The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

Chapter One 
Finrod

My counselors were chattering an indecipherable jumble of words and Orodreth was hovering warily at my elbow and I was trying not to limp, an attempt that took enough energy that the words and overwrought concern both went largely unnoticed, like flies pinging off a thick hide. Although the battle was several moons past now, the wound remained unhealed over the tender skin where my leg joined my body. The Orcs, the healers explained, used weapons smeared with offal, which was enough to poison and kill a mortal and slow the healing of even the strongest of the Eldar. And—brought low by the constant ache of grief that shadowed my every thought and deed—I was no longer among the strongest of the Eldar.

"—the sons of Fëanor—"

"—their Oath—"

"—several thousand refugees with—"

I had reached the table with the lamp on it. Fifteen paces, I knew, remained before the door to my audience chamber. When I was alone, I paused here and leaned against the table and rested my leg, but I would not do that now, not in front of my counselors, who would wonder at my weakness, nor Orodreth, who would worry over it. Fifteen paces. The hallway had not been long before the Dagor Bragollach. It was interminable now.

I felt Orodreth's palm bump my elbow, or maybe my elbow bumped his palm.

"It may not be advisable to—"

We had reached the door. I turned to my counselors: three pairs of silvery Noldorin eyes framed by dark Noldorin hair. "They are my kin, my cousins, once nearer to my own lost brothers than I ever was blessed to be," I said. "They bring with them innocents, seeking harbor in Nargothrond. I will not turn them away." I let Orodreth sweep open the door and with wide steps, each of which sent an arrow of agony into my wound, I crossed quickly to my seat at the front of the room. Orodreth stood beside me. My counselors with their dark Noldorin heads and their darker advice, melted into the chairs that lined the side of the room.

Celegorm and Curufin waited at the far end. Celegorm was turned, perhaps pretending to admire a tapestry on the wall behind him. The lamplight shone on his golden hair with the same drowsy warmth as a ray of sunlight through a jar of honey. He was not the tallest of his brothers but was the most powerfully built, strong in the shoulders like Tulkas or Oromë; even standing, he seemed a coiled spring, loaded with energy held in check only with great effort. Orodreth said something—announced me, I suppose—and Celegorm half-turned, golden hair still partly curtaining his face.

It was Curufin who stepped forward, small, dark Curufin whom I'd initially forgotten against his brother's brightness the way a shadow is lost beneath the sun. He was facing the door, awaiting my arrival, and stepped forward as soon as I was announced. He knelt before me and bowed his head. "Cousin. We thank you for seeing us now, at our arrival, though in the middle of the night, when you are yourself unwell."

So news of my condition has reached them already …

I paused only long enough to ensure that my voice would not sound weary but worthy of these high-arched stone halls. "Lord Curufin, I would hear what you know of the war, and the lands to the east." Beside me, Orodreth squirmed a little at my formality. There was a deep history between my brother and my two cousins, and I—with my tepid tone and proper forms of address—was the interloper, the one who brought the weight of other uncomfortable histories into the room with a manner of address that belied that we'd once been children together in Valinor.

Curufin rose and spoke very properly and well, telling me largely what I already knew: The Pass of Aglon had been forced and Himlad overrun. They came south by way of Doriath. There he paused. "We received word of Dorthonion, Cousin," he said, "and even descried the smoke to the north but—"

Celegorm had remained unmoving at the back of the room. As Curufin spoke, my eyes drifted to him; I still had not seen his face, only his glorious golden hair, tumbled over his shoulder, that earned him his epithet the fair and simultaneously set him apart in his family. Now he turned and a few strides brought him to me, to his knees before me with none of his brother's solemnity. No, even though given a form overlarge for the Eldar, it seemed the body of my cousin Celegorm could never contain the emotions that rose from within him. He trembled as he grasped my foot with a hand burning hot. "Finrod, forgive us."

He lifted his eyes to me then. Blue. I had nearly forgotten that: another detail that set him apart in his illustrious family. The stranger, I'd heard him called once, scornfully, in Tirion, by a rival lord to his father. "Do we know where Turkafinwë Tyelkormo was begotten? In Valmar, perhaps?" Those blue eyes brimmed with tears. "We were weakened, wounded. With as many refugees as we could find between Himlad and Doriath."

Curufin, sensing where his brother's outpouring was going, tried to wrest the conversation back to diffidence. "We have always remembered Angrod and Aegnor as nearly brothers—"

"They were as brothers to us, Finrod, and had we taken even the few strong that remained, had we ridden north instead of coming, perhaps we could have saved them." Two fat tears dripped onto the floor. Curufin shifted on his feet and released a nearly inaudible sigh.

