of wine in cupped in his palm. His eyes are bright blue, brighter even than my grandfather's, and I find it hard to look away from them, so obvious is Vingarië's resemblance in his face.

He straightens and steps forward, offering his hand in a brusque manner that reminds me of the Noldor, although his accent is lively and musical, like the Teleri. "Prince Macalaurë Fëanárion, I presume?" he says, and I realize that I haven't introduced myself. I force a smile that feels more like a grimace. I imagine my teeth must look bared, a predator in for the kill, not his daughter's suitor introducing himself. "Macalaurë Fëanárion, yes, my Lord," I say in a voice that trembles slightly.

With an amused expression, he replies, "And I am Lord Lantanén, but I am sure that you know that, if you possess the need to visit me."

"Of course, my lord."

"Would you like to join me in my study? Where we can speak more comfortably?"

So the Teleri also have studies, I find myself thinking, as I follow him down a hallway, past the parlor where, just the other night, his daughter and I kissed with a ferocity that made our lips as red as though we had been eating fresh summer berries, and to a set of double doors at the end, where we find ourselves in a room full of windows, overlooking the sea. I am surprised to see that there are no books, no piles of parchments, and no half-finished trinkets. There are a few baskets of shells on one shelf and a partially mended fishing net. On his desk are several scrolls, a chunk of driftwood, a quill, and nothing else. The windows are open, and the room is freshened by a brisk breeze off the sea. Lord Lantanén offers me a chair and, without asking, pours me a glass of white wine.

"How fares your father?" he asks, putting the glass into my hand, and I hear myself answer, going on at length about his work and his affairs, while Lantanén settles himself into a chair opposite mine, until I realize that I am talking quickly and breathlessly and repeating the same things that I said to start, and I abruptly shut my mouth.

Lantanén looks at me with raised eyebrows, and I feel my face warming. I had halted in the middle of a sentence. "Your father's work with crystals?" he prompts, perhaps thinking that I have lost my thought in the middle of the sentence, and that is why I stopped speaking. I feel my face redden further. My heartbeat is a roar. A small voice that sounds like I imagine one might sound while drowning is screaming that I am failing miserably.

"I am sorry, my lord," I say. "I realized that I had told you already of that."

"Your father's work is always a delight to me. I will be glad to hear of it as many times as you wish to tell of it."

I realize, with a start, that he is trying to calm me: His voice is slow and unusually kind; this is how Atar and Nelyo speak to frightened colts just weaned, stroking their necks and reassuring them that they will not be harmed by their shadows.

I take a deep breath and a sip of wine. It is good, sweet and crisp, and I quickly take another. "Thank you for your kindness, but I do not wish to bore you," I say. "Rather I should say that my brother Maitimo sends his greetings and asks after your lovely wife."

"My lovely wife is well, as always, although I wish that she was less attached to that city of yours. I miss her in Alqualondë, in the winters, while she remains in Tirion."

I wonder: Will Vingarië and I become like that one day? I know it is not unusual for couples long wed and no longer bringing children to the world to spend time apart, but I cannot imagine packing my things and riding to Tirion without her. I think of sleeping beneath the same stars but apart, in different cities, while our children grow and shuffle between us to spend equal time. And then I think, with alarm: Will Amil and Atar live that way one day? Will I go to Amil and she will inquire after Atar like one asks after an old and oft-forgotten friend?

There is a moment of silence, but it is not awkward, as Lantanén is drinking his wine, and I am lost in thought. It occurs to me that I could become used to this, to quiet afternoons in a study such as this, with the silence outweighing the words, sharing wine and company. Time in Atar's study is always filled with discussion—frantic gesturing hands, competing voices—that metamorphoses easily into argument amid the clutter that seems to fill his life. As much as I love my father and my time with him, I realize that I could learn to love this too.

In fact, I already do.

Lantanén speaks next. "Macalaurë, you did not come to tell me of your father's crystals, nor to ask after my wife."

"No," I say softly, "I did not." I take a sip of wine for courage. "I love your daughter," I say.

Those were not the words that I meant to say. I meant to be delicate and elusive, as Nelyo would be. I meant to use gentle metaphors in place of the brutal truth of it: That I will choose to live alone if one day Vingarië will not consent to be my wife.

But horror has only the briefest chance to flash across my thoughts before Lantanén chuckles and says, "I know. I would have seen it in your eyes, even if Tindanén did not let it slip at breakfast this morning." I watch his face carefully for signs of emotion, for something lurking beneath his kindly grin. But there is none, no deception, only joy.

"I see in your eyes," he says, "what I see in mine, for I also love Vingarië. When she was born, and I held my baby daughter in my arms for the first time, I knew what it meant when poets say that they would die for someone. For my wife, for my sons, the thought never crossed my mind, but for Vingarië, my first thought was: I would die for her.

"I see that also in your eyes, Macalaurë."

"Yes," I gasp.

"As you know, it is not the tradition of the Teleri to ask for a parent's blessing upon a courtship. But I respect that it is the custom of your people, and I admire your courage in coming here today." He offers his hand to me, and stunned, I take it. "Macalaurë Fëanárion, if you treat my daughter to the love that she deserves, then I will end each day with a prayer that you and she shall wed and find the happiness that eludes so many."

"I will. I would die for her," I whisper.

"I know," he says with a smile, "and so I give my blessing."

~oOo~

That afternoon, I am distracted in my theory lecture for a different reason: I am trying to capture Vingarië's attention and signal that my meeting with her father went well, that he gave his blessing. Unfortunately, she is quite absorbed in writing the lecturer's every word upon a parchment, pausing only to answer his inquiries, when he chooses her from the group. Luckily, I am so absorbed in trying to catch her attention that I haven't time for daydreams, and when the lecturer calls my name, thinking that he is surprising me, I answer with haste—and correctly.

"Excellent, Macalaurë," he says, unable to keep the disbelief from his voice.

I wait for her outside the lecture room. "You never looked up!" I accuse.

"I didn't want to know until we had time to talk," she replies, kissing me on the lips and earning a scowl from the lecturer, who is just passing, and a mutter about the impertinence of romance at such a young age.

"He gave it!" I tell her. "He gave his blessing!"

She laughs with glee and clasps me in a choking hug. "Oh, Macalaurë! Now it will be nothing to ask his permission for marriage!" Realizing what she has said, she backs away quickly, her fingers over her mouth. "Oh! I did not mean to say that! You do not have to marry me! Oh, why do I always say such things?" Her face has turned an alarming scarlet color. "Next thing," she says derisively, "I'll be naming our three children—"

"Three?" I exclaim. "I had thought we would have four!"

With a giggle, she takes my arm, and we amble from the building, pressed close enough together that walking is awkward and a scribe in a hurry rushes around us, muttering to himself about the wonders of the leisurely behavior of those who are not constantly presented with deadlines. We have a stack of assignments to complete before the lecture tomorrow, but neither of us mentions it and we head, instead, for the fountain.

"Four children," she muses, once we settle. "Two boys and two girls. The first, though," she says, with a bright glint in her eye, "will be a daughter."

A vendor selling fresh raspberries passes, and I signal for a basket. He hands them to me and disappears quickly, with a nod and a smile, before I can even press pearls into his hand for payment, saying something about a gift to the celebration of new love. I pop a berry into her mouth and say, "It sounds lovely." Her eyes close as the sweet juiciness of the berry explodes inside her mouth, and I kiss her. Her lips are warm, and she tastes of berries.

"You do realize, Macalaurë," she says, as we snack on berries, "that we will have to bond."

I pause for a moment, my mouth open, and a berry falls from my lips and into the fountain. Realizing her words, she flushes an alarming scarlet. "I did not mean it like that. Of course you know that; that is how children are made. But rather that …" She stops and hides her face in her hands.

"Rather what, Vingarië?" I say.

She says something behind her hands that I cannot comprehend.

"Vingarië, I cannot—"

She says it again, louder. "It is just that I have always been afraid. Of bonding. That it might hurt." She takes away her hands and looks me in the face, to appraise my reaction.

"I will be gentle," I say, and now we both blush and turn away from each other.

After several long minutes of awkward silence, she says, "It is many years away," at the same moment as I say, "We can have a long engagement."

We turn back to each other, our cheeks dimmed to pink, and tearfully, she says, "You mean that, Macalaurë? You would not mind?"

"I will wait until the ending of Arda for you, Vingarië, if that is what you wished."

"I hope it shall not come to that," she says. "But … but I would like a long engagement. I know your father married young, and your brother hopes to marry young, but all of this is so sudden: my love, my feelings for you. I never expected to love a man, much less to wish for marriage and children, and I always thought the pain of bonding and childbirth would belong to other women, never to me." She lays her head on my shoulder. "But I would endure far worse for you, Macalaurë."

I would die for you.

I shiver. Such promises should not be made lightly, but I feel as though they were made long before we were born, by something greater than us, and that we are merely reciting what is meant to be.

I put my arm around her shoulders and hold her. A year ago, also, I would have laughed openly at the suggestion that I should wish for a wife and four children with a greater ferocity than I wished for anything else. My attitudes of that time seem to belong to another person. Never would I have imagined that that feast in the forest that I had attended months ago with Nelyo, full of the empty, youthful hope for love that I never expected to discover—after all, who could love an aberration like me?—would be realized, that when I sat down beside the dark-and-silver-haired girl with the flute and we smiled wordlessly at each other, that I was looking upon the woman who might one day be my wife.

With Vingarië safe in the circle of my arms, I close my eyes and imagine our life, our future. I imagine our house here in Alqualondë, our bedroom open to the sea, lying on the crisp white sheets of our bed. I feel again the warm quiver inside to think of undressing her and making love to her, our cries mingling with the roar of the sea, her small, pale body soft beneath my hands, her kisses on my naked skin. A flush heats my face, but she cannot see it: Her face in pressed into my chest, her arms circling me, her hands pressing my back, warm through my tunic.

A little girl runs past us, chasing a tern that has stolen a piece of bread from her basket, crying out in protest and laughing at the same time, and my heart beats faster to think of the daughter that Vingarië foresees, and I feel her arms tighten around me. I imagine the house again, but I have trouble imagining a daughter there or any children at all, just Vingarië and me and the sound of the sea.

When I return to King Olwë's palace that night, having rudely missed his supper without making my excuses—and feeling ashamed for it, hoping I will not have to face him—I climb the stairs soundlessly to the room I share with Nelyo. But he is not there.

There is a parchment on my pillow, folded into thirds and sealed with Nelyo's seal, the one he rarely uses, preferring to continue using our father's until he reaches his majority. My name is written in his elegant hand across the front, and I break the seal carefully and reluctantly.

My Macalaurë,

I have gone to Taniquetil to recite for my examinations. I am very sorry for the sudden nature of my departure, but I just realized this morning that I needed to go now or chance that I shall never find the will or desire to do so again. Although the examinations have ceased to matter to me as they once did, I understand that—for reasons greater than my personal preferences in the matter—I must nonetheless attempt and excel at them, and so I have gone, before my sudden apathy leads me to make decisions that I will later regret.

I have sent word to Atar, explaining that he need not ride to Taniquetil next week to hear me recite, and so you do not need to make excuses or explanations on my behalf. I will gladly bear the retribution for my hasty and rude decision—as I recognize that it is impolite to have left as I did, knowing that my family had hoped to be in attendance, in support of me—and you need not become involved. Should he ask, you are welcome to tell him that you knew nothing of it, for that is not far from the truth, as I did not tell you before leaving of my intention. Indeed, until this morning, I did not know myself that I would not be sleeping in my accustomed bed tonight.

I have also spoken with and given my apologies to King Olwë and thanked him most sincerely for his kindness and apologized for my lackluster appreciation of it, for I recognize that my behavior in recent weeks has been beneath what should be expected of our grandfather's heir, and I hope to remedy these errors upon my return.

To you, also, I owe my apologies, for I have not been nearly supportive enough, lost as have been my thoughts in my own daily tragedies. Trust that you are more than a brother but my dearest friend, and there is no one on Arda whom I love more and wish not to see hurt. If I have done so, trust that it was inadvertent and that I shall make any amends that you deem necessary upon my return, and more.

I love you, Macalaurë, and you are in my thoughts always, and I hope that I may live fondly also in yours, during my absence, as your brother and most beloved friend,

Nelyafinwë Maitimo
"Nelyo"

I reread the letter twice, appraising my feelings. Nelyo, it seems, expects that I should be angry. I test this expectation: Am I angry? Should I be? Indeed, Atar and I had planned to accompany him to Taniquetil; we would sit behind him as he recited the results of years of study and scholarship to Manwë, answering his questions on the subjects. I had not thought about whether I desired the trip or not. Certainly, it would take me away from my studies in Alqualondë—and Vingarië—for a week but Nelyo was correct in that he is both my brother and my most beloved friend, and that it might have been a sacrifice had never entered my mind until now.

Nelyo's heart has never been a secret to me, just as mine has never been a secret to him. But in recent months, since Annawendë's departure, he has smiled at me when I know he has wished to cry; his face has been like one sculpted, based on expectations of how he should look, but I have recognized him as a stranger, and I have, at times, wished to seize his shoulders and shake him until he wept, telling him that I do not love him for his unfailing dignity or cheerfulness but because he has never thought first of himself while another is suffering, and that is a greater accomplishment than I can ever hope to achieve. When I am hurt, my thoughts are on my pain; my eyes see no one else's, but Nelyo would bear unspeakable torment, I believe, to save those he loves from the same.

To love him, given that, seems an inferior repayment, like giving a bland, featureless stone as gratitude for a pound of gold.

And so, when I think of how I feel about Nelyo's sudden desertion, I decide that I have no choice but to forgive him. My heart can bear to do nothing else.

For how can I betray him now? After all that he has done for me, selflessly, that the one time he chooses to act in his own interest, I would begrudge him it, believing that he should ignore his broken heart when he treats every tremor in the balance of my well-being as a travesty worthy of his immediate and ceaseless attention, until it is resolved.

I fold the letter and slip it beneath my pillow, wishing to believe the childish superstition that to put a letter from a person beneath my pillow will give me fond dreams of him and, likewise, give him fond dreams of me.

~oOo~

I have no way of knowing Nelyo's dreams that night, but I know that I dream of him. We are sitting on balcony, overlooking Tirion. We hold goblets in our hands and drink a fine, full-bodied wine and talk and laugh. Upon awaking, I cannot remember a bit of our conversation, but I know that we were both happy, and beyond that, the details seem unimportant.

I am nearing the end of my lessons here in Alqualondë, the point where my tutor will decide if he will take me as a student again next year or choose another in my place. Given this, I am abashed by the little attention I have given to my music, distracted as I have been by my budding love for Vingarië and now my concern for Nelyo.

Vingarië laughs at my concerns, when I tell her. "Of course he will take you back! You are not even forty yet, and never has this city seen one with greater talents than you!"

Unconvinced, I say, "It is possible, Vingarië, that you possess a sizeable bias on that matter."

"Yes," she agrees, "but it is also possible that my father is close friends with your tutor, and I overheard them discussing you in the parlor beneath my bedroom. There is a very convenient air shaft …"

Still, I do not believe her.

I intensify my practices, with Nelyo gone. Without having to worry about keeping him awake at night, I stay awake until the arrival of morning, practicing. Many nights, I get no sleep at all, and my eyes are heavy and my fingers sore upon reporting to my lessons in the morning, blisters forming upon the fingertips that I had always proudly believed to be suitably callused. But I ignore my pain and play on, and feel a twinge of relief whenever my instructor nods his approval.

The week passes in a blur. It is the eve of my begetting day, and I do not sleep at all, working tirelessly—or so I wish to believe—on a new song assigned to me today, a song that seems to require the fingers of a contortionist, or better yet, a dozen fingers instead of the ordinary ten with which I was born.

As the Lights begin to mingle, I hear the gentle strum of a harp answering my melody, from outside the room, on the beach below. I pause and rub my eyes, wondering if maybe I should have slept after all (I had two hours of sleep the night before and only an hour the night before that), if maybe I am hallucinating from my weariness, but when I resume playing, determined to finish the song, someone beneath my balcony answers on another harp, playing chords that compliment perfectly my music.

I stop playing and go to the balcony, lean over, and see a silver-haired maiden staring back up at me with a wide but slightly abashed grin on her face.

"Vingarië?" I hiss.

"Happy begetting day, Macalaurë. I had hoped to awaken you with a love song, but it seems you were already playing one."

I swing my legs over the railing and shimmy down a column. Three feet above the ground, my hand slips, and I topple into the sand beside her. "Ohh …" I say, rubbing my backside, and she laughs, offering me a hand and hauling me to my feet.

I kiss her. "Don't you know that it is the man who is supposed to arrive beneath his true love's balcony and serenade her?" I ask.

"But my begetting day is in the spring, and you will be home with your father then," she says, as though that makes her actions perfectly logical. Logical, no, but acceptable, and I feel a thrilling flutter to think that I have found wonderful love so unexpectedly.

It makes me realize, though, the depth of what must be Nelyo's pain.

"I brought wine," Vingarië says, removing a bottle from her satchel, "if you are not bothered by the thought of drinking so early in the morning."

Taking the bottle from her and using the edge of my nightshirt to work the cork free, I say, "I am not bothered at all."

She produces two goblets, and we move closer to the sea, where we lie on the chilly sand with the warm sea lapping at our toes, drinking sweet, heady wine and gazing at the stars, which are beginning to become sharper in their brilliance, hidden now only by the wispy veil of the mingled Lights.

"So were you born on your begetting day? Or merely begotten?"

"No. I was born two weeks late. My mother was at a very important feast, being held in my grandfather's palace, when she went into labor, and so I am the only of my brothers born within the walls of Tirion."

"I was born precisely on my begetting day," Vingarië says, "in Alqualondë. Perhaps this is why I adore the city so. Not that I do not also love Tirion," she adds quickly, "for I do. But my heart calls me ever toward the sea."

"We will have homes in both places, if that is what you desire."

"I would love that, Macalaurë."

"I also feel the calling of the sea," I confess, "although I do not know why. I am purely Noldorin."

"Perhaps your heart has always known that it would belong to one of the Teleri," she says softly.

With a smile, I agree, "Yes, perhaps it has."

The sea surges with a roar and rushes over our legs, soaking the bottom of her gown and the legs of my trousers. We both shriek and slide backwards but not quickly enough, and the sea retreats in foaming rivulets, making a trickling sound like the giggles of an impish child. We answer with our own laughter and pull the soaked cloth from our skin, where it unsticks reluctantly with a sucking sound. "Perhaps the sea is also claiming us," she says.

We sit until Laurelin gilds the western horizon with gold, and then I must take my leave, for I have to dress and ready myself for my lessons in two hours. "It is just as well," she says, "for if my father or one of my brothers decides to go to my room to invite me to an early breakfast, they will be worried by my absence."

I walk with Vingarië to the front of the palace, and we pause—our hands at the other's waist—and press our foreheads together. "Happy begetting day, my love," she whispers. "I was not yet born that day but my spirit sang with such joy." Her last words tickle my lips, for I have brought our mouths together in a kiss that I would like never to end. But I am a Noldo and practical, and I end it—kissing the backs of her fingers on each of her hands—consoling myself that we have until the ending of Arda to share in such kisses.

I walk to lessons, feeling as though my feet are buoyed by a cushion of air.

From there, the day steadily worsens.

Lessons are hard, and my tired brain decides halfway through that it is not worth the abuse that my instructor is giving it, and disappointed and angry, he sends me away five minutes early to practice.

And so I do, until, on my way to theory lecture, I put my burning fingers into my mouth and taste the metallic warmth of my own blood.

Vingarië tells me after lecture that her mother has arrived unexpectedly from Tirion, and she must take supper with her family, and so I will be alone on the evening of my begetting day. She hasn't even time for a moment by the fountain. "My mother is arriving at any moment," she says, and her eyes are bright with joy as she says it, and I feel a regretful pang of jealousy at the realization that I am not the only one in her life whom she cherishes.

Utterly ridiculous, I tell myself, to feel that way, but I hasten to King Olwë's palace in a stormy silence. I love my parents and my brothers as well as Vingarië, and were my mother absent from my life, I would also forsake my time with Vingarië to see her, but my heart hurts nonetheless, that I will have to dine alone or with near-strangers, on the night of my fortieth begetting day.

I run up the steps to our room, my harp tucked beneath my arm, keeping my feet light upon the stairs out of the selfish hope that I will encounter no one I know. No King Olwë, none of his kind servants. I want the solitude of my room, to stew in my sour emotions in peace.

I throw open my bedroom door, whip inside, and stop, for Nelyo has leaped from his bed and to his feet.

"Nelyo?" I exclaim, and my harp tumbles to the floor with a protesting jangle of strings already abused by my clumsy fingers.

"Happy begetting day, Macalaurë," he says, and then we throw ourselves in the other's direction and furiously embrace, both of us speaking at once to declare how much he has missed the other, our apologies tangling in midair as we assert how poor of brothers and friends we have been and of our desire to make amends however possible, and when we are both breathless and out of words, we back up to arm's length and appraise the other.

Nelyo looks healthy, like one who has just had a brisk ride. There is color in his cheeks, and his hair is windblown. He wears his traveling clothes: breeches, boots, a comfortable tunic. He smells of fresh winds, and I realize that he arrived only moments before me.

"So?" I ask him. "Did you pass?" and his face breaks into a grin, as he says, "Yes."

With a shout of delight, he is in my arms again, and I am asking strings of questions, about the difficulty of Manwë's questions and whether he has written Atar yet and how many days he had to recite, and his answers tumble over my questions in places, so eager are we both: The questions were hard, but he was prepared; he recited for three days each in letters and history; yes, he wrote Atar as soon as he knew, and there will be a ceremony in the spring, when his name will be added to the list. "I thought of writing to you also," he says, "but decided it better to tack my horse instead and ride as fast as I could to Alqualondë, so that I might give you my best wishes on your begetting day."

"I am glad that you did," I say, and he says, "Perhaps King Olwë will understand if we take our leave of him tonight? I should like nothing more than to relax in my bed with a bottle of wine—or two—to share with my brother."

King Olwë once had a brother, and so it is not a question of understanding, when I go to him with our excuses: He sends two bottles of his finest wine to our room.

~oOo~

The next morning is my day off from lessons, and I awaken to Nelyo lounging beside me on my bed and studying my fingertips. Laurelin is already bright in the sky; Nelyo, of course, being both dignified and responsible, is fully dressed.

"How nice it is to have no studies; what happened to your fingers?" he asks in such a rush that it takes me a moment to understand what he asks.

"Oh. Yes. I have been practicing hard." He touches my fingertip, and a sharp pain assaults me, and I cry out and jerk my hand from his.

"Too hard, you mean," he says, with gentle accusation in his eyes. Gently, he takes my hand again, touching only my palm, and looks again at my fingertips. "There was blood here. We will soak these today, in a salve that Atar taught me for the blisters I used to get from the sword, and you will not suffer this way any longer, now that I am back to see that you do not."

With a laugh, I say, "Nelyo, I am forty years old now. Soon I will no longer require your protection."

He snorts and rises. "You will always have my protection, Macalaurë, whether you need it or not. Likely, it will become inane as we age, but it is my right as an elder brother to dispense it in cloying doses for only the tiniest matters."

Secretly, though, I am relieved. My fingers are stiff, and the tips sting when I stretch them and pull at the wounded skin. I do not know how I will play, and I will have a recital in only a few days time. Nelyo is rummaging in his trunk and pulling out a leather satchel which is filled with many small vials, each labeled in his meticulous hand.

I swing my legs out of bed and pad across the floor to stand beside him, speaking to the scarlet tumble of hair down his back. "Surely you did not bring the supplies for science experiments—"

"Hush, Macalaurë," he says. "Musicians are not the only ones who find that inspiration seizes them at odd hours and places and will not let them rest until it is sated. I figured it better to pack a small quantity of each of the items involved in discussions I have been having with Atar than to lose a day or more attempting to acquire them in Alqualondë, if that is even possible." Beside the satchel, he lays another, a healer's kit, with bandages, salves, a few dried plants, and a bottle of draught.

"You brought a healer's kit? No wonder your trunk felt as though it was made of a solid block of marble!"

He turns and cocks an eyebrow at me. "I was traveling with you, Macalaurë."

I give a cry of indignation and push at his back, regretting it immediately because my finger hangs up on a fold of his robes and pains as though stabbed with a bee's venomous stinger. "Ai!" I shout and stick my fingers in my mouth, thus proving his point that I attract disaster as a candle flame attracts pesky insects.

He extracts them. "Do not do that. Spit is the salve of beasts; we are more sophisticated than that. You will make it worse." He pushes me back to sit on his bed with the flat of his hand on my chest, and with a note of surprise in his voice, says, "You have grown quite large, Macalaurë, did you know?"

"I have not," I retort.

"You have. It used to be that I could do this—" he flicks me with his forefinger in the center of my chest—"and you would go tumbling back four feet. But you are grown tall and sturdy at that."

"No," I say, standing and measuring myself next to him, "because at the start of the summer, I came to your chin, and I still come to your chin."

He laughs. "But Macalaurë! Atar measured my height before we left, and I grew three inches over the summer!" He pushes me back onto the bed and busies himself with pouring substances into a bowl and mixing them together. "I am taller than Atar now, did you know?"

It is impossible not to know: Whenever I see them together, my mind is startled by the image. No one should be taller than Atar. Atar is destined to look forever over the tops of everyone else's heads, where he can see things beyond the reaches of our inferior gazes. I feel, when looking upon Nelyo beside Atar, that Nelyo should step down from the rock or chair or whatever it is that gives him such height—for surely it must be a sham—and cease being so disconcerting. I remember being very small and scrambling onto rock formations with Nelyo to see what it would be like to be as tall as Atar. Nelyo would always chortle, "I can see so far!" but I was always afraid of falling.

I remember being small, no more than a few years old, and playing with Nelyo in the courtyard and tripping while running across the flagstones, scraping both knees raw and abrading the palms of my hands, and Atar had heard my cries from his study and had come out to see what was wrong. "Little one," he'd said, dabbing at my bloodied knees with his handkerchief, "do not cry, for you grow a bit taller every day, and the closer you are to the ground, the harder you fall."

I wonder if that is true.

Nelyo is crushing small, dried purple flowers with a mortar and pestle. "Why not give me plain salve?" I ask. "You needn't go to all of this trouble."

"Plain salve will quickly heal your wounds, but it will replace them with ordinary skin, and what you need are calluses. The point, Macalaurë," he lectures, "of injuries is that they teach your body lessons so that they needn't happen again. Your fingers will be raw again in a few days time if I apply ordinary salve. With this, you may never bleed there again."

Perhaps that is what Atar meant when he said that those closest to the ground fall the hardest: It is less a matter of the laws of nature than learning. Indeed, it is Atar who taught Nelyo the lore for which he is now thrice revered, and it would not surprise me if this opinion is more Atar's than my brother's alone.

So influenced are we by Atar that—at times—it is hard to see where his thoughts end and ours begin. Nelyo probably thinks himself clever for leaving me with no retort, but isn't it Atar who is the clever one? I allow myself to wonder how we would be different if we'd been born into a different family. Overcoming my squeamishness—my next thought is like putting one's fingers into a wound, an uncomfortable and painful thought—I wonder how I would be different, had I been born a son of Nolofinwë. I try to imagine looking at Atar with thoughts filtered by Nolofinwë's perceptions. As Nelyo sets the bowl on my lap and takes my hands gently in his, setting them into the concoction, I close my eyes and picture Atar as I saw him last, at our departure, with his tunic laced crookedly and untied—the string pulled free of some of the holes by Carnistir, who perched in his arms, doubtlessly with the hopeful thought of chewing on it—and his hair tied back in a strip of purple cloth that once formed part of one of our mother's gowns that had been ruined when Tyelkormo spilled wine on it. He'd wiped the soot from his face with a cloth that must have also been dirty, with the effect that it merely smeared the soot around in swirls of clean and dirty skin. He smelled of hot metal and sweat, a smell to which I have grown accustomed in my forty years as his son that it does not smell bad to me, but when I sniff it through Nolofinwë's nose, it is repugnant and unclean. When he took my face in his hands to kiss me farewell, there was grime beneath his fingernails, and though he managed to bring his thoughts into the present long enough to wish us safe passage, when Amil came to us to do likewise, I happened to glance at Atar, and his eyes were fixed on the ground, sightless, and he twirled a tendril of hair between his dirty fingers. Carnistir was happily chewing on the cloth with which he'd tied his hair, and Atar remained entirely oblivious.

To me, Atar's perpetual distraction and unawareness of the simplest of customs is merely a byproduct of his productivity, for one's thoughts can only be occupied by only so many things at once, and when one is gifted as is Atar, having one's hair neatly braided or perceiving with perfect clarity the actions—and the meanings of those actions—of every person to pass within one's sights seems frivolous. But, through Nolofinwë's eyes, I see Atar as slapdash and negligent and our behavior, as his sons—the duality of Nelyo's manners and lechery, my aloof shyness, Tyelkormo's insatiable pride, and Carnistir's senseless rages—as weeds that choke the pretty, perfect flowers amongst which we live, and which has been nurtured by the very same behaviors in our father.

"Deep are your thoughts," teases Nelyo, and my eyes flick open, and I realize that I have been sitting for minutes now, with my eyes closed and my fingers soaking, without speaking a word, even to thank Nelyo, for I can feeling the abused skin at my fingertips growing warm, as though livened by vigorous repair of the broken tissues.

My father's son …

I smile. "I am sorry. I have not even thanked you, and I can feel the flesh knitting itself. It is a wonderful feeling."

"I know," says Nelyo. "Let them soak for an hour, and then we will have breakfast. And we will soak them again tonight, and you will be in perfect repair for your lessons tomorrow and your recital a week from now."

Worry drops like a stone into my stomach. "Do you think I will be ready?"

Nelyo gives me a look of disbelief, snorts, and says nothing.

~oOo~

The week prior to leaving for Alqualondë, Atar called me into his study and asked if he wanted him to drive with the rest of our immediate family to Alqualondë for my recital. "Your mother would love to hear you play," he said, but there was a shadow of reservation in his normally bright eyes, and I sensed that he, too, would have liked to come.

In the weeks leading up to our departure, Atar and I prepared together for the Feast of the New Year, and my love and trust for him flourished. True, we also fought bitterly in those days, at times, in the forest with our illegal steel swords at our sides, my hands trembling with rage and pain, but the anger was fleeting—a falling star against an otherwise perfect sky—and I was very tempted to tell him yes, for no honor could be greater than to have my illustrious father ride all the way to Alqualondë solely on my behalf.

But, in the end, I told him no because I know that Atar expects me to be the best musician in Aman, and if I fail under his witness, then I fear that our relationship will disintegrate to the times before, when we had both regarded my placement in the family as his second son as a sort of mistake. "Perhaps Eru has a sense of humor," Atar had teased me once, after I'd failed bitterly at some task he'd asked me to do, and he'd meant it in jest but I'd known it also to be true, and I'd cried for hours in my room that night because so many others were happy and loved in their families, but I would have to exist until the world's ending as a joke.

And so only Nelyo will attend my recital.

The night before, I stay as late as I can at Vingarië's, for she will be accompanying me on the flute for my original composition, and we rehearse over and over again, until her eyes are dropping from weariness, and out of mercy, I proclaim it perfect and bid her goodnight.

To my ears, though, it is far from perfect.

When I arrive at the palace, Nelyo and King Olwë are sitting in the courtyard, drinking wine and discussing politics and influential lords whom they both know. I stand awkwardly in the doorway for a moment before they notice me—they are laughing over a preposterous suggestion made by one of Nolofinwë's lords—hugging my harp to my chest and shifting from foot to foot. Nelyo has the ability, like one of those small color-changing lizards, to look perfectly at ease, no matter where he is placed. His hair is loose and unbraided, falling in waves around his shoulders; he holds his wine goblet lightly and casually, gesturing with it as he talks, and laughing in short bursts at what King Olwë says, familiar enough to even interrupt him once to add something that makes Olwë roar with laughter and say, "Now you have made me forget what I was saying, Maitimo."

"You were saying—" Nelyo begins, but he spots me then and grins. "Macalaurë! Do not linger in doorways like a beggar! Come in and have a drink with us."

I step forward and mumble something about my recital the next day and needing to sleep, and it must have sounded convincing because Nelyo leans back in his chair and sighs, "Yes, I suppose that should be my fate as well, for I wish to enjoy each of the beautiful notes coaxed forth by my brother's able fingers." He rises. "But I thank you for the wine and company, Olwë," he says, and King Olwë returns the gratitude and wishes me luck, to which I nod and give my thanks.

Olwë? That my brother, in a matter of days, should be so familiar with the Telerin king mystifies me. The thought occurs to me that Nelyo's truest talents are being wasted in the hours that he spends with his books, but quickly, I swat that thought away because my brother's brilliance in matters of lore is not something that he should cast away so easily, simply because he has a knack for talking to people of importance. He catches my arm, and we walk together to our room. Also, he is good with soothing me—already, the nervous patter of my heart has calmed—but that does not mean that he should spend his life in my service either. In fact, I laugh at the thought.

"Why are you laughing?" he asks, but it doesn't sound so much like laughter anymore and I worry that I will be in tears before long.

We stop in the hallway, and he presses me against the wall with my face in his hands. "Macalaurë. You remember what I told you? On your first day here?"

Tears slip down my cheeks and pool against his fingers. "Yes," I whisper. "Breathe."

He embraces me. "It is that simple, my love. Breathe. Live. Think no further than the moment that you're in and there's no place for dread. You will be fine."

But I weep, and I cannot believe him.

~oOo~

It is a tradition among the Teleri that the year at the conservatory ends with each student performing in a recital. We perform in each of our ensembles, and we perform alone, presenting the composition on which we have been working for the past year. The first-years' recital is on the first day and is a matter of importance to no one but the students and their families. The concert hall is left notoriously empty and the applause scant; the people of the city wait for the advanced students, whose names are renowned, and the first-years are left in relative peace, to make nervous mistakes without the scrutiny of the entire city.

For which I am very, very glad.

I arrive at the conservatory the next afternoon with Nelyo at my side, relatively calm: I awakened late to find a full breakfast waiting for me and a hot bath, where I read a book of legends that Nelyo had been given by Manwë and drank juice and thought not a bit about music. When I left the tub—the water having grown cold—I found my clothing laid out on my bed and Nelyo waiting to braid my hair and talk to me of frivolous gossip that made me laugh and made it difficult also to hold my head still. But he did not scold me, even when a nearly-finished braid slipped from his fingers and unraveled itself before he could catch it. Without a sigh or a break in speech, he lifted the escaped tendril and began again.

Together, we walk to the concert hall. Nelyo will leave me at the door and find a seat close to the front, giving me an hour to tune my harp and warm up my fingers and voice. He chatters still in a voice that might be false but is bright enough to fool me, at least, of the Vanyar and their strange, awkward customs and several embarrassing blunders he'd made, and somewhere between laughing and groaning with dismay—imagining myself in his place—I realize that we have joined quite a crowd, and they all appear to be streaming toward the concert hall.

"Nelyo!" I hiss, seizing his wrist. "What are all these people?"

He does not fool me now, with his wide-eyed naïveté, and when we arrive at the door to the backstage area—pressed shoulder to shoulder in a thick throng now—I jerk him backstage with me.

He pleads with me: "You know how quickly news travels, and few haven't heard of the renowned new student at the conservatory—"

"I doubt it, Nelyo. More likely, they want to gawk at the foolish Noldo thinking—like an idiot—that he had the mettle to stand among them." Several other students are looking at us, although we have kept our voices low: the gargantuan, awkward Noldor in their midst, with hair and costume so bright and obvious, flagrant. The room blurs and I swipe hastily at my eyes. I will not cry again. I will not be so weak.

"That is not it, Macalaurë. I wish that you would believe me." I say nothing and will not look into his face. "Why won't you accept what you are?"

"And what is that, Nelyo? A spectacle?"

There is a long silence that is filled with the nervous, muttering voices of the other students arriving and greeting each other and departing to the practice rooms they have been assigned. I am afraid of these expectations. I am afraid that I will never achieve them.

In an emboldened, firm voice, Nelyo answers me: "Yes.

"Yes, Macalaurë," he says, "they come in part because you are a Noldo and part because you are a son of Fëanáro. But why do you assume that this is malicious? Why do you assume that we are the only people who can be innocently curious, who can search for beauty in humble places? Word of your excellence was not spread out of sycophancy or malignance; it spread because people would pass your chambers while your were playing, and they would be held enthralled for hours. Our people—the Eldar, not the Teleri or the Noldor or the Vanyar—love beauty, and they come in hopes of finding that. That is why they are here, Macalaurë."

My father—indeed Nelyo—would feel such pride in my place. It is no wonder that Nelyo does not understand how I feel only dread. What have I done? In wanting to please my father, to prove that I am his and not some aberration, a joke, I have convinced myself that I wanted this. But do I? I am not my father; I am not a cause for celebration, and I fear that the people of the Teleri have been misled.

I force myself to squeeze Nelyo's hand. "You should get a seat before they are all gone. Thank you."

As I turn away, we both know that I do not mean it.

I go to the practice room that I have been assigned, that I will share with Vingarië, since she is accompanying me on my original composition. I trudge inside, and she is already there, her voice as light and fluttery as butterflies as she tells me that her whole family is here—even those from Tirion—and they think it simply wonderful that she will be playing a song written for her and—

She stops and says, "Macalaurë?" and in the next instant, I am folded in her arms with her head on my chest. My trembling hands caress her back, stroke her hair.

"It is not as thought I haven't played for others before," I whisper, "but I am afraid."

"Then do not play for them," she answers. She kisses my lips. "Play for me."

~oOo~

They begin applauding as soon as my name is announced, and it is like standing on the edge of the sea, eyes closed, hearing the roar of the surf and wincing, not knowing when or where it will strike, only that it will be cold.

Play for me. Play not for the Noldor or my father or the honor of his House; not even for Nelyo or my own pride. Play for Vingarië. I walk onto the stage.

There is a lot of muttering, and I force myself not to hear malevolence in it, for I know that they are talking of me—but not necessarily of my failure. Nelyo is not hard to find, but I force myself not to look at him. I regret our words, my insincerity, before he departed, but I cannot think on that now.

When I raise my hands to my harp, the muttering abruptly stops, choked off in mid-sentence. I lift my eyes to Vingarië in surprise, but she is only waiting for my cue, her flute lifted to her lips. I incline my head and give it.

How does one play a song for the one he loves? I'd thought it an impossible task to capture Vingarië in a song, and my first attempts had been crumpled on the floor, for no single note or combination thereof can express everything about her. Eventually, I realized that my ambitions exceeded the medium in which I worked, exceeded any medium: no words, no song, no object that can be held in one's hands can express Vingarië. Instead, I'd chosen a less ambitious topic: the night of our first meeting. The song begins bravely and full of hope and swagger, and I smile, recalling Nelyo and the sons of the lords, engaging in their games of subtlety and rhetoric and the music escapes then, becoming light and relieved, free. But something is rising, some awareness coming to me, an innocent trill of a flute amid the stolid, practical melody of my harp, and there is Vingarië.

Now our melodies twine together, hesitant at first and at odds with each other, adjusting to accommodate and achieve harmony once more that becomes more natural as the song progresses until there is a single melody and it is hard to tell where the flute ends and the harp begins. There is a new hope now, and notes the color of Telperion's light fill the hall, and I look at Vingarië and so full is my feeling that I believe the even the Elves over the sea—in their wild forests beneath the starlight—lift their faces and smile in wonder.

In understanding.

Her eyes meet mine and we do not look away: We play with the shy hope of new love, of the thrill of a first kiss, of the innocence of youth. We move as one and the melody opens and becomes as wide as the sky, as infinite as the space between the stars, and that is our future, the possibilities that lay before us, moving as one through space and time. The song fills the room and struggles against it, struggles to rise to the place of its origin, in a time far away and in a place outside of logic and possibility—beyond Eä—where this moment was first conceived in a Music greater than ours.

And there it ends: winding back down the Arda, to Aman, to Alqualondë, and this place, this stage, and us. There it ends, with us, our gazes locked and our hands stretching for each other, the audience answering our song not with applause but silence and the expectant hope of one thirsty and holding the bottle inverted over one's mouth, hoping for just a single drop more.

~oOo~

Nelyo, Vingarië, and I take leave of all others that night and buy food from street vendors and eat on the beach, getting our hair and clothes full of sand and uncaring. I have dreaded allowing Vingarië to meet Nelyo for it seems that maidens look at him and quickly forget me, but their greeting was quick and pleasant before they both turned their attentions back to me.

Of course, in the song we'd just played, there is no room for infidelity and pain.

We pass a bottle of wine between us, and it is not long before the combined dread and triumph of the day and the wine and the lulling roar of the sea make my head heavy, and I fall back against the sand, meaning only to listen to Nelyo and Vingarië's conversation with my eyes closed—for they are discussing her brothers and Turonén's upcoming wedding and I need not be involved—and their voices become a pleasant, nondescript buzz punctuated by the occasional bright peal of laughter, and then they must have stopped talking because I hear nothing at all.

Until a giggle like a glissando awakens me: Vingarië. I try to lift myself from the sand, but my whole body is heavy—as though Tyelkormo and Carnistir both are sitting on my chest, as they are wont to do—and I struggle for a moment, my eyes too heavy to open, before I hear the whisper of sand sliding against sand and realize that they have buried me to my neck.

They both roar with laughter then, and with a might heave, I tear myself free of the sand and chase Nelyo down the beach, to the edge of the surf, our footprints overlapping in a wavering pattern that—for many hours after—the sea does not touch.

We leave Alqualondë before the Mingling of the Lights this morning, taking a special carriage bearing messages from Olwë to Tirion. He gives special instructions to leave us at our father's house, though, so that we will be home by evening.

Macalaurë sits beside me and sleeps with his head resting on my shoulder. He is drooling on my good robes but I cannot bear to wake him and complain. So much has changed since the last time we found ourselves upon this road, Macalaurë asleep upon my shoulder. He has grown; I have—I hope—begun to heal. We both return to our father with honors we did not have upon leaving. Still, he naps against me; he slavers like a small child. Still, I let him.

I have parchments on my knees—parchments that I wrote—that now mean more because of my titles. Now, people other than my father will read and debate them. A vestigial place deep inside of me feels a warm glow of pride at the thought but I am more concerned with a passage that is mired in long words that I doubtlessly thought impressive at the time that actually make my meaning nearly incomprehensible. Moving carefully to not disturb Macalaurë, I take out a bit of charcoal and make aggressive slashes over my perfect letters. They will have to be rewritten anyway, and this will save me the trouble of riffling through the stack of parchments to find the place again.

Laurelin brightens into late morning. The carriage hits a bump that drives my shoulder-bone into Macalaurë's temple, and he groans and stirs. Sitting up, he rubs his head and glances around us. We are moving quickly across the bland plains that stretch between Tirion and Alqualondë; even the blue sky over our heads is nearly cloudless, a blank expanse of blue. Macalaurë yawns and his stomach grumbles. "Have we anything to eat?" he asks, blinking in the bright midday light.

We have thick-sliced bread and honey, and I retrieve it from my satchel and sit it on the bench between us. I eat slowly, hoping that he will not notice how little I eat. My appetite has been reluctant lately, even when I know I should be hungry. Dressing this morning, alone for once, while Macalaurë washed in the bathroom, I studied my body in the mirror, letting my fingers rattle down ribs that Annawendë once named too pronounced and that now appear grotesquely prominent even to me. I'd turned my back on my reflection and dressed quickly, before Macalaurë reappeared.

"New Year Festival in a week," I say, to make conversation, and I am surprised to see Macalaurë scowl.

"How are you dressing?" he asks, staring into the pot of honey through which he is dragging his bread. A bead of it drips onto his chin, but I will wait until he's finished to clean it away.

I laugh with the realization that I haven't any idea. How quickly the trivialities in life are forgotten when worries weighty enough to disturb one's sleep take over their precedence! "I have not thought of it," I say. "Probably, I will go as Fire again. I haven't time to make a new costume. How about you?"

"I am going as a wraith," he says. "Atar and I have been working on my costume since we came home from Formenos."

I am surprised by this, but I am careful not to show it. Although, I suppose, I should not be surprised: I have been away two days a week to tutor Findekáno, and even when I was home, I was distracted by studies and worries of my own, too much to notice what my father and my brother were up to.

The New Year, in the days before our people came to Valinor, was known to be the coldest and darkest day in the Outer Lands. More Elves were rumored to disappear on that night than any other, and so the people would build the fires high and stay close, sharing the warmth, and drinking fermented juices until their heads spun and laughter surged easily through their throats and they momentarily forgot their fear. They would paint their faces and dress in costumes that mocked and defied those that hunted them, some dressing like the enemies they reviled and others dressing like the heroes that peppered their legends, those who were said to have faced the Dark One himself and triumphed. They would dance around the fires, their legs flying in a blur, whirling, spinning them through the darkness, full of such brutal courage that their movements were no longer beautiful; they snapped with the raw energy of lightning—sizzling, deadly—of that which alone could fight the evil that hunted them. With sticks for swords—and later, the raw iron blades forged by my grandfather and his lords—they would dance duets, heroes against beasts, that were never choreographed but understood to demonstrate the triumph of that which is good. Snarling, gyrating, thrashing in the dirt, those who were dressed as beasts became akin to those that hunted our people, their eyes wide and terrifying—showing whites all around—their lips skinned back from teeth made bloody by biting on their lips. They were the beasts; they were the allies of Darkness—until the dance was over and they arose, with smiles on faces that had magically, it seemed, become those that belonged to the father, sister, or cousin who, for a moment, seemed lost to the beast.