In my own grief for my brothers, I had allowed something to grow hard between my thoughts and my pain and that of others, alike to a callus that forms between tender flesh and the unyielding steel that torments it. Throughout my life, I had welcomed my perception of the emotions—sometimes even the thoughts—of others. A gift from my grandfather Finwë, it ran strong in my father's line. I remembered my father sitting next to me upon my bed, my face between his hands: "It is a gift, Finrod. You are meant to use it for the good." And I had, truly I had, but in the weeks following the Dagor Bragollach, I could not bear the pain of others upon the already open, weeping sore of my own grief. My brothers! Gone! I let the callus grow.

But Celegorm's pain pressed mine, as sharp as the touch of a cauterizing brand against a raw wound. A memory not my own came unbidden to me: Angrod and Aegnor opposite me, ducked low behind a fountain beneath a cherry tree where Curufin sat droning awkwardly to Terentaulë, the maiden he admired with the apple-green eyes, then a furtive arm reaching to wrap the tree's trunk and pull it into a sudden shake that sent overripe cherries raining down upon the lovers … shouts of surprise … Terentaulë batting shattered cherries from her hair … crouching lower, the three of us pressed against the ground and each other … sneezing laughter from behind hands pressed tight over mouths …

I had no such memories of Angrod and Aegnor, who regarded me with goggle-eyed admiration, as the younger brothers of one heaped with too much and unearned regard from family and Valar alike, but Celegorm—

I slipped to the floor. I saw Orodreth lunge to catch me, but my arms were wrapping Celegorm by then, who wept softly into my shirt. I felt something beginning to heal in my leg tear open anew, felt the soft, seeping pain of new blood. But try as I might to turn my thoughts to that physical hurt, it was smothered and made insensate by our twin griefs and guilts raging against each other. I let him in. For did he not give word to my own unspoken shame? That I, too, had failed them? Time twisted in a knot. I knew not how much passed before he drew away, head bowed now with shame, grief cooled to embers, his face sticky with tears and snot. I grasped his shoulders as though to keep him from flying away from me. "You are welcome here. Nargothrond shall be your home for as long as you wish it to be." My skin prickled, and I knew that, with those words, some fate that had been following us all on silent feet slipped soundlessly and clicked into place. Celegorm's fevered forehead dropped against mine.

~oOo~

I'd gone to my uncle's house once outside of Tirion, when I was just come of age, bearing a message from my father, and met my cousin Celegorm on the walk, tearing blindly down the path and panting with sobs that he, with great effort, withheld, a feat I knew he would not manage for much longer. He was still young himself, not even seventy yet. His shoulder knocked clumsily into mine as he ran past, and his thoughts bludgeoned my mind so that I saw the fight with his father that had provoked this wild flight, the hour-long exchange of words grown increasingly heated balled up into a single moment of undistilled emotion. I reeled with it, both the physical and emotional contact. I stared long down the path after him.

A week later, he came to Tirion, wearing blue and beautiful, having put himself together, I sensed, for our meeting with care that belied his supposed lack of his parents' artistry. "What you saw, it was not what you think—" He did not bother to ask what I thought before proclaiming it wrong, but no mind; I nodded and said nothing.

Celegorm was older than me, yet I pitied him. In a family built lithe and wire-strong, there he sat, like a boulder beside a meandering stream. Under Oromë's tutelage, he grew into his body eventually, but it was an awkward, too-long process, made doubly conspicuous by his unusual golden hair and blue eyes. The stranger. I had to push away thoughts of his strangeness. Emotion ran high among the Fëanorians, but they channeled it into their various arts and so won renown for it, but Celegorm seemed to lack any such skill, and his excess emotion—his anger, his passion, his sorrow—ran over for all to see.

Two days after the arrival of his and Curufin's host, he came to see me in my study. Bathed and in fresh clothes, his face refreshed by sleep and his hair brushed to gleaming gold, it was hard to associate him with the man who'd sobbed in my arms just two nights ago. "My behavior the other night," he said, "was untoward."

Untoward was one of Curufin's words. I remember Orodreth used to keep a page in his diary of "Curufin's words" that he and his brothers used when mocking their cousin, who had been simultaneously in their inner-circle and their favorite target for amusement, until his own power grew to where they dared not oppose him.

"I was exhausted by the battle and then the long journey. I do not remember when last I slept before coming here. I of course grieve for your brothers but … I hope you can forgive me. My words and actions were inappropriate."

Inappropriate had been on the list as well, if I recalled correctly.

I wanted to tell him that the glimpse of my lost brothers through his memories had done more to heal my grief than meditating upon and trying to overcome their loss during the entire month prior. I'd loved them but with the distant, patient love of a brother full-grown when they'd been born, who'd been set before them as a role model but never a companion. But to see them loved by one given the choice of all in Tirion for companions and who'd chosen them, and to understand them as worthy of a love great enough to inspire him, sundered from them for hundreds of years, to weep with their loss—I was grateful to Celegorm, in truth. I slept upon his memory of them, young and still innocent, in Valinor. But I could not tell him that. So I said merely, "There is nothing to forgive," and he nodded and left my presence.