Upon arriving in Valinor, the primitive joy that had marked the New Year celebration was abandoned first by the Vanyar, who felt it an affront to the Valar to continue indulging in something that no longer served the purpose that it had in the Outer Lands. They opposed the New Year tradition and spent it instead, praying their loyalty to the Valar.

The Teleri, upon their arrival in Valinor, were eager to forget the horrors that had marked the New Year—for all its being cloaked in drunken celebration—and followed the lead of the Vanyar but not out of loyalty to the Valar. Their New Year celebration became cultivated: The costumes became an ostentatious show of glistening silks and pearls; no longer did they don the mangy furs of beasts and paint their faces with mud but wore delicately feathered masks in honor of that which was beautiful rather than that which they feared.

The Noldor, though close in friendship to both the Teleri and the Vanyar, found it hard to relinquish the New Year tradition.

It became more cultured, true: No longer did they writhe on the ground in imitation of the death throes of the enemy, and the costumes and the music became things of beauty. But the acts continued, with pairs often practicing for weeks to give homage to the ancestors who had needed skill with sword and bow in daily life, to ensure the births of the offspring who now honored them.

Some of the lords oppose the celebration. They appear at the New Year Feast of the King because they feel it their duty to do so, but they wear their dress robes and sneer at the performances and make no secret that they think it dishonorable to the Valar to perpetuate the traditions that developed in absence of their protection.

Our father, of course, promotes the continuation of the tradition.

The question is raised every few years, if the Noldor will follow the lead of the Vanyar and finally relinquish the New Year Feast or at least change it to better fit out situation in Valinor, as the Teleri have done. One of the few counsels I have attended with my father dealt with this question, and Atar—normally silent on matters of daily governance of the people—stood and spoke for a long time. His voice was never raised to uncivilized volumes, but nonetheless, his words were as whiplashes against the backs of those who opposed the New Year Feast. "Whom do we honor more?" he asked. "The Valar? Or those of our own people who suffered and died to bring us here? The New Year is not an affront to the Valar but homage to our ancestors and our history, both of which have undeniably given us the strength we now so proudly possess."

Fists curled and uncurled on robed knees and teeth worried lips, but no one wished to stand after Atar, and the question—so far as I know—hasn't been raised since.

Atar has dressed me as Fire since I was old enough to attend the New Year Festival. Even now, it is my costume of choice, and I have beautiful robes made of sheer fabric in many layers of red, gold, and orange, woven through with actual strands of metal so that the light catches them and dances upon them as flames upon darkness. Macalaurë's costume changes from year to year, but it is always something horrible. He has gone all in black—even his faced darkened by soot—as Night; he has gone as Fire Demons and fell spirits and has always made his own costumes and kept them secret until descending the stairs from his bedroom on the night of the celebration. Not this year, it seems. This year, he had Atar's consultation, as I usually do.

Not that I should complain. Macalaurë deserves to at last enjoy a close relationship to our father, as I have done since my birth, when it was never a secret that I was the favored son, even when Macalaurë arrived and strove to impress Atar, opposed always by his nature, which seemed always to defy our father.

I realize that a long silence has fallen between us. "A wraith?" I ask, seeking to re-inspire the conversation. "How will you do that?"

"It is a secret. You will have to be surprised," he says enigmatically, and I am shocked by the hurt that seizes my heart in its relentless, jealous grip.

~oOo~

I smell home before I see it: I smell the pungent odor of wood burning and the deep, liquid scent of the forest, of leaves, that seems to deepen near our home as it does nowhere else in Valinor, as though the earth is expressing its love for our father.

The silver light pours through the forest canopy overhead and dapples the shadows with patches of light. I cannot help but feel my heart beating faster and lighter in my chest as the road becomes familiar: I have missed home; I have missed my brothers and my parents. I have missed the languid afternoons in the library and the deep discussions I have in the laboratory with my father, where time ceases to matter and we often emerge, our stomachs hollow with hunger, blinking in light that has changed significantly since one of us posed an innocent question hours before and conversation meandered from there, a river winding across unexplored terrain—crashing, roaring, bubbling—to the sea.

Beyond that, in my heart, lies a fool's hope: that she will have returned. I do not expect her to return, for I saw on the night that she rejected my proposal that her love for her betrothed would not be dislodged by something as banal as that which I'd promised to provide her. Even to love one as fair as I cannot equal the immutable joy of waking daily beside one you love and will continue to love, even when the passions of the flesh have receded to memory.

It is a foolish hope and one that I have tried to squander—knowing that a steely heart is torn far less easily than one left hopeful and vulnerable—but I find myself peering through the silvery darkness, in the direction of the apprentices' cabins, seeking a warm light in a window, the shadow of an expectant form on the step. I see nothing, but hope is not lost. Hope is not lost until the New Year, for she said that she would decide and return before then if she chose me.

Macalaurë sees the light in my eyes and smiles. He does not share my joy at our homecoming, I know—he left behind his Vingarië and a people more alike to him in temperament and talent than anyone in our family—but he is happy for me, and in time, he will fall into the rhythm that is life in our home outside Tirion and our month in Alqualondë will be like a beautiful dream.

We pass through the gates and my heart quickens all the more. Even Macalaurë turns to lean eagerly out the window, to stare at the familiar sprawl that is our house, sharing in my laughter, in my joy at being home. The carriage has no sooner stopped and we are leaping to the ground, lifting our trunks before the driver has the chance to secure the reins and disembark, shouting our gratitude and leaving the trunks behind, on the ground, until later, until we have greeted our family.

We scramble, pushing, through the door, into the familiar vestibule. Atar's riding boots are toppled over by the door and there is a trail of mud leading back to the kitchen that suggests that he probably wore them throughout the entire house before being caught by Amil and made to leave them at the door. We turn into the front parlor, which is empty, but in its usual state of disarray—albeit, slightly lessened, without Macalaurë and me as contributors—with a green cloak belonging to Tyelkormo balled up in one of the chairs and an impressive pile of half-finished mending spilled across the floor from the basket meant to contain it and one of Atar's books opened on the sofa and sat upon, by the looks of its sadly flattened spine.

There is a tin of biscuits half-eaten—and Macalaurë wastes no time in sampling one—and crumbs on the floor and a Strategy game begun and not finished, although by the looks of it, someone was losing miserably, so perhaps that is for the best. There is an empty hum of silence in the house, atypical and disconcerting.

"Where is everyone?" Macalaurë asks, around the biscuit.

"Perhaps they are eating supper," I say, but it is too silent even for that, for suppers in our family are noisy affairs, and even when Atar and Amil are buried in angry silence, there is more commotion than we now hear.

We progress through the house and follow the mud-tracks back to the kitchen, and at last, we find Amil, stirring something on the stove. I halt in the doorway, shocked by the slump of her shoulders and her hair in an unkempt tangle down her back. "Amil?" Macalaurë calls, tentatively, and she whirls with a gasp, crossing the kitchen—bumping gracelessly into the table, her teeth bared in a grin—to hold us in her arms.

"My sons! My beautiful Macalaurë and Nelyo … I did not expect you home so soon!" she says. She kisses each of us and exclaims with such joy that I sense she is more grateful than gladdened by our arrival. She is acting, and in our father's house, this is disconcerting, for emotion blazes forth here as it does nowhere else, in effusive billows, like flames left to swell beyond their confines, out of control. We do not control our emotions through acting here.

Macalaurë does not seem to notice. He returns her embrace while she worries over how thin he has become away from the rich Noldorin meals we are regularly fed, replacing it instead with a lighter Telerin diet, hard work, and worries. I look over her shoulder at the pot that is now bubbling on the stove. "Are you cooking supper?" I ask, and she starts and scurries over to stir the contents of the pot back into placidity. "Where is Atar?"

"Oh. Your father." I come up behind her and take the spoon and remove the pot from the heat. "Nelyo, do not bother with that! I am merely reheating what he prepared earlier in the week. Your father has been very busy—"

"With what?"

"His usual projects," she says, with a conspiratorial smile. She takes the pot from my hand. "Leave it, Nelyo. Please. You would be greater help to get your brothers washed for supper."

"I would, if I knew where they were—"

"I sent them to their bedrooms to play quietly. Your father has been very busy." Her eyes dance from mine, evading questions, as she nudges me toward the door. "It would be a great help—"

Then I am outside of the kitchen, nonplussed, while Macalaurë is connived into setting the table. She is bustling, too busy for questions—not that Macalaurë is the type to ask them—stirring things noisily and moving everywhere in a flurry. I shake my head and move toward the stairs and my brothers.

It is not difficult to find them. They are sitting on the floor, in the hallway, outside the suite that Atar reserves for our rare special guests. Grandfather Finwë stayed there when Carnistir was born. Amil's parents stay there when they visit, and Atar gives it to important scholars who come to hold counsel with him regarding lore and language. Tyelkormo kneels on the floor with his ear pressed to the wood, blatantly eavesdropping. Carnistir sits cross-legged, facing the door, with his palm flat against it, his eyes only inches away and squeezed shut. They neither see nor hear me. I stand at the end of the hallway, watching them, watching as Tyelkormo stands to move his ear to a higher part of the door. Carnistir leans forward and licks it.

I clear my throat, and they both jump, and Carnistir starts to squeal, but that quickly, Tyelkormo's hand is over his mouth, his other hand indicating that he should be quiet. Absurdly, I find myself obeying, creeping down the hall to whisper, "What are you two up to?" gathering Carnistir into my arms. His head rolls back and forth, looking from me to the door, back to me, back to the door, until I seize his chin and force him to look at me. "Hmm? What are you doing?"

Tyelkormo puts his finger to his lips again and takes my hand and leads me down the hall to his bedroom. Once inside, he closes the door and leans forward, his blue eyes very bright, wide and honest, and says, "We are spying on Atar's guest."

Guest?

"Atar has a guest?" I ask, feeling silly for having to glean such information from my fifteen-year-old brother. "Who is his guest?"

"We do not know. Atar brought him here in the night, while we were all asleep, and he hasn't come from his room. Well," says Tyelkormo enigmatically, "we suppose that the guest is a 'he.' But we do not know. He comes down not for meals, nor for socialization. Atar takes his meals with him and to hold counsel, he says. But we never hear them talking."

Carnistir is still in my arms, and he is looking into my face with his brow furrowed and worried. "He looks like you, Nelyo. Silver. Beautiful."

"Carnistir perceives much of our guest." Tyelkormo snorts in derision, for he is our father's son, taught skepticism with the same certainty that others are taught trust in the Valar.

Carnistir goes on to say, "But what came to pass for him needn't come to you, Nelyo—" I look with alarm at my baby brother, who speaks with a wisdom and in a voice beyond his years, and his eyes glisten with tears.

"Oh, for Eru's sake, hush, Carnistir!" snaps Tyelkormo, and obediently, with a final strident cry, Carnistir falls silent, plugging his thumb into his mouth. Tyelkormo turns back to me. How he has embraced his role as the eldest son! His blue eyes are confident; he expects to be acknowledged and trusted. Do I look that way, I wonder? Is that why people perceive me to be a great leader, when really, the only ones I lead are my eccentric and unruly little brothers? "I think Atar might be mad," Tyelkormo says.

I laugh nervously. "Where do you hear such things, little one?" Tyelkormo scowls at hearing the old pet-name, firmly put back into his place as the third-born, whose opinion matters little in our family. "Of madness?"

"From Macalaurë," he says, and I silently curse my brother and his obsession with morbid tales and, furthermore, his liking for scaring our little brothers with them. "He said that Elves went mad in the Outer Lands—"

"He tells you that to scare you, Turko," I interrupt, and Carnistir whimpers and squirms in my arms. "There is no such thing as madness. That belongs to the beasts; Eru's children are immune from such maladies."

Chagrined, Tyelkormo's gaze falls from mine. His mouth is pinched, as though he has taken a mouthful of lemon juice; he angrily twists a strand of his honey-gold hair, yanking it until I fear it might break. I soften my voice and reach done to stroke his satiny head, turning his chin to me. "Come, now, little one. I was sent to ready you for supper. Surely, you must be hungry?"

His eyes blaze, and for a moment, I think that he might answer me insolently. I sense the words there, like acid, behind his lips. His face is a mask of agony with them. But then, his expression smoothes and he looks down at his feet, and his blond head bobs in a nod.

"Good," I say gently. "Then why don't you go and wash your hands and face, and I will help your brother?"

~oOo~

I send Tyelkormo and Carnistir to the kitchen to help Amil with a swat to their behinds and a promise of Telerin candies for those who does best, sending them scurrying and tumbling over each other in their haste to be the first through the door.

I walk down the hill behind the house to the forge.

There is no sound to indicate that Atar is there, nor does smoke rise from the chimneys, but I know that he is. I know my father well, and he needn't show obvious signs of productivity to be so, and the forge has an expectant, occupied look that I cannot quite describe. The windows remind me of eyes: somewhat intelligent but really only vacant, gleaming spaces.

I knock on the door before I have time to think, rescinding my fist and curling my knuckles tightly. Since when have I knocked on the door to the forge? Always, it has been my place to enter freely. Indeed, the laboratory and study rooms that Atar built are some of the most comfortable places on the property for me, and many are the hours that I have spent in them, either in the company of Atar or the wisdom of books, performing experiments with the hope that he will be delighted by the results and delude me—just for the moment—into believing that I have created something special, something that he could not have done himself.

But the damage is done; I have knocked, and I hear the furtive sound of footsteps on the other side of the door. The door swings open to reveal Atar's face: His eyes are bright and manic—the look of one who has made something of great beauty and knows it—and his hair is a rumpled mess, framing his face. It was braided, I see, but the braids have fallen to tatters, as Atar has a habit of tugging at them when inspiration eludes him. He stares at me for three seconds, unblinking, before squeezing his eyes closed as though banishing a headache and saying in a slightly disbelieving voice, "Nelyo?" and then, immediately, as though transformed in that single second it took to speak my name, grinning and seizing my wrist and saying, "Come. I have something to show you."

For a moment, it is as it was before Annawendë left, when Atar and I could lose hours in each other's company. He leads me into the workshop and locks the door behind us.

In the center of the room is a round object, on the table, covered by a dark cloth. Atar flits to the side of the table, placing his hand expectantly over the covered object. How like Macalaurë he is, in that moment, I realize: conscious of his actions, of the poise of his body and the arrangement of his face; he is conscious, too, of my reaction and the thickening tension in the room. He moves his hand slowly over the object. "At last," he says, "the fruits of my—of our—long hours of study."

With a flourish, he removes the cloth, revealing a large dark stone, round, large enough to fit inside my embrace. His face has broken into an impulsive grin; he is watching my face with intense interest. I take a step toward the stone, noticing how a delicate filigree of fog swirls, barely perceptible, beneath a stone as black as night between the stars—

And it strikes me, like a fist in the chest, and I visibly recoil: some emotion, almost painful, about that stone. Don't look, don't look! Atar's face has rumpled in puzzlement, and I realize my expression is grave, my hand flown to my chest. "Nelyo?" he says softly.

I look at him, but it is as though the air had been wrung from my lungs. Words are not mine to speak. Dropping the cloth, he steps forward.

He made a seeing-stone.

In a delirium of exhaustion and hunger, driven slightly mad by the endless rows of letters in our endless piles of books, we had discussed it at times, in high, giddy voices: Why should we be constrained by the senses given us? "Think of it, Nelyo," Atar would say, arranging mirrors around the room until I could see clearly my little brothers trying to sneak candy from Amil's secret tin inside the house. "In a proper arrangement, we could see beyond our gift of sight. It has been tried; others have failed, but that makes it possible. Nothing undone is impossible."

Nothing undone is impossible.

Here is the proof of this.

My hand clenches my chest; I can feel my nails making crescent-shaped imprints in my skin. I force my eyes away from the stone, to my father's concerned face. I force my hand to relax, my palm soft on my flesh. "You have done it," I say. I force the muscles of my face to lift into a smile that Atar—eager to believe that I am pleased—quickly mirrors.

"Will you try it?" he asks, almost breathless. I am reminded of the first time that Tyelkormo killed something with his bow. Nelyo! Look what I've done! His teeth bared in a grin of unrestrained pride as he handed my the sparrow with the neat hole in its chest.

Why should I feel such foreboding? It was I who'd helped Atar in the formulations for this wonder; I understand better than anyone besides Atar ever will, perhaps, how the thing works. My knowledge alone should quell my fears.

It does not. Like a dog kicked accidentally, I approach cautiously, my hand stretched in front of me, feeling as might a child about to do something forbidden. But it is very much bidden. Atar's smile is rabid that I should love his seeing-stone as much as he.

My fingertips slide over it. It is smooth and cold. Images tease my brain of Tyelkormo sloshing water onto the floor and Amil chastising him; Macalaurë is popping strawberries into his mouth while her back is turned, and Carnistir is crying. Like slipping into cold water, I slowly coax my palm fully against the stone. I slide into Tirion, into the palace, where the soup course is just being served and Uncle Nolofinwë is saying, "I do not know if I should trust—"

I withdraw my hand. My heart is pounding in my chest; my breath is short. "Amazing, is it not?" Atar says, and I am crushed in his embrace. "We shall be renowned for this."

~oOo~

I am so taken aback by the seeing-stone that I am in the courtyard, seated across from Atar—who eats sparingly—before I remember the mysterious guest and the questions I wished to ask.

Atar dismisses himself from the table early, taking his dishes into the kitchen. I hear his footsteps creaking on the stairs, as he ascends to our guest.

I could ask Amil, of course. She is quiet, focused entirely on feeding Carnistir, although he seems to be doing well enough himself. He is five years old now; well beyond the age when he should be eating alone, but Amil seems to deny this, pressing food-laden utensils into his face. He whines at her excessive attention and slumps in his chair; he bats the spoon from her well-meaning hand and knocks it across the table. Tears sparkle in her eyes.

I think on the seeing-stone. I am consumed by thoughts of the seeing-stone, pushing my food around my plate. I wonder what Uncle Nolofinwë was saying; I wonder if I can see far enough to locate Annawendë. Or maybe she is here. Atar engrossed in work is akin to a horse in blinders, able to see only that on which he fixes his gaze. Macalaurë's eyes are drooping, and he will likely retire early to bed. I will use the chance, I decide, to visit Vorondil.

And if he tells me nothing to my satisfaction, the seeing-stone remains.

Outside of its presence, it is hard to recall that feeling like a fist into my gut. It teases its way into my brain, whispering promises of endless knowledge.

Nothing undone is impossible.

Since I can remember, this has been Atar's mantra. "I cannot!" Macalaurë and I would cry, in our youths, frustrated by Atar's ever-escalating expectations. "It is impossible!" And always, he would answer: "But, my loves, nothing undone is impossible."

Leaving us no choice, no excuse.

I wonder, now, what that means to him. Many things we have discussed in the delirium of the laboratory, upon discovering some new strange substance—dizzied by fumes—that seemed the stuff of dreams, barely recollected later. Atar's eyes would dilate until the black centers nearly overwhelmed the brilliant gray irises; how he would laugh at my passionate insistence on one or another of my theories, when really, I was just listening to my words cascading and bubbling through the air, making my presence known, as a statement: I am Maitimo. I am your son, but also, I am Maitimo. Listen.

What if we could see into the past? Into the future? Into places far away? What if we could send ourselves to those places? What if we could cross the ocean without a ship? Fly? Will ourselves into another world? What if we could speak without words, across leagues, with just the thought of the other? I would sit and stare at him, trying to force my thoughts into the mysterious depths of his mind. He would turn and wink at me. What if the people in our stories could be brought to life? What if we could create life? Bend it to our wills? What if we had the powers of the Valar and flowers sprang at our feet? Atar laughed: You upon a bed of daisies, Nelyo? Perhaps with a maiden and half your clothes off! And I swatted his arm in indignation and said, No. All of my clothes. And we laughed until we were dizzy with breathlessness, until my chest ached, and Amil knocked on the door and tried the knob, to find it locked, and called, "Fëanáro? Nelyo? Do you want supper?" We regarded each other solemnly, our cheeks damp still with tears of laughter, the laughter caught in our chests, fluttering, threatening to erupt: a bird in a cage, both fearing and aching for freedom.

Stepping outside of the laboratory, cold clean air forced its way into our lungs and washed our minds of our silly, senseless whims. I would realize that my eyes burned and rub at them, seeking to banish the redness before encountering Amil and having her order my head into a cold water bath, to have them flushed by her gentle, overbearing hands. Atar's were clear: bright, sparkling pools of gray. He would regard me solemnly.

What if, Nelyo, the thoughts of Eru were ours to know?

He had blinked. He had not said those words. It must have been my imagination. Even Atar must recognize the barest boundaries of possibility.

But nothing undone—

Nonetheless, some things are ordained impossible.

He had not said those words. It had been only my imagination, dizzied by the potions we'd blended in hopes of discovering magic, when really, all we'd discovered were more rules that governed an otherwise senselessly beautiful world.

He had taken my hand and led my like a child to the house, to supper, to have my red, sore eyes bathed by my mother.

He had not said those words.

Had he?

Now I wonder, for it seemed he had put greater faith in the senseless wanderings of my mind than I.

I do not realize that supper has ended until my plate slides away from me, and I look up into the soft face of my mother, which—for the briefest of moments—becomes a bland, featureless blur. I shake my head.

"You are weary, my son," she says, "and you barely touched your supper." She leans over to kiss my hair; it is not a far reach now. I have grown very tall this summer, very fast. My majority draws near, and yet, my confusion seems to be compounded with each new day. "Why do you not follow your brother to bed?"

Stunned, I realize that my brothers are gone from the table. There is a smear of food where Carnistir was sitting and nothing more.

"I will," I say, giving her a smile that will satisfy her, painting it onto my face with—I realize now—the same skill that Atar makes shapes out of stone and Macalaurë weaves song into the wind, into the mingled scents of flowers and trees, in perfect counterpoint to the rhythm of the rain, the laughter of a fountain, or lilting melodious birdsong. She sculpts statues and I sculpt myself, into the image of what she wants to see.

Convinced, she cups my face and kisses my forehead. "I will wash up. Take yourself to bed, my beautiful Nelyo."

Ten minutes later, I am sitting on the floor in Vorondil's cabin.

I have always considered Vorondil a friend, but I felt nervous upon knocking: This is not right. I do not belong here. I might have been sitting at my brother's place at the table or wearing a woman's gown. I felt awkward. He knew my purpose here, for I was here once already, just before leaving. Like a compulsion, I've returned.

He lets me in and—despite my protests—goes for wine. I wander to his desk and admire the sketches tacked to the wall, of a maiden: Nimerionë, I remember. She whom he loves; whom he intends to marry. Still, it is difficult to imagine that Vorondil knows such emotion. Always I assumed that his preferred topic of conversation indicated the depth of his spirit: that he cared for only metal and stone and the science that enthralled us both but that trickled with greater force into all of the corners of his life. (Whereas I was left free to love and enjoy the affections of maidens while he studied for my father's relentless rigors. Vorondil is natural in the forge; less so in the arenas of academia.) I think of Nimerionë and have to keep my hands stern at my side to keep from caressing her cheek in the sketch. To me, Nimerionë was little more than a space crossed on my way to Annawendë, a piece sacrificed in a game in which I believed myself expert. Had I looked harder at her, I wonder now, would it be my cheeks flushed with happiness? Like Vorondil's? Instead of gaunt with despair?

Vorondil returns with wine and hands me a wineglass, folding his legs to sit on the floor across from me. "No!" I protest and indicate the chair I'd left for him.

"Of course not," he says. The skin at the corners of his eyes is tight and tired; I know the look of one who has been studying overlong. His shoulders sag; nonetheless, his voice is painted with a smile. "It is a pleasure to have you, Maitimo."

I shake my head and feel my hair sliding over my shoulders. Vorondil's hair is neat and dark, secured almost completely behind his head in an intricate braid. Mine is rumpled and wild. I can feel a snarl forming at my neck.

For a long time, we sit and say nothing, and I wish I hadn't come.

At last, it is Vorondil who speaks. "I have no word of her, Maitimo."

I taught myself to deal with startling statements like this, years ago; it is a mark of diplomacy, I've learned, to never look flustered. Grandfather Finwë, no matter how stunning the news reported to him, never loses the stony, slightly bemused expression of a father humbling a stubborn child. Never have I seen his hands clench upon the arms of his chair; never do worries ruffle his honeyed voice into displeasure. I used to sit in front of the mirror and mimic his expression. I practiced Atar's expression too: the fire in his eyes like two flints coaxing a miracle of fire from hard, lifeless stone. I practiced the expressions of everyone—Amil, Macalaurë, Uncle Nolofinwë—until I remained perpetually aware of my face, of my carriage, and could adjust it accordingly.

But statements like this require a sort of mental backpedaling akin to the feeling of running in the dark and suddenly finding the land absent beneath one's feet: Can one recover his grip on land? I have learned never to relax enough to expect land beneath my feet, so when gravity seeks to seize my emotions, it takes only the barest flinch to recover my composure.

I do so now: The ground falls away from my feet, but I muster all of my determination and reach.

I fold one hand over my knee; the other twirls my wineglass. I concentrate on the muscles in my wrists, on relaxing them to keep my hands from shaking. My fingers rest lightly. I let a smile drift across my lips—slightly clueless. I have seen the look on Arafinwë's face when Atar and Uncle Nolofinwë are debating something beyond his comprehension. I do not wish to look completely befuddled, it says to me, but neither do I want you to believe that I am able to reply to you, for I haven't the faintest clue of what you speak. I tilt my head; I feel the weight of my hair fall with it, the snarl irritating the back of my neck until I want to tug it, tear it free.

"That is not why you came here?" asks Vorondil, and his lips are tight and nervous now. Was I too familiar?

"I came simply to ask you if you wanted to borrow the books that Manwë lent me." I am warm: You were not too familiar, but make no mistake that you were wrong.

He smiles, relieved. "I would be honored," he says.

~oOo~

And so I return to the laboratory.

There it is, covered in the dark cloth. It beckons me, but as I approach, a pressure builds against my chest, an invisible hand, pressing me backward.

Are there some things that we should not know? Because anything is possible—does that mean that everything should be attempted?

Or is some knowledge best left in the darkness between the stars?

I know how Atar would answer that question. The answer is resting on the table, beneath a dark cloth. The answer both beckons and repels me.

In absolute knowledge, hope is lost. All is known, and hope is lost.

I close my eyes. I wonder: Is she riding toward me, at this very moment? I imagine her, low over the neck of the horse that Atar gave her to take from Formenos, her clothes too constricting on the strong muscles of her body to billow gracefully, as does the raiment of maidens in dreams. Probably, her hair is tied in a knot to prevent tangling. Her jaw is set in concentration, for riding horseback is not natural to her. There is nothing graceful or beautiful about her image, and that is why I know that the feeling of my heart being wrapped and smothered, thundering harder in an attempt to tear free, is a feeling of love.

I have images of other maidens, those before her: images like oil paintings stacked and wrapped in my head, for later enjoyment. How I used to delight in those moments when a woman's beauty and mine would become almost an art! A coil of golden hair on my flat, taut stomach; her lips on the tender flesh, in the hollows of my hips. Her graceful hand—strong and agile from studying the harp and drawing—rising to wrap around my perfect shape: What a proud image we made! How beautiful we were, when I moaned and she whispered, Maitimo, in perfect reverence.

Annawendë and I make a clumsy image, not suitable for a painting at all. I imagine sitting for a portrait with her, how the artist will lament posing us to complement the other. I should not be more beautiful than she is, but I am. My strength is wiry and graceful, like a length of wire, while she is solid and proud, like a low-growing tree that defies the most ferocious winds.

I am laughing. This room has known much laughter, but not this kind. This laughter is mad, only a misplaced breath away from a sob. My hands—so steady only minutes before—quake like banners torn by the wind. She said she would be here by the New Year—and that still leaves time for hope.

I race from the room and the temptation of the seeing-stone do not stop until I reach my bed, pressing my face into my pillow so hard that I can fool even myself that I am not crying.

~oOo~

Sleep is fickle for me, these days.

Some days, it is a stone across the water, dancing between unconsciousness and long, cold stretches of wakefulness.

Other days, it is heavy and syrupy, suspended with endless, odd dreams, and when I awaken, my mouth is parched as though filled with dirt, as though I have spent the night buried beneath a great load of earth that I cannot brush away.

Tonight, with my face buried into my pillow, I awaken only once, and it is because I cannot breathe—I am smothering myself—and my lungs burn and scream for acknowledgement, waking my reluctant brain from its stupor. So I roll onto my back. I am still dressed in the day's clothes and I haven't even pulled free the covers on the bed. I am too weary for that, so I lie atop them, in my clothes and boots, leaving clots of mud to mar the fresh bedclothes.

Then, there is a staccato rapping on the door.

And the sound of someone crying, subdued and desperate sobs.

I rise, feeling as though ropes are holding me to the bed, and I must fight free. "Sitting up" seems so far away, unattainable. My body aches with the need to sleep. A reluctant hand rubs at my eyes and feels goo gathered there, in the corners. The inside of my mouth is sticky with a sour film.

Judging from the light outside the windows (the drapes of which I've forgotten to close), it is the middle of the night, the zenith of Telperion. I make a sound like a call, and the door opens to admit my mother, holding in her arms a child that must be

Tyelkormo? No, too small.

Carnistir? No, too large.

The child is heaving with sobs, his dark hair a mess, still dressed in the prim nightclothes of a Noldorin prince.

"Findekáno!" I call, and my feet are dropped to the floor; they are crossing it; they are embracing my small cousin who latches immediately onto my neck and wails into my hair.

"Anairë just went into labor," Amil whispers to me. "Would you mind if Findekáno stayed in your room tonight? He needs you."

He needs you …

She knows the magic of those words to me, for they drive her also. Need of others overcomes exhaustion or pain of self. For my life until this point, I have believed myself Atar's son, cheated somehow of my connection to my mother, but for my blazing red hair. But even that is more splendid than hers, like a shimmering length of silk, as though Atar took the one feature she had to give to me and improved upon it. Is that not his, too, then?

But this I see, now, as coming from Amil: this ability to cast aside wholly my concerns, embracing those of another. Atar will lock himself away from us for days, constructing seeing-stones and new letters. Macalaurë—more like our father than he knows—hears not the call even of his most beloved brother when music is foremost in his mind. And Tyelkormo and Carnistir have the indulged selfishness of small children—only they do not grow out of it but seem to embrace it more tightly, allowing it to engulf them, as the years pass.

Exhaustions tugs my body toward the bed; my baggy, weak muscles fight gravity seeking to pull me to the floor, to curl up asleep on my rug, as I used to do when I was younger and tried to keep myself awake, studying, by lying across the hardwood floors to read. But my arms close about my cousin, and he weeps into my hair, his breaths shallow and frantic, and I nod to Amil in dismissal and take Findekáno to my bed, where my relieved legs collapse to sit upon it. Findekáno latches tighter to my neck, as though afraid of being set aside and told to sleep.

"Little one," I say, "there is no need to cry. You are safe."

"I am scared," he says, and it is not fear for himself but fear for his mother and unborn brother that makes him weep so, and with a flash of realization, it occurs to me that he shares this elusive trait of empathy, of selflessness so lacking in our family.

Our fathers will argue at Grandfather Finwë's suppers, palms pressed to the table, fingers splayed, in the vestigial posture of an animal forced to fight, their words rending the air; they see not the shame on their wives' faces or the pain on their father's or the discomfort of their sons, as they seek to wound each other with cheap insults and petty ploys at intellectual superiority, lapping eagerly at the blood drawn from opportunistic wounds delivered to the other's pride, unaware that the blood of their father, their wives, and their children mingles also with it. Or, perhaps, if not "unaware," certainly uncaring, willing to slam the door on my mother's tears when, later, she dared to question: "When did you learn to hate?"

How I envy Findekáno! The ability of a child to weep, to draw comfort with something as simple as tears. I hold him close and wish that such a humbling act would bring Annawendë to me. I would stand in the square in Tirion and let tears mar my face, let agony twist it—I would wear it all, shamefully, for the world—if I knew that it would draw Annawendë to hold me as I now hold Findekáno.

As the hours wear on, his tears dry and his breathing slows until he sleeps fitfully in my arms, clutching my tunic in his small fist as though afraid that his restive dreams will tear me away from him. My legs burn and grow numb with his weight, but I do not move to shift him and restore my comfort; my back aches and my eyes grow as painfully heavy as iron balls in the sockets, but I do not move until morning, until Laurelin balms the world with honey-gold light, and Findekáno shifts in my arms and murmurs my name, "Nelyo," with a grateful reverence that makes my pain inconsequential, as I hold him close and think, I healed him.

It matters little, at that moment, that I've yet to heal myself.

~oOo~

At an appropriate hour of the morning, I awaken Findekáno and dress him in the robes hastily packed, probably by my grandfather or Lady Indis, and then dress myself, and together, we walk to breakfast.

One of Grandfather Finwë's messengers stands nervously in the vestibule while Amil offers him to stay for breakfast and Atar reads the message written in my grandfather's hand. The messenger is young and unknown to me—probably new in his employment—and it is obvious that this is his first time in our house. Doubtlessly, he has heard rumors of us and seeks to confirm or dismiss them. The walls in the House of Fëanáro seem to glow, as though he put Holy Light into each stone of their construction. Or: They run there like naked savages, wielding weapons and tearing at each other's flesh in anger; such is the temper of Fëanáro and his scions. I smile at his wide-eyed appraisal of me, as I am rumored to be tall enough to necessitate ducking through doorways, as I am said to wander in a daze, speaking in strange languages with my father, as I am said to be as beautiful as a Vala and as wickedly proud of it as the brightly arrayed plants in the south of Aman that devour their insect suitors.

I am none of those things, and his brow smoothes to see that I hold the familiar hand of a child as innocuous as the son of Nolofinwë, and to see that Fëanáro wears ordinary traveling clothes (although he is barefoot and his feet look none too clean) and that our house is far from magical and, in fact, quite dusty at the moment, being that two pairs of hands frequently recruited for chores have been missing for a month now.

"Is there word of Aunt Anairë?" I ask, and Amil smiles with such unfettered joy that it is hard to look upon her.

"Findekáno, you have a baby brother called Turukáno. He was born and proclaimed healthy, three hours ago, and your mother is faring excellently." She comes to embrace Findekáno, who steps dutifully into her arms but turns his eyes to me. "He will be presented on the eve of the New Year."

The New Year.

I do not think of it.

"He is said to be dark-haired and resembling your father but with your mother's eyes, and it is said that he cried very little following his delivery," Amil goes on.

"You are lucky then" comes the voice behind me, and Macalaurë—also in traveling clothes—steps around to stand beside Atar. "That Nelyo and I should be so lucky!"

"You cried no less than Tyelkormo and Carnistir," says Amil, and Macalaurë scoffs and smiles at me. I wonder at his traveling cloak, for it seems that he and Atar have planned a journey without me.

Over breakfast—for which the messenger stays, his curiosity perhaps piqued insatiably—I ask Macalaurë his destination, and he laughs. "Oh, just to Tirion! Atar's stallion has sired a foal with one of Grandfather Finwë's finest mares, and I have been promised him as a gift for my fortieth begetting day! The foal is due this spring, and we are off to visit the mare." Suddenly, his face rumples, and he says, "We didn't mean to exclude you, Nelyo, just that we thought you'd like to stay with Findekáno, and you have looked so tired lately—"

"No mind, Macalaurë," I say, laying aside my fork to squeeze his hand. "I do not wish to go; it was of curiosity that I asked."

But later, as they tack their horses and prepare to depart, and I listen dutifully to the request that I research the properties of some obscure metal for Atar—Findekáno perches on the stall door, his arm circling my neck and his hair tickling my face—Atar says, "You know, Macalaurë, that duty will take us to my half-brother's house, to bear our good tidings," and I want to draw Macalaurë to the side. Protect Atar, I will say. Protect him from the pain that Uncle Nolofinwë so carelessly inflicts, for Atar will not acknowledge that it hurts, but it does. Laugh brightly; let your words pour forth without hesitation to fill the silences where resentment festers; take Nolofinwë's hand in warmth and fellowship but never leave Atar's side, for that is his greatest fear—don't you know?—that he should lose us as he lost first his mother, then his father, driven away by his flaws, to our half-family.

Or so he perceives.

But to do so would wipe the expression of innocent joy from my brother's face, to spend a day journeying with our father, as he has so rarely done, in my accustomed place. It would carve his face gravely, and he would worry and not enjoy the afternoon, and to take that from him seems unnecessarily cruel.

Atar is the elder; it is he whom I trust to remain strong.

And so I kiss Atar's cheek first and then Macalaurë's and embrace each in farewell, and I say nothing.

~oOo~

Findekáno is to stay with us for three days. On the third, Nolofinwë will send one of his most trusted servants to bring him home—at least, this is what Atar has said, his eyes glittering with unconcealed contempt. Because it is too much to ask him to ride for his own son, I imagine he thinks.

With favorable news of his mother and new brother, Findekáno seethes with the insatiable energy of a fourteen-year-old child, and so I take him to find clothes more suitable for play. He wears pale green robes trimmed with silver embroidery, and they do not look the sort to withstand heavy play in the garden.

"Will you instruct me?" he asks, as we ascend the stairs. He skips and whirls around me—at one side then, in a blink, at the next—as capricious as a darting hummingbird. His eyes are bright jewels in his face, and I recall the child I had brought, weeping, from Tirion only a half-year ago and smile at the change.

"Not today, little one," I say. "Today will be yours for play."

In the hallway, we find Tyelkormo and Carnistir, pressed to the closed door of the guestroom, as they were yesterday: Tyelkormo with his ear pressed to the door and Carnistir—his eyes squeezed shut—leaning so close to it that the tip of his nose is flattened, with a splayed palm grasping, seeking, against the lifeless wood.

"Little ones!" I scold, and they both leap to their feet and scuttle to the middle of the hall, innocent looks upon their faces and hands clasped between them, as though they can convince me to forget the incriminating postures in which I had found them only the moment before.

I order them out of the hallway and to sit on Tyelkormo's bed while I rummage through his armoire for a tunic and trousers that might fit Findekáno, however loosely, with the help of a belt and some pins. "It says nothing," Tyelkormo whispers.

" 'It?' "

"Yes, you know, Atar's guest." There are a few ticks of silence and Tyelkormo explodes, "Well, it could be a woman!"

"No, no, no," says Carnistir, leaning over to bite Tyelkormo on the shoulder.

"Maybe Atar is only pretending that there is someone in there?" suggests Tyelkormo.

"Why would Atar do a thing like that?" I ask, but really, it is a possibility. Atar, at times, feels it necessary to test our cunning, to see if he can rouse our curiosity to explore that which has been expressly forbidden us. I think of his secret books, of the tales of Orcs and Dark Lords—of locks begging to be outsmarted—and shiver.

"No, no, no!" Carnistir protests, from around a mouthful of Tyelkormo's tunic.

Finding a tunic at the back of the armoire that Tyelkormo recently outgrew and a pair of smallish-looking trousers, I go to the bed, unlatch Carnistir from Tyelkormo's shoulder with a stern look, and begin to undo the complex ties on Findekáno's robes. "I suggest, my dears, that you forget Atar's 'guest' and enjoy the afternoon of freedom that I am giving you."

"You've no lessons for us?" asks Tyelkormo.

"I only just arrived home yesterday, Turko." He turns up his nose at the name. "And, unless Atar left you any work, I thought the three of you could play together in the garden while I do the reading that he has left me."

Carnistir cries out happily, and Tyelkormo looks askance at Findekáno, then shrugs. "That is well, I suppose."

It is a beautiful day, with a sky like the inside of a robin's egg and only filmy wisps of cottony clouds to mar it. On a day like this, rain and grief both seem impossible, and desperately, I wish to believe this true.

The children dance down the path in front of me, chortling with the simple joy of having an afternoon free to do as they please, with nothing to constrain their flying limbs and wandering imaginations. "Let us play Animals!" says Tyelkormo, eagerly, upon arriving at the lawn. He has insisted on bringing wooden practice swords and his longbow, although—knowing Tyelkormo's penchant for mischief—I forbade him to bring along any arrows. Standing straight with the pride of the eldest and most powerful of the children, he points his sword and assigns roles. "I will be a leopard. Carnistir, you are a snake. And Findekáno …" the point of his sword drifts in his young cousin's direction and he smirks, "you will be a mule."

Before I can even open my mouth to speak, Findekáno's brow wrinkles and he spits, "I will not be a mule," and Tyelkormo—not used to be challenged by someone whose face he does not need to crane his neck to see, who in fact, is a good six inches shorter than he—recoils briefly. I feel a flare of pride and am shamed, realizing that I had hoped for my half-cousin to triumph over my own brother.

"Fine," says Tyelkormo, glancing at me and knowing that further argument is futile. "What, then, will you be?"

"I will be a Great Eagle, for they are my favorite of the animals."

Tyelkormo, of course, scoffs, but Carnistir watches his cousin, his dark eyes wide with admiration, licking the point of his wooden sword.

I settle on the grass, in the generous shade of an oak tree, and open the first of the books I have brought. The children have begun their game, which is little more than an excuse to spar with practice swords, and as I turn the pages absentmindedly—seeking the passage that I am certain I remember—I glance occasionally at them, knowing that Tyelkormo and, occasionally, Carnistir have a very liberal definition of what constitutes "fair play."

Atar wishes me to research a metal little used outside of an obscure town to the north of Aman, in the shadow of the northernmost mountains. The metal is not as strong as steel, but it is very flexible, and I am certain that I know Atar's intention: He will fold it into the strongest of his steel alloys and make a blade that is both supple and unbreakable. He has spent years perfecting his technique for making weapons—swords, at times, have been almost an obsession for him, trumping even his need to finish commissioned projects—and it has often been my research that expedited the process, as Atar much prefers to wield a hammer in the forge or to decipher chemical puzzles in the laboratory than to spend dry, interminable afternoons doing research in our oven-like library. That is my love: to pick through our amassed volumes as a bird might pick through a pile of hay, seeking a single seed. Several of Atar's books were authored by metallurgists from the north of Aman, and it is my hope that they have researched this bizarre metal devised and used by their kinsmen.

If not, the imminent weeks will probably see Atar and me riding across half the continent to arrive in this town, not to leave until each of Atar's curiosities has been sated. While, usually, thought alone of a journey would cause my heart to seize with joy, this time, I regard it with the same exhausted disinterest as a traveler who climbs uphill for the whole of the day only to discover, in the last civilized hours of travel, that his reward is to stand at the foot of a mountain, which he must cross in order to reach his destination.

And so I hope to find what I seek in these books.

A question teases my mind, begging to be asked of Atar, but I feel a low humming dread at the thought of actually voicing it. Why, Atar, do you seek to take your sword-making in this direction? It is something that I have noticed, of late: that his sword-making is less concerned with making pieces that are beautiful to the eye or light in the hand—perfect for sparring—and those that seem better suited for their original purposes. To hurt. To kill.

In Aman, we have need for neither. Do we?

The last blade he showed me before I left for Alqualondë was a plain, almost unsightly thing, with little ornamentation, especially for Atar, who believes that nothing is perfect until it is made beautiful. But, Atar said, it would not break upon an enemy's armor. It would bend and continue to exist to fight another day—as would he who wielded it. I was puzzled by this, but did not speak aloud the thoughts that occurred to me—as involuntary as a breath—and, in fact, quickly suppressed them even in my own mind, sensing danger about them. But Atar, there is no armor; there are no enemies.

Sometimes, this thought has the same feeling as did the stories that Atar had told me as a child, stories that I now knew were impossible but that I'd once eagerly believed. Believed … and yet, I felt a kernel of doubt, as though I'd known that Elves couldn't fly and that rainbows weren't painted by good deeds, but I'd wanted to believe, and so I had shut away the doubts, even conniving interesting rationalizations when my growing knowledge of the logic of the world had clashed with those legends I'd loved so dearly.

Until I could believe no more.

But, for now, I believe that enemies are a thing of the Outer Lands. We are safe here.

The metal he folded into that steel was not as flexible as that of which I now seek a mention in a black mire of cramped handwriting, penned by someone, perhaps, better accustomed to wielding the hammer than the quill. In my mind, I am already computing formulae for building a sword, coupled with Atar's strongest steel, using hypothetical properties, as I best understand them. This metal is too weak to be used for tools designed for even the lightest of uses, nor is it of particular beauty, and so it was barely mentioned at my metallurgy recitation last winter. It has been abandoned as useless—although the people of northern Aman continue to produce it and so must have found some use, however obscure—and worthless of study. But I remember it, if only because it piqued my mind to consider its possible uses.

It seems, though, that Atar has beaten me to the task.

The children have started their game and are now a flurry of limbs, swinging their practice swords at each other as they mimic the animals that they play at being. I do not point out the unlikelihood that a leopard, a snake, and a Great Eagle would ever fight. They care not for such details, only for the excuse to test their bodies against each other under a guise of play, and I am not so long removed from childhood to have forgotten the resentment I once felt for adults who'd spoiled such fun.

Tyelkormo and Findekáno soon dominate the game. Carnistir has been quickly knocked aside by Tyelkormo and is sitting on the grass, his cheeks flushed and his face twisting in an effort not to cry and chance the ridicule of his older brother; now, Findekáno and Tyelkormo remain—their animal mimicry deserted—and the sound of wood colliding with wood chases the birds from the trees in an angry, alarmed flurry of wings.

I should stop the children, but I do not. I am curious.

Atar and I worked with Findekáno on basic sword-fighting techniques over the summer—between also teaching my three younger brothers—and it seems that Findekáno's new tutor on the subject has honed his skills even further, capitalizing on Findekáno's unusual intelligence to overcome his diminutive size. He seems to know Tyelkormo's next move before Tyelkormo himself does, and he darts out of the way, exploiting the weaknesses Tyelkormo then presents, and my brother is left to defend himself with awkward, graceless swats and lunges, nearly falling once, as he leaps aside to keep Findekáno from delivering what would have been a "fatal" wound to his chest. Findekáno deftly avoids situations where he could be easily overpowered by Tyelkormo's greater size and strength; I see him watching, appraising, whereas Tyelkormo grows more and more frustrated and ceases to rely on the powers of his mind, using brute strength and risky lunges to try to pin my tiny, darting cousin, whose face is pinched and grave but whose eyes glow with pride.

Tyelkormo tries a desperate move, swinging his sword into a long arc into Findekáno's shoulder. Findekáno sees it coming, and he moves aside, but his foot slips on the grass and he falls to one knee. As Tyelkormo's wooden sword comes down on Findekáno's defenseless shoulder, he thrusts his own sword into Tyelkormo's unprotected abdomen, and both cry out at the same time and fall aside, faces damp with sweat and hair clinging to their necks, rubbing their respective injuries and watching the other with a mix of mistrust and something else, sly and subtle, creeping into their locked gazes.

Could it be respect?

I wait for tears to well and cries to resume, but neither makes a sound. Findekáno speaks first. "Well, it is a draw then," he says, and Tyelkormo shifts and then nods. "Sure. A draw."

They both look at me, to see my reaction, but I have anticipated their curiosity and have turned my face to my book, pretending to have seen nothing, although—when I pass my hand over my mouth, with the excuse of suppressing a cough—it is really to hide my smile.

Macalaurë and Atar do not return until late that night.

Amil is busy working and declines my offer of supper without turning away from the statue that so enthralls her.

My evening is filled with feeding the children supper, administering baths, combing snarled hair, saving a toy rabbit from being chewed to pieces or at least left sodden and tooth-marked (that was Carnistir), saving one of Atar's books of legends from having the cover torn off (that was Carnistir and Tyelkormo), blotting a grape-juice stain from a set of good robes (that was Findekáno, and I was only partially successful), tucking the children into bed, reading three separate bedtime stories, returning to escort Carnistir to the bathroom after he threatened to—if his bare feet had to touch the cold floor (because I had to remove his rug to be laundered after he tried to paint a design on it)—pee in his bed. Wearily, I am pondering my own bed when I hear the triple-beat of two horses riding up the road.

But, at that moment, a wail erupts from my bedroom, where, for sake of convenience, I am letting Findekáno continue to sleep, and so I go to dispel whatever chimeras haunt him.

I should curl up beside him in my bed and leave my questions for Atar for the morning. Telperion is dim outside, and my eyes are heavy. Findekáno inhabits barely a sliver of my bed, so it will be more than possible to drop to sleep and forget his existence. And, if any children wake up in the night with nightmares or needing to use the lavatory, then Atar can take care of them. I will be lost to dreams.

But my problem is that I am Atar's son, and no son of Atar can let curiosity eat at him, unsated. I lie beside Findekáno, atop the covers, hoping that my exhausted body will convince my mind to sleep, but there are a dozen questions zipping around inside my skull with the annoying persistence of a swarm of angry bees, until, at last, I give in and rise, slip my feet into my shoes, and return to the hallway.

As I pass Macalaurë's bedroom, I hear a weak call, "Nelyo? Is that you?"

He is seated on his bed, having just finished his bath, with a towel around his waist, attempting to coax a bristling knot from his hair. He smiles at seeing me. "I thought you asleep!" he says.

"I should be. Would you like me to do that?"

Resigned, he hands me the comb and turns his back to me, as I try to work out the knot as gently as possible. "We stayed late at Grandfather's and rode home very fast," he explains, hissing between his teeth when I am forced to pull at his hair to free it.

"That is why you should braid your hair when you travel," I say.

"You know my hair won't stay braided." The comb slips, and I accidentally tear a clump of hairs from the tender scalp at the base of his skull. "Ai!"

"Sorry, love. How was Turukáno?" There is a moment of blank silence. "Our new cousin?"

"Oh, yes! He is just an ordinary baby, Nelyo. Albeit, a much quieter baby than we are accustomed to. He looks a lot like Findekáno did, but his eyes are gray. Very boring, really."

I smile, for one day, Macalaurë and Vingarië will hold a feast to welcome their first child, and most of the guests will go home and proclaim the baby "very ordinary, really," and Macalaurë will bristle at the thought. "Few are babies who are not ordinary and boring," I remind him.

"I doubt you were either, what with your hair and your extraordinary arrival into the world."

"I arrived no differently than anyone else, you included."

He sighs. "You know what I mean. Atar birthed you in a tent, by a river. That's not ordinary."

"It's ordinary enough for Elves born in the Outer Lands."

"You must be obstinate, must you?" He turns to look at me, and the comb yanks his hair. "Ai!"

"If you would hold still, then it would have no reason to hurt," I say, but I am nearly finished, drawing the comb through his chocolate-colored hair, so silky that it ripples through my hands like water. "And yes, it is my nature to be obstinate. You are not much better." I hesitate, wondering how best to phrase my next question. But it is Macalaurë, and if I cannot speak frankly to him, then I can speak frankly to no one. "And Atar? How did Atar fare?"

He turns again but—snarl gone—his hair feathers gently through the comb and lies like a fan across his back. "He was better than I expected. We got halfway there, and he said something to me—something derogatory—about Nolofinwë, and I wished I'd brought you because I didn't know how to respond. How do you respond?"

"You don't," I say. "The feud between him and Nolofinwë long preceded either of us, and I believe that they both have played a role in exacerbating it. If Grandfather Finwë and Amil can't change Atar, then I doubt we can."

Macalaurë sighs. "It is selfish to feel this way, I know, but I am grateful that we live here, outside the city, and do not have to see Nolofinwë much." He gives me a careful, sidelong look. "He makes me feel ... it is hard to say. Nervous, perhaps? Like I am proving something sinister, no matter what I do."

I agree but say nothing. To perpetrate our father's attitudes gives weight to some peoples' feelings that our family is impetuous and selfish; to show too much deference proves to our father that Nolofinwë is to be feared and mistrusted. We are either self-chosen pariahs—earning suspicious looks from some—or we heighten the tension within our family. Spirit of Fire, I think, and he was rightfully named, for he inspires conflagration in those around him who would normally be content to lie in peace. Bitterly, I think that this is an unfair predicament into which to place children.

But neither was it fair for Atar's mother to die. Neither was it fair for Grandfather Finwë to be widowed, in the prime of his marriage, and his hopes of love and family dashed. Neither was it fair that he should choose between Atar's happiness and the lives of his future children. Neither is it fair that Atar—only a small child himself at the time—should be expected to understand and accept what eluded even the wisdom of the Valar.

In this senseless and cruel tangle of allegiances and betrayals that mark our family, that Macalaurë and I—and later, Tyelkormo, Carnistir, and whatever children may be born unto Amil and Atar in the future—should be forced to endure discomfort at the rare meetings of our father and half-uncle, seems a mild injustice by comparison. I am shamed by my wish that we should not be so afflicted when my father, at the age when my greatest upset came from taking a hard and shameful fall from the back of my pony, had to stand beside his mother's lifeless body and bid her farewell and know that, but for his existence, she would live.

I laugh hollowly and say, "Yes, we must balance carefully, Macalaurë, when placed between Atar and Uncle Nolofinwë. But comfort yourself to know that nothing truly dire awaits us, should we slip and fall."

"You say that now, but you would not, if you had to endure Atar's rage and then his silence, for a mistake made in our uncle's presence," says Macalaurë, but I see in his face that my meaning—though unspoken—is understood. "How is it fair, Nelyo," asks Macalaurë, with the wistful voice I thought lost in his youth, "that our people should have endured so much to come here, under the promise of living in peace, without pain, only to discover that there is pain here too, only no one will acknowledge it, and it is to be endured alone?"

"Not alone," I say, wrapping my arm around his small, bare shoulders and pressing my face into his dark, damp hair that smells of the soaps he used to wash it. And is that not what marks our family as different? That while the people of the city rejoice and worry over nuances, that our family understands how easily we are wounded, how constantly near we are to danger, even here, in the Blessed Realm?

That the strife we thought we'd left behind in the Outer Lands had followed us, as a cloud of biting insects will follow a source of hot, fresh blood?

"I am so wearied by it," Macalaurë confesses in a whisper. "Already! After only forty years. Must it be our fate forever?"

Some among us are said to receive visions of the future, but grounded as my talents have always been in that which is solid and easily held in the hand, I have no such gift. The future—even the next five minutes—is as black as the glistening, silky night, beyond the gentle Light of the Trees. I reach, groping like a man blindfolded, for such answers, but they arrive no sooner than the moment in which they were meant to occur, and so I am forced to exist in the present, with my feet flat against the earth, confined and intrigued by what is here.

But is that not better in a way? How would I answer Macalaurë if, in this moment, the vision came upon me of agony in our future, of strife beyond our imagining? Of feuds? Of war? I imagine the worst—what if that was meant to be? How would I answer him then, knowing that our interminable lives were destined to be lived in pain?

Without knowing, with that dark, velvety ignorance filling my mind, I can answer him instead: "We can always hope."

Which, with a smile, I realize, we can.

Just as easy to imagine is the opposite: of wounds inflicted long ago—and often unknowingly—being healed. Of our families coming together in love and fellowship; of laughter spiraling to the height of the stars, woven by my father's and uncles' voices. Of forgiveness—for deeds that should not require forgiving but to which a person humbles himself to speaking those words with sincerity: "I'm sorry." I smile at the thought. It seems just as possible—more perhaps—than the first, for are we not closer to being healed than to having our wounds ripped open anew? Is it not in the nature of flesh to knit itself? It seems aberrant then to suggest that things will worsen between our families, without provocation.

"I have hope," I say, and realize that I actually do. I have hope for many things, in that moment, and hope for overcoming the pain of those which do not occur. It is not the nature of our people to languish in wearied agony forever, and as long as there is light in our days, our bodies will seek to envelop it and our spirits will seek to emulate it, and joy will be allowed into our lives again. With loss of hope, with belief that we know the future to be of a substance we cannot endure, we seal our fates, for it is hope that makes us open our eyes in the morning and strive toward what we want to be, not lie in the dark, our eyes closed to the morning, and allow to befall us what we believe fated to occur, made certain by our apathy.

And so it is with a genuine smile that I bid Macalaurë a good night and kiss his forehead and enter the silvery dark, on my way to the forge, where Macalaurë tells me that I will find Atar.

It is a hazy evening, very warm, and the faint bluish lamplight emanating from the forge is textured and fuzzy. The door is open to allow the faint breeze to circulate air that becomes easily oppressive, as if angered to be left to fester behind stone walls and thick glass windows. Night insects buzz amorously to their mates; the air is heavy and musky, the kind of night where one might forgo nightclothes and lie atop the bedspread with a lover and taste the salt of each other's skin until Laurelin paints the morning in gold.

Hope ...

I see Atar as soon as I approach the door, still wearing his traveling clothes, although he has cast the cloak aside, and it has slipped from the bench and fallen to the dirty floor. His shoulders are rounded, and he works intently over something.

He hears me approach and turns. "Nelyo! Please, enter."

He meets me at the door, and I cannot see what is was on which he'd been working. We embrace, and he says in a low, excited voice, "I should have told you yesterday, but in my eagerness to show you the seeing-stone, I forgot. We have a very honored guest, Nelyo."

"Yes," I say with a wry grin. "I have caught Tyelkormo and Carnistir listening at his door twice now."

He laughs. "Yes, I wanted them to meet him, but he is justifiably reluctant. They will meet him on the New Year, though, for he will be attending the feast with us, as our guest."

Atar is rarely so enthralled by the presence of another person. I have seen him treat Ingwë, the High King of the Eldar—the most revered of the Elves of Aman—with the same bemused familiarity as he treats Grandfather Finwë, and I have heard Atar instruct King Ingwë with same strained patience that he uses with my brothers, when he desires less to be a teacher and more to share in discussion with a peer. To the lords of Grandfather Finwë's court, he gives little regard, except to those—like him—who earned their titles through gifted craftsmanship and so are apt to sympathize with Atar on most matters. But the rabid eagerness in his eyes now is akin to that worn by the people of Tirion when they tell their neighbors that one of the lords wishes to take supper and discuss some matter of importance. It must be an honored guest, indeed.

"It took much effort on my part to get him to come," Atar tells me proudly, "for it has been many years since he visited Tirion, and he thought never to return. But always has he thought of my father with affection, and it is for this reason that he agreed to come."

Atar grins. "He is Rúmil."

I try hard not to recoil, not to show my surprise, but Atar perceives me with an astuteness that escapes others. I remember the first—and last—time that I met Rúmil and feel shame warm me. How I devoured his words—just last week, I was reading one of his treatises on the tendency of words in the Vanyarin dialect to disintegrate into words so specific that they were like crumbs to the whole—with little thought to the man, the hand, behind them. Yet though I know the secret behind his gift that goes unspoken by all but Atar, I refuse to consider the dim, dark memories of the hours that I had spent in his company, so horrified by him—and so ashamed of myself for it—that I do not now remember of what we even spoke. As a loremaster, each moment in his presence should have been as precious as diamonds but I'd forgotten every last drop of it.

"He will go costumed to the feast, of course," says Atar. "Not that this bothers him, as it does some"—he rolls his eyes in disdain of the lords to whom he alludes—"since he celebrated it in its original, brutal form, in the Outer Lands. He is certainly not, therefore, bothered by costumes and masks, much less with dancing and playacting." Now, Atar takes my hand and leads me to the table, where lies the object on which he'd been working. "Of course, a mask will be chief of his costume, and I have made one that I think will be perfect for him."

The mask on the table is a light, bright metal, of exceptional beauty and somehow familiar. The twin lamps that Atar had set on the table reflect in the metal, make it hard to look up and perceive accurately. It appears to me as a face shaped of light, dazzling my eyes. I reach out and lift it, finding it as light as if it was made of paper mache—but cold. Despite the hot, heavy night air, the mask is like ice in my hand. I tilt it away from the light, to better study its contours, and I gasp.

For the reason for its familiarity is suddenly plain to me.

For it is me.

It is my face, cast into metal: the straight nose; the beautiful, high cheekbones; the chiseled lips. The features for which I have been praised, all of my life.

"I know of no subject more beautiful," Atar says, "and so I thought it fitting, that Rúmil should wear a face that befits his spirit."

I hear myself answer, "Of course."

"You do not mind then?"

I hear myself answer, "Of course not."

It is not as though people have not gone to the feast, dressed in my likeness before. It is considered great fun—both a joke and an honor—to dress as one of the royal House. (Although no one has ever gone as Atar, as though they fear that even the barest resemblance to such blazing power will leave them likewise scalded.) But their masks were crude and the likeness was usually made mostly by the affixation of a long, red wig and by imitating my straight-shouldered carriage and rapid, pattering manner of speaking, like that of my grandmother (or so I have been told).

This though ...

It is like sharing my skin. It is like I can peel away my own face and reveal something awful beneath, as will Rúmil when only the remnant of the festival is the bitter, stale smell of dried sweat on our robes. I touch my face and am relieved to feel the warm sponginess of skin.

Atar is polishing my fingerprints from the mask with the edge of his tunic. "And you? You will go as Fire, again?"

I nod and, realizing that his eyes are fixed on the mask and not my real face, say, "Yes."

He sets the mask aside and kisses my cheek. "You are predictable," he says, "but so beautiful that I cannot see it as a fault."

I smile but my tongue is a leaden weight in my mouth.

Atar glances at the window. "Tomorrow is near. Go to sleep, Nelyo, for I wish to wile away the day discussing what you learned through the day's research." He nudges me in the direction of the door. "And sleep, Nelyo," he adds, as though he is one to preach about the dangers of insomnia, he who stays awake to the point of collapse when trying to sate his inspiration.

I trudge to the house and up the stairs, obediently, unlacing my clothes as I walk. Tyelkormo and Carnistir both sleep with their doors open, to allow the cross-currents of air to pass between them, but the guest room door is closed solidly and—feeling a nugget of shame like spoiled food in my gut—I pause beside it to press my ear to the wood.

Why? The man cannot speak.

He cannot make a sound.

Actually, though, I remember his laugh: It reminds me of when Atar would place a long file into my hands and make me smooth the careless, rough edges of my projects, the squeal of metal on metal—unnatural, protesting. I shiver and skitter away from the door like an alarmed animal, my heart drumming inside of my chest.

I am glad for Findekáno as I had once been glad for the animals Atar sewed from rags to comfort me as a child. He sleeps curled on his side of the bed, his lips parted and moist, his eyelashes a dark smudge on cheeks still childishly plump. Tyelkormo is beginning to lose that softness; sleeping with him is like sleeping with a wire-trap: his limbs constantly thrashing with energy; I awaken with bruises after a night with him, and have begun letting him fall asleep in my bed and then carrying him to his own.

I put on my nightclothes and slip into bed as silently as possible, but still, Findekáno awakens, whimpering, to settle in my arms. How unquestioning he is in his belief that I can give him comfort! And how comforting it is to know that, no matter what, I can, for the simplest of comforts are akin to heroic deeds, to a small child.

My mind is buzzing with worries and wishes not to sleep. My life is too cluttered at the moment for me to catalogue information as I normally do. I no sooner shelve one item and it is pushing another to the ground. Annawendë, the New Year, Turukáno, the Seeing Stone, Rúmil—and now they are all piled on the floor of my mind, rising to my knees, so that I can no longer even wade through them. How I long for the simplicity of childhood, when sleeping in Atar's arms silenced even the worst fears. Findekáno's hand curls at my chest and his breath tickles my neck. I close my eyes—not to sleep—but to fervently wish that he hold this carefree innocence forever.

~oOo~

The next day, I awaken near to the bright gold of afternoon to find Findekáno's side of the bed rumpled and empty—his nightclothes scattered in his haste across the floor—and a folded slip of paper on the bed beside my pillow. The air is unusually still: I do not hear the sound of my little brothers and cousin playing outside, nor is the air bright with the sound of hammerfalls from the forge; even the curtains in my windows hang limply, unbothered by the wind. I have slept, a deep and heavy sleep—though not dreamless—through the night and morning, yet I do not feel rested.

My skin has the dried, dirty feeling of sweat left to dry beneath my nightclothes, souring my skin in the dream-exertion that marks my nights. I force myself to sit up; I will need a bath before leaving my bedroom.

But first, I unfold the note on the pillow. I read:

Nelyo,

Come to the laboratory, when you awaken. Do not hurry on my account.

My love,

F.

I sniff with laughter—how like Atar to think that the act of wishing for my presence might be enough to awaken me!—but I refold the note and sit it on my night-table, unable to discard it, in a sentimentally affectionate moment.

A half-hour later, bathed and dressed in tidy, fresh clothes suitable for a day of work, I start down the steps—forcing myself not to pause at Rúmil's door—to the kitchen, yesterday's notes a bundle in my hands. A basket of fruit sits at the middle of the table, and as it does not appear that we are having a midday meal, I grab an orange and peel it as I walk across the lawn to Atar's forge, eating it in sections as I used to do as a child, when Macalaurë and I would tuck slices into our lips and grin massive orange smiles, and Amil would chide us, fearing that we were in danger of choking. (And Atar would chide her for being unreasonable, for how could a small child inhale an eighth of an orange?) The door to the forge is open, but no one is working inside, until I draw near to the laboratory and hear voices.

Atar is speaking—rapidly and earnestly, his hands gesturing shapes atop the worktable—to Vorondil, sitting across from him and watching him with his perpetual expression of pinched concentration, his head bobbing in continuous assent. Vorondil has a special talent for making listening appear exertive.

Vorondil sees me first, and his eyes slip to my face and then away—not wishing to appear inattentive to Atar's words—but Atar, astute even when lost in distracted self-centeredness, catches the minute shifting of Vorondil's eyes, and his words falter, and with a wide grin, he turns to greet me. "Nelyo! At last! Come in and sit."

I hesitate for a moment, then sit beside him, across from Vorondil, whose eyes flicker from Atar's face to mine, his expression flat now that he needn't twist it into the illusion of rapt attention. I take a bite of orange. "It is nearly noon, is it not?" asks Atar. "I had not noticed, and I have not even paused yet for breakfast!"

I offer him the remaining three segments of orange, and with a flattered smile, he says, "Thank you, Nelyo. How kind of you." He plucks them from my fingers and nibbles one. "Bitter," he says with a grimace. "This is what one deserves, I suppose, for not growing one's own oranges."

I push my notes in his direction. "I trust you wanted to know of this metal for weaponsmithing?"

"No, actually," Atar says, around the orange. "For armor."

I glance at him quickly, but if he notices, then he gives me no acknowledgement. Vorondil smiles smugly. "Your father and I were discussing armor designs."

"Armor?" I laugh nervously. "For what?"

"For curiosity, Nelyo, what else?" says Atar. "Because it was once essential knowledge, and I don't believe that this knowledge should die. Besides," he adds, "it will make our practices much less painful. I would not have to spend three nights a week, rubbing liniment on your brother's arms to facilitate the erasure of the bruises."

"Macalaurë?" I say, puzzled, but Atar does not acknowledge my confusion and goes on to say, "Furthermore, I am becoming bored with sword-making, for the moment, Nelyo."

Atar is frequently bored with one or another thing that once captured his interest almost exclusively. As far as I can tell, the intrigue he feels for all of his craft has waxed and waned, except for gemcraft. Gemcraft seems to always command his attention—the fruits of it lying under a shroud in the corner, thus far ignored by Vorondil—and for this, I suppose I should be glad. Better gemcraft than sword-making, a hobby which has made me nervous of late and ashamed of that, as though I am coming under the purported influence of my Tirion relatives, having spent so many hours in my half-uncle's home with Findekáno. It is not that! I find myself desperately thinking. It is the acknowledgement of what I feel in the dark recesses of my spirit: that there is danger even in paradise, and it will make swords an evil necessity.

I do not want the weight of even this feeble intuition shaping my behavior.

"I see no point in wearing armor," Atar is saying—and I force myself to concentrate on his words and ignore the mumblings of my own thoughts—"if the weight of that armor hampers its wearer's natural agility and flexibility, and so I seek an alloy that gives protection while allowing free movement. If such an alloy had been available to my father's people, on the Journey, think of the lives that could have been saved." His brow crinkles, and his mouth is a firm line across his face. If the Valar ...

"And now is our chance to remedy this," he says brightly, "to find what was once but a dream to the people of the Eldar." He does not seem to consider that mere discovery will not return those lives to history; that this new pursuit will serve his pride only in proving once more his superiority to the Valar. He opens my packet of notes and busies himself with reading, forgetting in that instant Vorondil's and my presences, in the innocent-ignorant manner that Atar adopts in his moments of busy inspiration.

"I will work on a gauntlet that I need to finish," says Vorondil, rising and breezing from the room, leaving behind sketches that I recognize as Atar's work, of gauntlets and breastplates and helms, adapted from the early drawings of the crude armor that the Valar gave to the leaders of the Eldar, on the Journey. I turn them and study them while Atar reads. He has copied passages from books, also—and I know, then, the seriousness of his pursuit, for Atar despises rote copying from books and usually employs Vorondil or me to do it for him—books of history, where the common annoyances and rare dangers of the first armors are described. He is trying to overcome each of these problems, I see, from the drawings, sometimes with great success and sometimes not. In the case of the latter, I imagine him working and distracted, perhaps by the shrouded orb in the corner or by our secret guest or by Tyelkormo and Carnistir fighting to scramble into his lap, as though he is not big enough (and they, still small enough) that both can be accommodated, and jotting down an intuitive solution, that he will torment into perfection at some later time.

With our shoulders pressed warmly and companionably together, I lift a quill and begin the work for him, making delicate corrections to the drawings, nervous—as I imagine any apprentice must be when his master first begins to recognize him as slowly approaching status as an equal—and my fingers squeezing the quill perhaps a bit too tightly, making my letters slightly rigid and unsightly. I grimace and set the quill aside to read a page titled, simply, "Boots," in Atar's slithery, beautiful hand.

Atar's shoulder moves against mine and he lifts his own quill to make notes in the margins of my work. "This is excellent, Maitimo," he says, abandoning his work in the middle of a sentence to stride to his desk at the corner of the room, tear open a drawer, and toss a cloth package at me. "Here, we'll share this, for energy, as I have an inkling that we will be here a while yet."

The package is filled with my mother's coimas, and I nibble it while he returns to swing his legs over the bench, stinging me with the tips of his unfettered hair as he tosses it over his shoulder. "Where are the little ones?" I ask, and he replies, distractedly, "Off riding with Macalaurë." He pauses to give me a tight, mirthful smile. "Your brother has developed a sudden interest in children. He suddenly minds not one bit, taking the three of them to the forest on horseback, to stop by the river to picnic and perhaps fish a bit, and return late for supper. Even Carnistir, who torments the poor boy to distraction, I found astride his hip this morning, 'helping' him to scramble eggs." Atar laughs. "Well, he is wiser than me, with that. I despised the thought of fatherhood until I realized I wasn't being given a choice in the matter." He tucks a loosening tendril of my hair behind my ear, leaving his hand to linger, flat and very warm, against my cheek. I smile and resume my work on his drawings, while he rests his chin on my shoulder—his arm circling my back—and watches my pen trace designs on the parchment. Planks of daylight angle through the windows and bright specks of dust swirl through them. I can feel his chest moving as he breathes, the warmth of his hand on my back, and the weight of his chin on my shoulder. It is all very pleasant.

But could I stay here forever?

I am his son, and even as my logical mind argues for peace and hope, my body wishes to be propelled into the future, to know. I rub my eyes, and when my hand falls away, Atar's rises to replace it, to touch the soft, darkened skin beneath.

"You have not been sleeping."

"I did, actually, but I was disturbed by dreams."

I wonder: Does Atar dream? If he does, what are the contents of those dreams? I find it difficult to believe that I am significant enough to enter his dreams—his own son—and instead imagine geometrical stuff like that which fills the parchment before him. I imagine his dreams as sketches, as inspiration unfolding in a series of rough lines and painful erasures. Certainly not the carnal and sometimes terrifying stuff that haunts me.

"Of what do you dream," he asks, "that torments you so?"

Of what did I dream? Macalaurë dreams of music, I know, for he has told me so, and sometimes, he hums tunes in his sleep, barely detectable beneath his breath. My own are shadowy in my mind, shapes without meaning. I remember looking to the sky and seeing a rock floating on the horizon. Oh, what did Atar conjure now? I was mildly annoyed, I remember, at his audacity in blocking the stars with the hideous, silver-cream disk that seemed to bear the shadow of a face in agony. But mostly, I remember running; waking, even, with pain in my legs, as though fists held fast to my muscles and pulled them in both directions at once, frantically working the muscles until the pain subsided—pointing my toes to the sky, to no avail—trying not to awaken Findekáno with my misery. But from what did I run?

"I dream of being chased," I say softly.

Atar nods. "When we took Carnistir to Irmo, he told us that those with strong ambition often dream of pursuit. It does not surprise me, then, to hear you say this."

Ambition, yes, I suppose that I have this. While always innately intelligent, I was certainly never as gifted as Atar, and my talents had to be honed with all the tedious precision of sharpening a blade: hours in the library, page after page written, and torn up, and written again, desperately wishing—if not always admitting—that fate hadn't doomed me to suffer as forever his inferior.

I feel myself melting into his touch, closing my eyes with sudden weariness. The quill slips from my fingers, and he cradles me in his arms. We are no longer equals. He is my father again. That is fate; that I shall never overcome.

"Do you dream?" I ask him softly.

"I do," he replies.

"Of what?" and more softly, ashamed, "Do you ever dream of me?"

"Of course. I dream of light," his voice is very near to my ear, barely a breath, "and you are in it." He kisses my ear, as though to seal his words there. I am profoundly at peace: It is as if we'd managed to reach out and snatch a second from Time and hold it—whirring like a locust in our hands—and slowly stretch it to envelop us in a world without sound, where even the dust seems to shimmer, motionless, in the syrupy daylight.

But perhaps we'd stretched it too thinly, for that moment is delicate and it shatters before I have drank my fill, and the sound of Vorondil's footfalls in the next room—growing more insistent as he approaches the laboratory—are enough to make Atar draw away and my shoulders to go rigid once more, as Vorondil bounds into the room, a finished gauntlet cradled proudly in his hands.

The day before the eve of the New Year blazes forth with a heat like none we've had all year. The clearing around our house simmers like a crucible, but I can only wish to become one with it, molten and searing to the eye, rather than doomed—as I am—to be smothered beneath it. Even Atar excuses Vorondil and me from the forge that day, and we all sit in the shade of the largest oak in the garden, with cups of cold water drawn from the well, our legs sprawled and our clothing sticking to our skin, making intermittent, reluctant conversation as though not wanting our hot breath to add to the heat of the day.

Findekáno departed last night, and I am sorry for him now, for Tirion must be even hotter than here, without the cool shade of the trees and ensconced as it is in white stone. Tyelkormo and Carnistir are splashing in the fountain outside of Macalaurë's music room, from which comes the reluctant sound of scales forced into the wavering, hot air, and it is not long before the scales cease, and Macalaurë emerges, his tunic half unlaced and his chest damp, to join us in the shade.

"That is tempting," says Macalaurë, jerking his head in the direction of the fountain. "To be so young to be excused—" and he hasn't even the chance to finish his thought before Atar is leaping from the ground, tearing his tunic over his head, and racing to tumble into the fountain with his two youngest sons, who shriek with joy and latch onto him like the fat leeches we found in a pond once in Formenos, that Tyelkormo tormented poor Macalaurë with, driving him into a tree for fear of the things. I laugh and consider the stretch between the shade of our tree and the fountain: It quivers with molten, golden light, but like any pain, if endured quickly, the reward of having done with it entirely seems worth it, and so I race too, tearing off my tunic as I go, and splash into the fountain before remembering that I still wear my boots. Atar is laughing very hard at me, and Carnistir is taking the opportunity to see if his fist fits in Atar's mouth.

"You are both mad!" comes the shout from Macalaurë, across the garden, but it is only a few minutes before he has joined us, and Vorondil is alone beneath the tree, sitting very rigidly now, as though trying to prove his superiority to us in matters of dignity.

"Vorondil!" Atar hollers to him. "For Eru's sake! You are worse than a cocklebur in the seat of my shorts!" and Vorondil stands slowly and walks stiffly across the lawn, undresses and folds his clothing carefully on the edge of the fountain, and primly dips his foot into the water.

Carnistir—splashing across Atar's lap on his way to me—knocks poor Vorondil's trousers into the water, and Atar seizes his wrist and pulls him gracelessly into the fountain between us.

And so we sit—the water is tepid but cooler than the air, at least—with water to our chests, while Carnistir and Tyelkormo play among the forest of our knees, and Amil pokes her head out of her workshop window to see what is causing the commotion and laughs with reckless joy at the sight of us.

I consider the sight, imagining myself as one of the lords from Tirion, rounding the corner, perhaps, with a message, drawn by the sounds of Carnistir's shrieks and Tyelkormo's laughter. I imagine the jolt of surprise that he would feel at the sight of us: our clothes scattered around the fountain, our feet a tangle at the center. I smile. Macalaurë sees my smile and grins in reply.

It is too hot to cook, and so we eat cold salads and leftover slices of turkey, kept cool in the cellar, with berries picked by Tyelkormo in the forest earlier this week. With Laurelin fading into evening, some of the heat seeps from the day. We all help in the kitchen, to clean up, and have it done in a matter of minutes, and go outside to lie on the cool grass and listen to Macalaurë's latest composition on the harp.

Laurelin has just faded, and it is the darkest part of the evening. The air smells sweetly alive, of grass and trees, green things that rejoiced in the intense heat and light of afternoon. We do not even spread blankets between us and the ground but lie directly on the cool grass, letting the blades nip us through our clothing—in chastisement, perhaps, for flattening it—sprawled in a loose ring with Macalaurë and his harp at the top. Tyelkormo is lying on his back, and a large brown moth has landed on his chest and flutters in his loosely cupped hands. Fireflies stream up from the grass—winking gold stars, dabbing light against the darkness—flickering in rapid, complex patterns, hoping for a mate, hoping to be understood. One lands on the tip of Atar's ear, but he doesn't seem to notice—Amil's head is in his lap, and he is idly stroking her hair—and it blinks its signal from there, very bright against his hair that is darker than the night sky overhead.

"Varda made the stars. Yavanna made the fireflies. Much the same they are—but which is superior?" asks Atar. I smile to remember how I used to answer such questions in my youth—so gravely serious! expecting, hoping that he would perceive how deeply I'd considered the question and be proud of my response—and Carnistir says, with the wide-eyed certainty of a small child, "Varda's stars, for Varda is Queen of the Valar."

"Fireflies," Tyelkormo counters, his voice surprisingly faint, his head outside of the circle, "for they are tangible. Stars are not tangible." I see a deeper darkness quivering against his shadowy hands, as the moth plays its feather-soft wings against his skin.

"Aren't they?" asks Atar. The firefly on his ear opens its wings and hums away, blinking greenish-gold as it goes. "Who says that—given the right materials—the stars are not obtainable to any of us?"

You especially, I think, for hasn't he defied possibility already, by placing something as insubstantial and abstract as light within the solid reality of stone?

"Nothing undone is impossible," says Macalaurë, with a tiny smile, drawing his fingers across the strings of his harp in a glissando so beautiful that my heart squeezes in my chest, perhaps trying to end itself so that it needn't live without such beauty ever again.

With a rustle of wings, Tyelkormo's moth takes to the air, fluttering toward the lighted windows of the house.

Tyelkormo sits up, and his hands reach for where the shadow departed, but his stretching, seeking fingers fumble only air. I feel a pang of sympathy for him—my inconsonant little brother with his golden hair and his love for natural things untouched by meddling hands—and move in his direction, beckoning him with my arm. He hesitates. No longer does he come to me, uninvited, on a whim, as he once did. Now, he regards me for a long moment before mirroring my movement and shifting in my direction, moving inside the crescent of my arm. He is a solid child and large for his age, but the body inside my arm is still small and still a child, something that, at times, I have forgotten of late.

I kiss his temple, at the edge of his golden hair. He sighs and curls on the ground, lying with his head resting on my thigh.

Across from me, Atar holds a dozing Carnistir in his lap and Amil snuggles into Atar's side. A strand of her hair bows into Carnistir's mouth.

Macalaurë begins to play. I close my eyes and let the notes fill my head, each bright and beautiful. Macalaurë's music once ached with a longing I knew he did not fully understand; people would cry at hearing it, without even realizing that there were tears on their faces. Even my grandfather—strong enough to lead the host of the Noldor across the Outer Lands—had to close his eyes against the tears, against the emotions and memories that should not belong to one as young and unworldly as Macalaurë.

Now, his music speaks of hope. It speaks of first love, of the feeling that one's liquid-heavy essential organs have been replaced with something light and whimsical, like colored feathers, that a puff of wind might bear one to beautiful and mysterious lands. The feeling that, were one to spring into the air with the stars between his fingers, he might never have to return to the ground but might watch the darkness behind his hands subside until he lived among the stars. Macalaurë's music makes me want to fling myself into the possibility beyond the confines of a cliff and fly; it makes me want to hold back the sea and dance where the waves once played, with a maiden in my arms who has no darkness in her eyes, overwhelmed as they are with light.

Macalaurë's music makes me ache with longing. I imagine that—when I take my firstborn child into my arms for the first time—I will hear this song, that the happy tears on my cheeks will fall in counterpoint to the wordless melody that he now sings, his voice beginning softly—subservient to the melody that he weaves between the strings of his harp—then rising and swelling until even the stars in the sky seem to dim, bowing to his power, and my tears fall onto my little brother's face and mix there with his.

He buries his face into my belly, and I rock him, cradling his head in my arms, his hands clenching my tunic in his fists at my back.

The song ends, but I do not hear it at first: The ghost of the melody eddies in my head, and it is not until I feel Tyelkormo shift—and I open eyes that ache with the memory of tears—that I realize that the silver light is very bright, that it is nearly midnight and we have all become adrift in song and so lost in time.

My hand lolls in Atar's direction and I see Carnistir sleeping—for once at peace, looking as young as the child that he is, without the strange light to darken his eyes with age—and Amil and Atar kiss, with her palm flat at his sternum, now relaxing to cup his chest and slip past his ribs, caressing, to his waist. I am not supposed to see this, I know, and with a flush heating my face, I turn quickly away and meet Macalaurë's eyes. His cheeks are also pink, and he lays his head on the smooth curve of his harp, and we smile shyly at each other. I gather Tyelkormo into my arms and go to retrieve Carnistir from Atar, keeping my eyes averted from where Amil has her fingers snaked into the ties of his tunic, having half-unlaced them already, and they draw apart for a moment with the abashed glow of two adolescents caught together, exchanging furtive glances and conspiratorial smiles, as Atar kisses his fingers and brushes them against my blushing cheek. "I love you, Nelyo."

"I love you too," I say. "Both of you." With a child on each hip, their sleepy heads lolling against my shoulders, I straighten. "I will put them to bed."

"We thank you for that," says Amil, reaching up to squeeze my fingers, those supporting Carnistir's bottom, and Macalaurë and I turn for the house, and before we are a dozen steps away, I glance back and see that Amil and Atar have merged into a single silhouette against the silvery darkness.

Macalaurë and I tuck the children into his bed—one at each end, since Carnistir claims to be unable to sleep with anyone but Atar—covering them with only a light sheet, for the night is heavily and intimately warm still.

"Do you think we shall embarrass our children like that someday?" he whispers as we wash our faces with cool water in his bathroom. "With our own wives?"

"I hope that, after bearing four sons, my wife—whomever she may be—still wishes to make love with me on warm nights, beneath the stars," I say, "and take her chances of creating a fifth."

"Will there be a fifth of us, do you think?"

"I am nearly certain that there will be many more of us."

We make pallets on the floor from his spare bedclothes, beside the doors that open onto his balcony, where we will be the coolest. Having left all of his pillows with the little ones and too lazy in the heat to go to my room for more (and not heartless enough to awaken our brothers to steal for ourselves the ones around which their plump little arms are wrapped), we lie with our heads on the floor, head to foot. Macalaurë wears his lightest nightclothes and—lacking anything large enough to fit me—I have stripped to my undershorts and lie, using my upper-arm as a pillow, staring into the night beyond his balcony.

Neither of us covers with a sheet, not with the humidity upon us with the weight of blankets. His bare, slightly grubby feet are crossed and seeking the relief of the bare, cold floorboards. There is a healing gash on his calf, and his thighs are yellowed in places with bruises. I reach to trace the cut but, remembering his odd, evasive reaction the last time I found wounds on his body, swat his foot instead.

"This is unwise," I say, laughing as his foot—still as ticklish as it was when he was a child—twitches away from my hand.

"It is better than to have your hot breath on my head all night," he retorts.

"Your feet smell."

"Yours are no better." He pauses, then goes on to say, "You could turn over and face away from my feet."

"I wish to look outside."

"Why? It's not as though you can see it with your eyes closed to sleep."

I swat his foot again; again, it recoils. Again, I laugh. "You are becoming sardonic, you know," I say. "You are proving your paternity." I caress the arch of his foot; he yells and yanks it from my grip. From his bed, Carnistir moans—a low sound that threatens to roll over into a sob—and we both turn in his direction, holding our breaths and hoping that he does not awaken, erupting, as is his tendency, into hysteria. The mattress creaks as he shifts, and he makes no further sound. We both sigh with relief.

"Shush!" chides Macalaurë. "If you wake him—"

"You are telling me to shush? You are the one who shrieked." I walk my fingers along the underside of his big toe, and he draws his knees into his chest and sits up, annoyed. "Fine," he says, turning his body so that our heads lie in the same direction. "Since you will not leave me in peace...." Spotting my arm, which is stretched across his pallet, he grins and continues, "Actually, this is rather convenient," and lies down, using my arm as a pillow.

I study his face, as an artist might, pondering the planes and angles, realizing with a sudden clench of fear—the same that seized me in my youth, upon first learning that life could end—that the child is gone from his face: his cheeks are no longer soft, his face no longer round and undefined, easily confused with that of any other child. His cheekbones are defined now and shadowed; his chin is firm; his nose no longer begs to be tweaked but is straight and proud, like Atar's. Wisdom is beginning to bloom also in his eyes, even at the tender age of forty, for he has learned now the meaning of love; he knows desire and fear of loss in equal measure (for those come with love). I trace my fingers along the line of his jaw, wondering, When did "little" Macalaurë depart? When did his features eclipse the point of immaturity into this new, beautiful countenance that I suddenly feel I have never seen before?

For, this time last year, my brother had been but a boy who'd sworn no desire for females and less a desire for children, spitting the word like a ball of putrid saliva, who'd often been mistaken for being younger than he was by those who had not known better. Not now. Now, I imagine his wedding; I imagine his eyes changing to the wedded contentment of our father and uncles; I imagine him holding his first child in his arms, then herding all of his children with the look of perpetual perturbation that seems to take shape naturally into the faces of parents, sneaking kisses with his wife and making love with cautious care, always listening for the sounds of footsteps coming to him with tears or nightmares or to tell of accidents made in the bedclothes. I smile at this, and he grins back and says, "What is it? Why do you smile so?"

I shake my head and will not say. He takes my fingers from his face and squeezes them in his hand, and our hands lie, entwined, on the floor between us.

His eyelids are drooping. It is exhausting, I know, for him to play music like he played tonight, as though he must remove a part of himself to do so and his body has to sleep to replenish the loss. I caress his fingers in mine, and he smiles. "Do you know how happy I am right now?" he asks in a whisper, his voice slurred by weariness. "I have forgotten the meaning of pain."

I consider the bitter truth of it: That Macalaurë's happiness came at a time when mine departed, when the life I loved and had envisioned as my destiny began to disintegrate with the inevitability of crumbling stone. Would I reverse this, to change my fate? Would I have Macalaurë lose Vingarië and revert to insecurity and naïveté, if it promised that tomorrow, my hopes would be realized, that I would walk forward in my own life and into the cottage in the wilds, with my books and my children around me, and my wife beside me in my bed at night? No …

I close my eyes, lulled by the contented rhythm of Macalaurë's breathing, and wait for dreams to come. I remember his words: I have forgotten the meaning of the pain.

Squeezing his fingers, gently, so not to wake him, I whisper, "May you never remember it."

~oOo~

I awaken in the first blushes of morning, when the Lights mingle and it is easy to forget strife and pain in favor of that single hour of perfect, beautiful light.

The lower half of my arm is heavy with lost feeling, and Macalaurë is still lying on the upper half; he is snoring lightly, his eyelids twitching as he navigates dreamscapes, and I haven't the heart to dump his head from my arm and awaken him, so I stare out at the morning. The world is softened by a thin, gauzy mist; the air glows with the mingled Light, captured as it is by the water droplets milling through the air. The morning is warm already, and today will likely be hot, like yesterday. The curtains do not even twitch with a breeze, as though even the winds have subdued themselves in reverence of the Light.

Today is the day when my hopes, at last, balance on my fingertip, where forces beyond my control will decide if they will shatter upon the ground or if gravity will seemingly reverse itself and the impossible will be achieved. I allow myself to think of Annawendë in my arms; I allow myself to imagine her scent of hard work and metal, undercut by the softer smell of her skin, of the woman beneath the deceptively hard veneer; I allow myself even to think of wedding her—a forbidden thought in these long months of her absence—of pushing myself into the softness of her body, of a shared spark of ecstasy engulfing us both, of our spirits united and unable to be sundered. I close my eyes and tears drop softly to the floor, and I haven't the hands to wipe them away, for Macalaurë sleeps upon my arm, numbing one hand, and still clenches the other in his own.

~oOo~

There is much to be done this day, and I push through it with the grim determination of a wanderer gone long without sustenance who knows that he must cross the last mountain before him—knowing not whether there will be a town on the other side or another mountain to cross—but he must cross it anyway, to know.

Tyelkormo and Carnistir need baths and their hair braided and dressing in their costumes. Tyelkormo goes always as a deer, complete with antlers nabbed from one of Atar's quarries (that never fail to worry me, given his tendency to toss his head about, neglectful of eyes or soft tissues that might be in their way), while Carnistir always refuses to wear anything except all black, even a black hooded cloak that he pulls low over his eyes. He calls this costume Invisible.

Macalaurë and I are entrusted to this duty, and I don't need to see Atar being admitted into the guest room to know why, as I return with a struggling, gnashing Carnistir held at arm's length and screaming of the injustice of two baths in less than a day.

"Ah, yes, Rúmil," says Macalaurë, when I mention it, once both little ones have been settled into the tub. Macalaurë works on Tyelkormo while I hold onto the much more difficult slippery-wriggly Carnistir, who is moaning as thought tormented and trying to tumble headfirst out of the tub. "Atar told me of him when we went to Tirion to visit my colt." He grins. "Why the secrecy, though?"

So Atar has not told all …

"I do not know," I lie. "Rúmil prefers to live alone, although I know not the reason." Carnistir stops fussing abruptly and turns his dark eyes on me, and I sense a shocked disappointment behind them.

"He's pretty," says Carnistir.

"Who? Rúmil?" asks Macalaurë.

"Yes …" Quixotic, like usual, Carnistir hugs my arms and nuzzles his face into the crook of my elbow, smearing soap across the front of my tunic.

Tyelkormo's foot flies out from his body and kicks Carnistir hard in the knee. Carnistir shrieks and kicks back, and Macalaurë and I must hold them both and try to subdue them. "I told you to stop calling men pretty!" Tyelkormo shouts, scrambling to free himself of Macalaurë's grip.

Carnistir is weeping now, softly, less with anger than injustice. "But he is pretty—silver-bright pretty!" he insists, while Macalaurë scolds Tyelkormo, who is now also crying. Both are subdued now, but the iridescent, soapy water churns with the memory of their outburst. Carnistir turns his quivering, tear-streaked face to me; with his cloud of dark hair slicked to his head, he looks quite pathetic. "He is pretty, Nelyo, don't you know?"

I shiver, smile, and turn Carnistir's face from mine to resume rinsing the soap from his hair. "Of course, I know, little one."

I am glad when Amil comes—dressed in her green costume as Yavanna—to take the little ones, and Macalaurë hustles to his room to don his secret costume, and I am left alone, to refill my bathtub with hot water, undress, and plunk myself into it, turning the hourglass first because lately, I have a tendency to linger overlong in the bath and, twice, even fell asleep. In the past, the New Year Festival has been an occasion of great joy for me: the mystery of the masks and the costumes, the shadowy corners where the fingers of firelight do not probe, the dizzying wines and the feeling of silk on my skin, parted aside to make way for warm lips and fingers to explore the flesh beneath. "Do you even wear undergarments?" Macalaurë had teased—slightly scathing and slightly exasperated—after the Festival last year, and I had laughed and said, "Well, our ancestors did not. I am staying true to history."

And so, stepping from the bath and going to my armoire—leaving a dripping trail behind me—I ponder my costume, in its blazing reds and gold of nearly sheer silks, layer upon layer, shifting and dancing like the Fire I am supposed to be, and the pile of undershorts in my armoire: bland, graying cotton, worn in both the forge and at my grandfather's most extravagant feasts, and I snatch the costume from its hanger and let the armoire bang shut on the undergarments.

In my hair, I thread strands of gold, twisting the fiery locks into haphazard braids and leaving some to tumble down my back. Atar once made a mask for me, to match my costume, but when I put it on, he snatched it just as quickly off and broke it beneath his boot and answering my shocked stare by saying, "The shame of disguising beauty as something lesser!" and so I paint a design at my right eye with a mixture of scarlet and gold—the gold made by Atar with actual gold dust in it that ensnares and dazzles the light—and leave the rest of my face bare and my identity undisguised.

And so I am ready.

I squint at myself in the looking glass and wonder, What is your fate?

Well, all fire falls to the same fate, I suppose. It is either snuffed or it burns itself into exhausted nothingness: Regardless, it is ephemeral and destined to die. It is the existence prior to disintegrating to cold cinders that matters. It gives life and warmth and aids productivity—or it consumes and destroys, taking everything, perhaps, in anger of its own eventual demise. I scowl and turn away from the glass, to look for my boots and join my family in the foyer, attempting to ignore my uneasy uncertainty.

What is your fate?

I bound down the stairs noisily, taking them two at a time, hoping that, if I force my body to mimic joviality, then my spirit might become as convinced as an outsider looking upon me—why, look at the joy in his spirit! how happy he must be!—and abandon the petulant gloom in which it lingers.

Amil is there already, dressed in her whimsical green gown done in a motif of leaves—and a crown of leaves and flowers upon her hair—reclining wearily against the wall, fingers at her temples, while Tyelkormo and Carnistir scamper around the room, shrieking, grabbing hold of each other and wrestling, bumping into furniture and sliding the rugs askance. Judging by the long tear in one of the scarlet drapes by the door—and the presence of incriminating threads on one of Tyelkormo's antlers—the antlers have already proved hazardous. Atar and Macalaurë have not yet appeared, Vorondil left this morning to escort Nimerionë (and Atar made several overt hints about silver rings accompanying Vorondil in his pocket), and Amil's apprentices have returned to their families for the holiday, still being underage. When she hears my footsteps, she looks up with relief, and I hasten to the task of separating Tyelkormo and Carnistir, dusting off their costumes, and sending them to opposite sides of the room to sit and behave.

"We were just playing, Nelyo," quips Tyelkormo, primly adjusting his antlers and reminding me so much of our father that I cannot help but laugh.

"Playing or not, today is an important festival, and I cannot have you attend with your clothes in dirty disarray. And you must be cautious of these, Tyelkormo," I remind him, helping him to straighten the antlers, "before someone loses an eye to your rambunctiousness."

"Well, he—" he jerks his head in Carnistir's direction, who is sitting gloomily in his appointed chair, his lower lip puffed out—"bit me on the wrist, see?" Tyelkormo slides away the sleeve of his brown tunic and shows me a bluish ring bearing an uncanny resemblance to the shape of Carnistir's teeth.

I sigh and send my littlest brother a sharp look, and he wails. "We will deal with that when we return day-after-tomorrow," I say, affixing Tyelkormo's sleeve over the bruise, kissing his rumpled forehead, and sending him in the direction of his chair with a swat to the bottom.

I go to stand beside Amil, who kisses my cheek. "You are so beautiful, Nelyo," she says, reaching to touch my hair. "Sometimes I wonder if you are mine at all—or if your birth is but a manufactured memory, and really, you are a son of the Valar."

I laugh. "No, there is too much of Atar in my face," I say, "and Atar would not suffer the affections of anyone but you, Amil."

She smiles and embraces me; I have grown such in the last few years that her head presses my chest now. "You are beautiful, Nelyo. And I feel so lucky that you are my son."

Behind me comes the sound of footsteps moving down the hall. I draw back from Amil's embrace and watch two pairs of hesitant feet come into view on the steps. One wears Atar's unmistakable black boots, for he is dressed as a warrior on the Journey, wearing grandfather Finwë's old armor, adjusted to fit Atar's thinner, lither body.

My shoulders are drawn tense, and—realizing that I hold my breath—I force myself to inhale, trying to calm my pounding heart, sick with shame for my fear of Rúmil, who hardly deserves what happened to him and, less, my discomfort about it. After all, I was not the one tied to the tables in the Dark Lord's dungeons and— I shake my head and feel my hair spilling like silk ribbons over my shoulders; I force myself to remember that it is not Rúmil that I fear but the truth he represents about the world in which we live, and he is safe now from that, recovered from the hopeless depths of Utumno. I should embrace him and the hope that he embodies. I straighten my shoulders and stand alongside Amil—who is watching me, perhaps sensing my unease—in proud imitation of congeniality. I watch as careful, delicate steps bring Rúmil down the stairs to us. His body, unused to travel, is doubtlessly frail, and he clutches Atar's arm for support. He wears midnight-blue robes spangled with stars and a silver mask that is like looking into the mirror. I feel a bitter pang of relief that he wears a hooded cape over the robes, and it covers his ruined ears, and his mouth is hidden beneath the mask, done in the shape of my own lips.

They reach the last stair and, with his foot outstretched and groping to reach this final obstacle, Rúmil steps with wincing care to the floor and then releases Atar's arm.

My little brothers, who have been fidgeting in their respective chairs, have both fallen silent. Tyelkormo's jaw dangles open rudely with his finger hanging from a corner of it.

She is the Lady of the House, and so Amil steps forward first. "Lord Rúmil," she says, and she curtsies. Amil is stiff and awkward when greeting guests, trying to hold her body in imitation of much smaller, delicate women, but her voice is sincere, and so she is always forgiven for it. "It is an honor to have you in our home. I welcome you ..." She laughs nervously, realizing, perhaps, that he has been here for a week now. "Perhaps it is better to say that I hope you have found your accommodations adequate?"

Rúmil turns his body in Atar's direction, and Atar lifts his hands and makes a series of quick gestures with his fingers, making shapes in the air as though spelling something in silent speech. I feel my brow furrow. Beneath the mask, I can see Rúmil's glittering gray eyes watching Atar's hands with an intensity paid to deciphering script. When Atar's hands fall back to his sides, Rúmil bends and takes Amil's hand, and he moves the metal lips of his mask—my lips—across her palm. Her shoulders jerk slightly, but her feet stay fixed; with her back turned to me, her expression remains a mystery. Rúmil straightens, turns to Atar, and moves his hands in a series of gestures, and Atar says, "He says that he thanks you for your warm welcome and that he has enjoyed his stay in our home. He says that he envies my luck," adds Atar, with a wry grin, "to find a wife as beautiful as you."

It takes Amil a long moment to gather her composure and reply, "I thank you, my Lord," turning slightly in my direction as though begging for rescue.

I move to stand beside her. Atar is moving his hands again; I find myself watching his twisting fingers, knowing that he makes the shapes of words but unable to distinguish one from the other. I try to figure where words, phrases, sentences end. I wonder about the grammar of this finger-speech, about the intricacy of this language compared to ours. I find myself aching to learn it, to speak with such silent fluidity, weaving hypnotic patterns through the air.

Rúmil turns to face me. He makes a gesture, near to his face. He puts his finger to my chest; he glances at Atar. "Maitimo," says Atar. "He wishes you to learn your name."

He makes the gesture again. A nervous laugh slips from my throat before I can stop it: How can I meet kings and queens and speak with them as peers, yet find my heart pounding against my ribcage to be faced with this man, swallowing the sour taste of fear that coats my mouth? A man no different than me, really. We are both scholars; we both make our lives from meaningless symbols upon parchment. We impart that meaning; we have the power of deities to make something from nothing, to look upon black squiggles and smudges and press the parchment to our chests, with tears sprung to our eyes: beautiful.

I make the same gesture that he has made twice now, at my face—my name. The unnatural movement of my hand is awkward. Our people were made to speak, but this? But when we can no longer speak—

Rúmil clicks his fingers and tosses his head, and I sense he is laughing at me. He makes another gesture, cutting the air with his hand. No. I don't need Atar to translate. I feel my face constrict in confusion; Rúmil notices it: I see his eyes, through the mask, deciphering each of my gestures, breaking the code of my expressions and posture. Rúmil pokes me again in my chest. You. He takes my hand in his. His hand is larger and stronger than I expected; he wears black silk gloves, but the hand inside of them is warm. Living flesh—but not a sliver of it visible. His fingers are very supple and agile, from years of writing calligraphy. He puts my hand to his chest; I feel flesh and ripples of bone beneath; he breathes, and his chest rises to meet my hand; I stiffen at such intimacy with a near-stranger, but he presses my hand with insistence against him. My hand is rigid in his, I realize, but relaxing now. He nods and takes his hand from mine, leaves it resting on his chest. He makes another gesture, one reminiscent of writing. Rúmil.

I take back my hand and confidently imitate his motions. Rúmil. He makes another gesture, three times, swiftly: Yes, yes. Yes!

I smile and feel my body sag, realizing for the first time the depth of my attention. The world slowly swims back into the periphery of my vision, akin to those moments in the library, studying, when all I could see was the page, and I didn't hear Macalaurë call me for supper until his hands were on my shoulders, and I jumped: "Stop mumbling to yourself like a madman and come to eat," he said, laughing, as though he didn't know what it was like to wander down that long tunnel of solitary study and emerge, blinking and flinching, back into the broad and very bright world.

Rúmil makes more gestures. Maitimo, I decipher, but the rest are lost in an incomprehensible twisting of fingers, although I can puzzle out where the words begin and feel the rhythm of sentences in my mind with the definitive click of a peg falling into a matching hole. Atar translates: "He says, 'Maitimo, it is a pleasure to meet your re-acquaintance. I thank you for the honor of wearing your likeness, although no shape in metal—even borne of your father's capable hands—quite does you justice.'" He turns to Atar and signals further, and Atar clicks his fingers in laughter and replies, speaking as he signs: "I take no offense."

I close my eyes and see the string of signals just made by Rúmil replay in slower detail. I open my eyes and shape, awkwardly, I thank you, and Rúmil's eyes widen inside the mask, and he signs back to Atar.

Atar says, "He says that you deserve your recent honor in being named Master of Letters, for your comprehension is superb." Atar then signs back to Rúmil without translating, but I see the gleam in Atar's eyes and watch the shape of his fingers, and I suspect I know the meaning of one of his signs: proud.

I am proud of him.

And Atar smiles and reaches out to caress my cheek. He makes the sign again: Proud.

And calls my brothers: "Tyelkormo! Carnistir! Come and greet our guest."

They scurry over, scuffling when they meet, pushing and fighting to be first. Tyelkormo leaps to the front to be introduced, but Carnistir ducks behind my legs, buries his face in my robes, and moans. I turn to bring him around to the front—well accustomed to my little brother's antisocial nature, at times—but he is already easing around, peering at Rúmil from around my legs, reaching out a small, chubby hand, fingers outstretched as though stroking something soft in the air before him. "Silver ... so pretty ..." He steps around and takes Rúmil's black-gloved hand in his; he presses it to his forehead. He sinks to the floor and wraps his arms around Rúmil's legs in a bizarre embrace that I see him do sometimes with Atar—especially in the mornings, when he doesn't want Atar to leave for the forge—and nuzzles his face into Rúmil's robes. Tyelkormo, who has been chattering in introduction while Atar signs fiercely, attempting to translate fast enough to match Tyelkormo's patter, falls abruptly silent, and we all stare with amazement at little Carnistir, who does not speak, as though he knows that Rúmil cannot hear him.

And Rúmil stoops and unlatches Carnistir from his legs and—with the awkwardness of one who does not often hold small children—lifts him into his arms. Carnistir pushes his face into Rúmil's shoulder and knocks his hood aside, exposing a ruined ear, but Carnistir—who cries at the slightest provocation—doesn't make a sound, and his fattish baby-arms lock around Rúmil's neck. Rúmil holds him close and a low sound leaks from his throat, a mewling cry that speaks of the most basic longing—and the brutal knowledge that it will never be satisfied.

Atar goes to ready the carriage, and we wait for Macalaurë.

Without Atar, Rúmil becomes stiff and awkward, although he still sits with Carnistir dozing in his lap. Amil is making an effort—too much, perhaps—to accommodate Rúmil: She jots notes, asking if he would like a glass of wine or some cheese and crackers without realizing that he will have to remove his mask to eat or drink, and he will not do that in her presence.

From the stairs comes the quick patter of footsteps and Macalaurë emerges. Macalaurë always keeps his costume secret until the last moment, and he never dresses as something lovely but always something scary, delved from the darkest legends that he likes to read and retell to frighten our brothers into obedience. Today, he wears all white, a fighter's costume, bound close to his body. Even his boots are white, specially made and acquired for this costume. His hair is covered by a white hood and he has painted every last bit of exposed skin white—except the skin around his eyes, around which he has smeared soot to make his eyes appear dark and sunken and his fingernails, over which he has pasted something dark and chitinous to resemble claws.

Tyelkormo flinches away from him with the primitive fear of early childhood before becoming exceptionally bold to save his pride and declaring "You make a stupid wraith, Macalaurë!"

Macalaurë turns abruptly and yells, "Gah!" jumping in Tyelkormo's direction, and Tyelkormo yelps before he can stop himself. I notice that, at his waist, Macalaurë wears a crude weapon made of some kind of dark metal. Atar, likewise, I noticed—before he departed to ready the carriage—wore a longsword of exceptional beauty, that which I know he has spent weeks forging, after dismissing Vorondil for the day, in the private hours of night.

I begin to wonder …

But that quickly, Atar has returned, and he is introducing Rúmil to Macalaurë, and we are herding the little ones and settling in the carriage. It is a half-hour ride to the copse called Osto-Lomëa where the Festival will be held. The New Year Festival is never celebrated in the civilized indoors but in the depths of the forest, in the shadow of Túna, where the Lights will not reach but the stars are hard and bright in the sky. The Lights are just beginning to mingle when Atar turns the horses through our gate and onto the road.

I always feel a bit silly—pretentious almost—in the half-hour that it takes to ride to Osto-Lomëa. Certainly, our ancestors didn't enjoy this luxury, nor did they have the pleasure of sipping at a flask of wine that ingenious Macalaurë slipped into his boot. With Rúmil in the carriage, conversation becomes awkward, stilted, although Atar is making the effort. I feel silly, like a child caught playing dress-up in his father's clothes. Even Macalaurë looks harmless—quite silly, in fact—in his scary costume and face paint. Tyelkormo has recovered from his shock, apparently, because he is clambering across Macalaurë's lap and nearly having his eye with an antler.

At last, we arrive at Osto-Lomëa, by all appearances, an ordinary forest except for the valets waiting outside. They take the carriage and motion us with sweeping, dignified gestures toward an undignified dirt path where the underbrush has been pushed aside. They greet Atar as "Prince Fëanáro," offering a hand to Amil—as though, caring for four children and achieving renown as one of the most capable sculptors among the Noldor leaves her incapable of stepping from the carriage—and bowing to each of us in turn, "Princes Nelyafinwë, Canafinwë, Turkafinwë, and Morifinwë." They pause at Rúmil, uncertain of his identity, and finally suffice with a polite nod and "my lord ..."

Inside the forest, it is as dark as it must have been in the Outer Lands, on the Great Journey. I feel a twinge of hesitation—I always do—for I am unaccustomed to such total darkness. I become anxious about the placement of my feet, imagining that I might be misfortunate enough to chance stepping into a hole and turning an ankle or that something dark and cold will slither out of the shadows and grip my foot as relentlessly as a bind of iron. But lamps are draped too among the darkness, in the shape of the constellations, and my eyes—meant to be born into darkness—do not take long to adjust, and then the forest is beautiful. The trees are shadowy and featureless, outlined in bluish starlight; the undergrowth might be piles of darkness glazed with ice. The path sweeps northward and, hung high in the branches of the trees, the Valacirca glows before us, shaped from the stones my father devised, and to guide us along the path to the clearing. A nightingale warbles, and another answers. From deeper inside the forest, along the path, comes the sound of a shout and a weak strain of music. We move toward the sound, moving carefully in the near-darkness, until the trees in front of us pulse with firelight, and we step into the festival clearing, where large bonfires make pools of reddish light and pitch-black shadows, and there is something savage and sensuous about the few dancers who writhe in the flickering light of the clearing.

At the head of the clearing is the royal table, and Grandfather Finwë and the Lady Indis are seated there already. He is costumed as Manwë; Lady Indis wears no costume but a festival gown of gold lamé that reflects the firelight. Left in charge of Tyelkormo and Carnistir, I cannot hear the words that pass between Atar and Grandfather Finwë as they embrace in introduction, and Atar presents Rúmil. I see Atar's hands flashing in the firelight, and Grandfather Finwë bows before Rúmil, whose hands fly about in flustered protestation, but Grandfather Finwë pays him no mind and kisses the backs of his black-gloved fingers.

Grandfather Finwë, I realize, must have known Rúmil before he became Melkor's thrall, when his voice had the power to make the forest fall silent in reverence, when even the wind waited in the trees to listen, fearful, perhaps, of tearing those sounds from his throat, of warping and distorting them, rendering them silent. Melkor did that, I realize with sickening rage, did what even the capricious wind could not bear to do. I think of Macalaurë and the power of his voice, and I am ill at the thought of Rúmil's torment upon him, so sick, in fact, that I must sit suddenly, fingers trembling and writhing, entwined, against each other, while Amil asks with concern, "Nelyo? Are you unwell?"

"I am fine. Just—" Just what? What excuse can a young and healthy Elf as myself make that will convince her? "Just wishing to sit," I reply lamely, but she leaves me alone and goes to kiss her father-in-law in greeting, and I take deep breaths and remind myself, This is Valinor and Melkor is imprisoned in Mandos.

The clearing quickly fills with costumed people, and Macalaurë and I move among them, searching for people that we know but, most of all, Vingarië and Annawendë, respectively. We find Vorondil, dressed as starlight in a radiant silver-blue costume, entwined around Nimerionë, and he rushes to us, brandishing his hand, on which is a silver ring. "I will be a husband within the year!" he shouts, and I can smell the sweetish scent of wine about him. Nimerionë giggles and ducks her head and tugs at Vorondil's sleeve: "But, love, my majority is still five years away ..."

Vorondil clutches her to him, putting his fingers on her lips and then—boldly—replacing them with his lips. "Hush, love, I am doubtful that I can wait beyond tonight—"

We give them our best wishes and move away to allow them the privacy to move into the shadows at the edge of the clearing, where Vorondil, I know from experience, can attempt to earn his wish—or at least, something comparable in satisfaction. As we depart, he snatches my sleeve and pulls me roughly back—nearly tearing the delicate silk in his haste—and whispers in a breath reeking of inebriation, "I haven't seen her, either."

There is a nugget of growing dismay in my gut, and I nod and move away: At least one of us should be happy tonight.

"He is quite drunk," Macalaurë says, as we walk, "although he probably needed it for the courage to propose. I thank Eru for only being forty years old and having ten years still to find my own courage." Fearing that he has spoken insensitively, he looks at me with his eyes wide inside the dark rings of soot. "Oh, Nelyo, I didn't mean to—"

I silence him with a dismissive wave of my hand. "No mind," I say, although my churning stomach indicates that I mind a lot. "I am going to enjoy myself tonight," I add unconvincingly. He looks at me doubtfully; he will not be easily fooled. I scan the clearing for an unescorted female, seeking to prove the truth of my statement—to myself as well as Macalaurë. Snatching two goblets of wine from a passing waiter, I give Macalaurë a purposeful look and head in her direction.

~oOo~

A combination of wine and dance—both in great measures—leaves my head spinning. The music is loud and fast now—screeching to rise among the voices of almost the whole of the Noldor—and the crowd surges in rhythm, as partners are exchanged and inebriation creates surges of laughter and hilarity and reckless dancing—crowds forming circles around the performers, pockets of madness—and the music surges ever-louder, ever-harder, until it seems that even the trees shake in rhythm and there might not be a world beyond this clearing: no foes, no concerns, no paradise—only this night.

A small maiden dressed in a scarlet, feathered gown has danced in my arms for the last half-hour: I do not know her name, and if she knows mine, she does not call me by it. We do not speak, and our dancing is not confined to the proper steps common to other festivals. Her nose is at the height of my chest; she is a tiny bundle of bones in my arms. The music moves our limbs and the rest of our bodies follow in languid obedience; when a waiter passes with wine, I grab goblets for both of us. I cannot tell if it is lust or inebriation that makes me clutch her to my body, but she slips her fingers up my silk-clad thigh and her teeth close on my nipple through the cloth, and my loins blaze with flame, and I know by the way she presses against my hips that she must feel my excitement—she must!—but when I ask her if she wants to leave the clearing, my words are torn away by a sudden yell from the crowd around us, and she is bumped away from me by a man reeling backward to clear a ring formed around two people who stand back-to-back with swords in their hands.

I grope around for her, but then I notice the identities of the two men in the ring: Atar and Macalaurë.

A visceral fear grows inside of me, at the sight of the firelight like bright blood on the swords, and that quickly, the nameless girl is forgotten and my arousal has withered. I join the crowd that forms around them; Atar has begun to speak, his voice easily dominating the music and the shouts of the clearing. "In the days in the Outer Lands, our people fought many enemies beyond our pampered imaginations." He smiles viciously; the firelight livens the shadows on his face. Is he Atar? I squint in the fickle darkness: If not for the bright gems that are his eyes, I would doubt. The teeth inside his grin are vicious, appearing almost pointed. I shake my head and blink, and when I open my eyes again, his grin is wicked still but otherwise normal. "In the Outer Lands," he goes on to say, "many of our people were taken by blind wraiths who sought them by the heat of their bodies in the darkness. But some triumphed ..."

He turns to Macalaurë, who has remained silent, resting on his black sword, his face as without expression as the lifeless wraith he imitates. From his pocket, Atar draws a strip of black silk.

"My son Macalaurë has an extraordinary gift: the gift of a wraith. For he can fight without his eyes, by sound and feeling alone." He gestures at a young man in the crowd who steps nervously forward, looking around as though for some escape. But Atar has him by the shoulder, is asking him, "Tie this around your eyes and tell me: Can you see a thing?"

The boy does as he's told, shakes his head no, and disappears gratefully into the anonymity of the crowd. With a flourish, Atar ties the silk around Macalaurë's eyes. I watch my brother's eyes lower obediently. In my irrational fear, I think that he neglected his eyelashes, for they are too long and thick and betray his Elvenness. I want to leap into the clearing, shield him with my body. Protect him from harm. But that is silly—isn't it? "Nor can my son. But he will fight me anyway, and he will not falter.

"Now, some of you might think this sword—" Atar draws his longsword from its hilt—"is a prop made for ceremony. No, it is real—as real as that which guarded our people. It will cut, wound, and kill." He brandishes his arm, bare between the bracer on his wrist and the sleeve that reaches his elbow, and he slips the sword across it. With a gasp, the crowd watches dark, syrupy liquid well beneath the blade and trickle down his arm into the grass.

"As you can see," says Atar, laughing at their fear, "it is real."

My mind fumbles to comprehend: the cuts and bruises on Macalaurë's flesh; his secret meetings with Atar—but I wonder, is it real? There is something dark and wet on Atar's arm, but I don't want to believe him mad enough to cut himself with such brutal impassivity. But even as I watch him circle Macalaurë, who still leans on his blade, that dark liquid drips onto the grass. The crowd recoils but does not leave; women cover their eyes but peek through their fingers; parents lift their children into their arms but let them watch. Atar paces and paces—until the tension embraces us all—and paces. Macalaurë stands, unmoving, unflinching. I wonder at the heart that beats beneath his breast: Is that afraid? Atar paces; I cannot see Macalaurë breathing. It is as though he is really no longer human.

Atar circles, growing narrower, then wider again, like a predator teasing its prey—only Macalaurë does not move—and then flies from nothing and into a flurry of movement, and before I can even register that he is in motion, Macalaurë has spun and their blades meet with a bright clang that bites our ears and makes us wince. This sound was supposed to be forgotten; this sound was supposed to be left behind, on distant shores, but here it is, ringing so quickly that it becomes a continuous metallic keening, and we are leaning forward with the hunger of predators, wondering, who will bleed next?

In the madness of the firelight, Atar is a twisting flame, contorting impossibly, but Macalaurë matches him, weaving his body amid Atar's sinuous attacks, but never once touching him. When Atar's sword rises, Macalaurë's is there to meet it. There is a rhythm to their fight, a primitive heartbeat; I feel my pulse stirred by it. My body grows tense; my muscles thrum with the force of Macalaurë's parries, as though it is I who am undertaking such an impossible fight—and yet am not overcome.

Macalaurë, light on his feet, seems to be defeated once, but that quickly, he leaps into the air and over Atar, somersaulting and nearly colliding with the crowd, who surge back from him. He swings his blade, Atar's meets it, and they are begun anew, weaving their feet in an intricate and deadly dance. Macalaurë trips Atar's foot from beneath him, but Atar rolls away from Macalaurë's plunging blade. With graceless necessity, he clutches Macalaurë's foot and topples him to the ground. They are both amid the leaves now, rolling on the ground, swatting each other with their blades. Macalaurë kneels on Atar's chest; Atar knocks him aside. Macalaurë lies prone on his back now, limbs splayed, his sword loose in his fingers, his chest exposed. Mercilessly, Atar steps upon him. Macalaurë wails—a sound like a blade drawn across bone—and Atar raises his sword, in both hands, and plunges it into Macalaurë's chest.

I am too shocked to scream, blinking, heart a roar in my chest, I am so frightened—but it cannot be, for Macalaurë is standing with a wide grin on his face, his makeup smeared now, tearing off the blindfold and taking a bow. He tosses the blindfold to Vingarië, who stands at the head of the crowd and shouts with delight—leaping and clapping her hands—and Atar says, "My son Macalaurë!" and takes Macalaurë's hand, and they bow together.

I blink. For I was certain. Certain that I saw my father kill my brother.

But such a thing is impossible. Atar would sooner plunge a blade into his own chest than bring the slightest harm against one of us.

Turning, blinking, rubbing my eyes, I wander from the circle, but I feel a hand grab me from behind. Atar.

"Your brother is something, is he not?" he asks, falling into step beside me. His voice is high and breathy with exhilaration. "He could not fight to save his life with a sword ... but put a blindfold across his eyes." He pauses, studying my face, and seizes my wrist to stop. "Are you unwell, Nelyo?"

"I—I thought I saw something that was not." I laugh nervously. "Too much wine I suppose." I lift his arm and look at its underside, at the dark, sticky line there, already clotting. "How could you—"

He traces his finger along the wound and puts it to my lips. I twist away, but his finger deftly follows my lips; he insists. He pastes it onto my lips, and I obediently lick it, tasting bittersweet chocolate. Atar laughs; I must have shown my surprise. "In the firelight, you cannot tell it is not blood. And," he leans forward to whisper in my ear, his breath as hot and heady as though inebriated though I smell not a trace of wine on him, "it was all choreographed."

Macalaurë appears beside him, his arm locking Vingarië to his hip. "Nelyo! Did you see—"

"Yes. You were wonderful."

I smile weakly and wander away, to the shadows, perhaps, alone.

~oOo~

I am sitting alone at the royal table, watching the heaving, fire-lit crowd and trying to make sense of the screaming music and trying not to feel hope drain from me with every passing minute that Annawendë does not appear from the crowd and come to wordlessly embrace me. I have denied envisioning this moment, but I have; even as I admitted the imprudence of it, I have imagined her manifesting like a spark from the fire, a quivering apparition spinning through the darkness to arrive at my side with words ready upon her lips: Nelyo, I was wrong to leave. I love you. I choose you.

I feel foolish and ugly, even: a beautiful face but a heart dark and empty and not worth loving. I am holding to the sides of my chair to keep from leaping to my feet and running from the clearing in panic and shame of this realization.

It is then that I notice the girl watching me.

It is hard, at first, to determine that she watches me, per se, for she is masked and costumed, although I cannot tell as what. Her body is angled toward the crowd, but her head tilts in my direction. I meet her eyes and, slowly, she turns away.

Not a minute later, she is at the opposite side of the clearing, her back to the mass of people and her face squarely facing me.

And it must be me, for I sit alone, with only trees behind me.

Annawendë is gone. With a despairing scream inside my head, I force myself to acknowledge this. I force myself to imagine a cozy house in the south of Aman and Annawendë in the arms of her betrothed whom I've never seen—or maybe, he is her husband by now—cuddling in front of a fire. Choosing names for their children perhaps. Her fingers linked with a hand that is not mine, nothing like mine, with stubby fingers and swarthy skin. But a hand she loves. Linking with hers. I feel a pang like a knife twisting in my gut, but I force myself to dwell on it until the pain goes away. And I stand to introduce myself to the girl.

But she is gone.

She is gone into the surging crowd.

With angry determination, I stride from the royal table and down to the crowd. I am pulled into a dance with a group of young people, but I duck free and continue to search for this small, unremarkable girl who'd watched me.

And she is there.

She is in front of me, looking up into my startled face, as I fumble, "I saw you—"

She takes my hand and bows neatly. Her fingers are gloved in silk and her touch as delicate. "You wish to ask me for a dance?" she asks in a clipped, exaggerated Tirion accent. She puts my fingers to her lips and kisses them, for her mask ends at her lips. I look for her eyes beneath her mask, seeing if they swim with drunkenness, but they are very sharp and clear, and they pierce me with the painless surprise of a stiletto.

"I do," I gasp, and I take her into my arms. The music is wild and fast, but we circle slowly. Her face is tilted to mine, staring at me. I wish I knew what she looked like beneath the mask: It is a mask of a face, the image of perfect female beauty, with high, arched brows and finely sculpted cheekbones. I wish I knew what face could do justice to those astute eyes that made me feel as though she could see beneath my clothes, beneath my flesh, as though she knew me more intimately than nearly anyone else.

"Who are you?" I ask as way of conversation, for I am painfully aroused, and I do not wish her to know it, lest she take offense. It is hard to tell the shape of her body for she is bound tightly in her costume, an exaggerated craftsman's garb, feminized and very sensual, taming her body into ideal female proportions, with a tunic that plunges at the front to show the cleft of her breasts.

"I am a Maia of Aulë," she says, and I say, "No, what is your name?" and she replies, in the same nonchalant, lilting tone, "I am a Maia of Aulë. That is all that you need to know, on this night." And with a smile, she reaches to touch my lips.

We dance to the edge of the crowd, and then we are in the shadows, kissing frantically, moaning into each other's mouths. I feel the briefest pang of guilt for Annawendë—so quickly forgotten!—but decide that it is a matter of survival: hold onto this girl with all of my power or thrash and drown needlessly. So I hold on—and she is kissing my neck, undoing my robes and moving her mouth down the length of my body while I slip my hands inside the neckline of her tunic to cup her breasts in both hands. I try not to think of Annawendë, of her full and lush body, of hips and breasts that seemed made for motherhood. This girl pushes me roughly against a tree, the rough bark scratching at my back through the delicate silk of my costume, and falls to her knees in front of me. My robes are open to the waist now, and she is kissing my navel, my belly, and I try to lift her mask from her face, but she slaps my hands away. "Leave it," she says, putting her hand between my legs and, in an instant, making me forget the mask, as she strokes my length through the silk, and I thrash my head and bite my lip until I taste blood, my arms rigid, hands clutching the tree behind me, as waves of sickening hot pleasure course through my body and threaten to erupt in release.

She removes her hand from me and puts both hands on my hips, and with an effortless tug, she slips my robes from my body and the warm night air caresses my naked skin.

She cups my testicles in her hand, kneading me until it almost hurts, and kisses the humid place where my legs join my body, slipping her tongue along my skin, teasing, until I can feel spasms of pleasure threatening release, and my hips thrust involuntarily. She laughs and looks up at me. "You are beautiful," she says. She slides her hands up my thighs, to my belly. She clutches my hips and pulls me into her, letting her lips brush the head of my erection, the tongue teasing, and then taking me fully into her mouth, until I can barely stand it.

"Let me touch you," I beg her. "Please, I cannot take this—"

She nibbles my length, speaking, "I do not want you to take it. You have suffered long enough, Maitimo."

She knows me ...

"Just release," she says, and puts her mouth on me again, and there is not much I can do after that to disobey her, to stop the spasms of ecstasy that force my back to arch away from the tree, fingers digging the bark and screaming wordlessly to the dark sky overhead, the stars cut by branches and reeling for the moment before I squeeze my eyes shut, wondering if I can endure this, wondering if it will ever end and hoping—hoping—that it won't.

But it does, and as I go limp, she lets me slide from her mouth, and she rests her head against my belly for a moment, her hair warm against my damp flesh, before pulling my trembling body to the ground beside her, to lay me on the ground and cradle me in her arms.

She kisses my mouth and closes my eyes with surprising tenderness. "Why?" I whisper into the lips that cover mine, burying my hands into her dark hair, and she replies, "Because I realized that I love you," and she removes the mask, and Annawendë holds me and kisses me until the morning comes and I have no more tears to cry.

~oOo~

I awaken in the depths of afternoon, in my bedroom in Grandfather Finwë's palace, with Annawendë in bed beside me, naked flesh pressing naked flesh. Still, though, we remain unwed. She let me lie between her legs last night, raising no protest—although, beneath my hand on her breast, I could feel her heart pounding—but I remained adamant against taking my father's path, and so we contented ourselves with the pleasure brought by hands and mouth, and I brought her to the palace in the morning and laid her beside me, in my bed, in the place of a wife.

She sleeps—her back to my belly—and my cheek pressing her hair. My bed smells of the rich, earthy scent of our damp skin. She stirs and turns in my arms, and we kiss. "Think of it, Maitimo," she says, entwining her fingers in my hair, "that this is the first of an eternity's worth of mornings that we will awaken together." She deepens the kiss, coaxing my lips to open; our tongues entwine. Despite the satiation of last night, I feel my arousal stirring against her thigh. She feels it too, and she laughs inside my mouth, and it makes a funny vibrating feeling that makes me laugh too. She strokes my cheek. I feel the softness of her skin, the roughness of her blacksmith's calluses, and the hardness of the silver ring that she allowed me to slip onto her trembling finger last night.

I did not ask about her betrothed; I did not ask how they reached the decision to separate. Perhaps, one day, we will discuss it, but not now. Now, I do not want to think that the light of my happiness casts another's life into shadow. While my tears of joy had nurtured the soil of the forest last night, another had cried tears in a land far away—but they were not borne of happiness.

In Arda Marred, it seems, joy must be balanced by an equal measure of despair.

I cannot bear to let such thoughts dampen my joy. Not today. There will be a time for gravity but not today. Today, it is the New Year, and Laurelin is reaching her zenith outside, spilling gold across my bed, across our tangled bodies. Today, hope has been realized.

Today, I will announce my betrothal to my family and reaffirm my allegiance to my grandfather: It is a day for honoring the past and celebrating the future.

Annawendë sighs in contentment and buries her fingers in my hair. I could lie here forever, I think, and—watching my silver betrothal ring rejoicing in Laurelin's light—I realize: I will.

Today, I am in love.

It is the first day of the New Year, and the afternoon light is as rich and thick as amber. Today, one by one, we will stand before Grandfather Finwë; we will swear our allegiance to him and all of the Noldor. Over the next month, one by one, all of the Noldor in Tirion will do the same, but we—his family—will be first.

I am sitting in my bed, waiting for someone to come and dress me for the ceremony, reading one of Grandfather's books that I found on the table in the corner. It is an illustrated book of stories of the Outer Lands, and I am reading one about how Rúmil drove away a host that threatened the Kings of the Eldar and did so with only his voice. I stare long at the illustration: Grandfather Finwë, with his raven hair, and King Ingwë, as golden and radiant as Laurelin, both armed with graceful swords and spotted with blood and ichor, facing a swarm of black beasts—bristling hair and gnashing teeth—and Rúmil behind them, kneeling in reverence, his face lit by starlight, holding in his hands only a harp. Sword and harp—I wonder if this story is true. Grandfather Finwë is wounded on an arm hanging uselessly at his side; King Ingwë defends him, although he is also bleeding. Harp and sword …

There is a knock on the door, and I close the book and look up expectantly, and Nelyo enters my bedroom. I feel myself start at the sight of him, for it is as though the bitter transformation of my beloved brother over the last year might have never happened, such is the light in his eyes. He comes to my bed and lifts me into an embrace. "Blessings to you in the New Year, little one, my love." He kisses me, and I melt into his arms. Nelyo, Nelyo, my Nelyo has returned …

Laughter rumbles in his chest, and he rubs brisk circles on my back. "I love you," I mewl, and he laughs again, "I am here, love. I have always been here."

When he goes to my armoire to remove my ceremonial robes, I see a silver star winking on his finger. He comes back, and I take his hand: He wears a simple, silver ring on the index finger of his right hand. I look up sharply at him: What is the meaning of this?

He sits on my bed and pulls me onto his lap. "I am giving you a sister," he says, "and one day," he whispers in my ear, "I will make you an uncle."

I hug him around the neck and reply, "I would like that."

~oOo~

Grandfather Finwë sits at the front of the room, and we assemble in the court, a long room with Grandfather Finwë's throne at the front. The statues and paintings that line the room are familiar: They are Amil's and Atar's, respectively, I realize. The room smells of incense and, beneath that, the cool scent of marble.

The texture of the joy has changed from the rabid frenzy of last night to something softer, cultured, like silk after fur. Even Atar takes Uncle Nolofinwë's hand in his; they exchange New Year blessings and their lips even twitch into smiles, for today, they will honor Grandfather Finwë, and that is the one thing that unites them.

Atar goes forward first, for he is the eldest son, and Grandfather Finwë rises to meet him and takes Atar's face into his hands. They kiss and speak quietly, hands clasped, too softly for anyone else to hear. Grandfather Finwë appears to speak with earnestness; Atar nods at whatever he says. They step apart and Atar kneels and takes Grandfather's hand in his. "I pledge fealty to you, my King, through the days of light and darkness of our realm. I give you my courage and my honor—and my love—in Body and Spirit, for as long as Arda endures." He kisses Grandfather's hand and presses it to his forehead, and Grandfather Finwë reaches down and twines his fingers in Atar's hair.

My half-uncles go next, and then Amil and my aunt. Aunt Anairë does not kneel but holds the newborn Turukáno in her arms, and when she is finished speaking, he reaches out and weakly grasps Grandfather Finwë's finger as though he, too, is swearing.

Aunt Eärwen is not present because, last night, just before the arrival of the New Year, she gave birth to a son. Uncle Arafinwë swears on behalf of the three of them.

Nelyo is next, then Macalaurë, and then it is my turn.

I wait for Macalaurë to return, and then Atar is nudging me in the direction of the dais. The room is very quiet, and I feel a sort of apprehension settling over me as I walk. Grandfather Finwë looks very imposing, upon the dais, in his formal robes. My footsteps shatter the silence of the hall; I concentrate on keeping my back very straight, like Nelyo did. I recognize the weight of what I swear even as I recognize, also, that it is more a tradition than an expectation. Still, this tradition derived in a time and a place where swearing to a king meant handing your life to him and hoping that he would keep it safe, but knowing that you could not lament if he did not, for your life was a price paid for the safety of the people.

When I was very young, and Atar taught me the words of the New Year pledge, I cried at first, thinking that I was going to be asked to immolate myself, commit myself to Grandmother Míriel's fate, for my grandfather. "No, no, little one," he said, laughing, holding me close. "One day, you will have the courage to consider this, but this is not something he would ask of you now."

As I take careful steps up the stairs, I wonder if this has been the year where I have found such courage.

I feel very different from last year, when I walked up these same stairs, holding my robes from my feet. Last year, my heart pounded very hard, my mouth felt as though swabbed with cotton. Now, I breathe easily; I return Grandfather Finwë's smile without thought. I am ready to swear.

I kneel before him. The room is silent, waiting for my words.

"I pledge fealty to you, my King ..."

When I rise again, Grandfather replies, "Thank you, little one, but I would not ask it."

I draw back to look into his blue eyes, so much like mine. "But I would give it," I say, and he embraces me.

~oOo~

There is a feast, after the ceremony.

"We are a well-fed people," Atar jokes, "for we cannot have a ceremony without following it with a nine-course feast." He is jovial today; I imagined Nelyo's betrothal as largely the cause of it, but he catches me in his arms as I pass and lavishes my face with kisses, making me giggle. "How have I been so blessed?"

While we wait for the table to be set for us, we mill about in the court, drinking white wine and exchanging New Year blessings. I am regaled by each of my half-uncles and mutter a dutiful reply. Nelyo lifts me and spins me around—Annawendë has joined us, and she laughs—and says, "New Year blessings to you, little one!"

"You have said such to me already," I remind him, and he says, "Then I tell you again. To be sure that you do not forget."

He puts me back on the ground. I am tall now and heavy, and I suppose that I should begin to grow accustomed to being held and carried less. Still, he holds my hand, and I lean against his hip.

"Maitimo?"

A small voice comes from behind us, and Nelyo turns. Findekáno is tugging his robes, wearing a tiny, nervous smile that fades when Nelyo acknowledges him. "New Year blessings, Maitimo."

Nelyo draws him around to the front and hugs us both, one at each hip. Findekáno is not so small now; he grew much over the summer, whereas I did not. The top of his head now reaches my nose, and his head no longer appears too large for his frail body. In fact, his body is not frail any longer at all; there is a certain wiry strength to him that reminds me of our fathers. "New Year blessings to you too, little one," says Nelyo, with an arm around each of us, leaving us facing each other, with Nelyo between us.

Findekáno regards me cautiously. I feel something move against my hand and look down to see that it is his fingers, that he is taking my hand carefully in his in an ancient gesture of allegiance.

Nelyo is speaking to Annawendë in a voice as light as a rainfall upon the surface of the sea, but he holds us both to him. I rejoice in his laughter, though I am not the source.

I let my hand close on Findekáno's and squeeze his fingers in mine. I smile as I say, "New Year blessings, Findekáno," and joy lights his face in return.

The End