Chapter Two 
Celegorm

Nargothrond was beautiful, but I could not bring myself to be wholly content there, and in truth, at times I felt suffocated. I remembered our first winter in Formenos and the blizzards that had made leaving the house impossible for long days on end, the thrumming agitation that ran the lengths of my limbs and begged release, the walls too tight and the furniture overlarge, the seeming omnipresence of people and voices—

Nargothrond was more insidious, for Finrod and his people had nearly perfected the illusion that we did not live underground at all but in a forest glade, a starlit meadow, or along the sea coast, the journeys of days or weeks between them replaced by high arched doorways. The halls were towering and vast; the stone carved and painted to impersonate the wild green life of Arda so convincingly that I pressed my hand once to a tree trunk, reaching out with my senses and recoiling emotionally and bodily at the cold lifelessness they met. My hand I kept curled upon itself for the rest of the day, feeling as though it might never grow warm again (it did, eventually), and I began to feel, if not confined, then unsettled in Nargothrond.

For it was impossible and sounded foolish to claim to want wide-open spaces; Nargothrond was nothing if not a wide-open space, albeit underground. It was life I wanted—green life—not the strange molds and coldly luminescent glowworms that Finrod and his people used for stunning effect in their underground halls.

Our people, I knew, felt differently. It had been a long march from Himlad under open skies and along dark-clotted treelines that both seemed to conceal unseen threats. Now one's eyes could sweep a room in a matter of moments and know a tree, if not for a tree, then at least a harmless painted stone, and know that the stars overhead marked a limit and would not darken with wings that would bring more blood and grief. Our people were given quarters in Nargothrond but it was not unusual to see even grown Elves asleep beside an underground brook or under a stone tree, having come forth to make an attempt at the new life we'd been promised only to be overwhelmed anew by the long moons of unrelenting exhaustion and grief, and gratitude at the ability to sleep at last.

I'd myself succumbed to our long weariness on the night of our arrival. Curufin said nothing, although I knew he'd been displeased—our family did not need further accusations of betrayal of kin, and my suggestion that some of us might have gone north and at least made an attempt in Dorthonion edged perilously close to such a suggestion—but at breakfast the next morning, he ate quickly and rose from the table without much conversation because, "I do not want to hold you back from your conversation with our cousin Finrod."

Nonetheless, I dawdled that day and part of the next. Like his halls, Finrod unsettled me, as though the gentleness and empathy for which he was known was akin to his stone trees: a mere soft, pleasing covering for something built to harbor and endure.

~oOo~

In Valinor, it was always Curufin and me with Orodreth, Angrod, and Aegnor. I was the oldest by enough that our friendship would not have been natural or even expected in childhood, but once we became adults, it fell so easily into place that we might have all been of age and always companions: the middling children of a large and illustrious family, like saplings that twist to free ourselves from the shadow of the trees grown tall around us.

My two older brothers had arrowed so easily into notable adulthoods that it seemed that, by the time I came of age, all energy for such had been exhausted on them. I had no appreciable talents that could be directed into something productive, having long been released by my father from forgework and my tutors reassigned to more promising students in the city. My parents, I think, were less disappointed than nonplussed by this, lack of direction having never been a failing to which our House was prone (quite the opposite, in fact), and gladly poured their pride into my older brothers' accomplishments and left me alone for the most part to "find myself" in the pathless forests beyond Valinor.

I never knew I was lonely until my cousins came of age and I fell in with them. We busied ourselves with the kinds of pursuits expected of the feckless: gathering a compendium of inside jokes, pursuing women we had no intentions of marrying, lying beneath trees and alongside fountains and making fun of our family and others of royal Tirion, experimenting with excessive quantities of inferior wine. At first, Curufin was far too diligent and uptight to obtain membership in our circle based on virtue, but lacking anywhere else to go—Caranthir was a resolute loner and the others either too illustrious or too young—and because it caused my parents a satisfying amount of anxiety to watch their most promising child forsake his books for late nights in the city, we accepted him among us until it was impossible to imagine our circle without his artful machinations and the aura of licitness his considerable and ever-growing accomplishments gave us.

(For it was hard to worry over our late nights and undisclosed pursuits when he began to rival Maedhros in scholarship and was whispered as a fitting intellectual and aesthetic heir to our peerless father.)

But Finrod always sat utterly apart from us. My elder brothers and Fingon still treated us with fraternal affection when we saw them—and they were liberal with the wine and delighted in exchanging rumors and stories about women—and Caranthir threw us the occasional bit of information when his inscrutable reason dictated it was to his benefit to do so. Turgon was a satisfying target of our japes and was dramatically angry with us on at least a weekly basis, and Aredhel was our one reliable source of information on young women (and we likewise instructed her about young men). The twins and Galadriel were too young, children still, to be seen with anything more than a vaguely protective tenderness.

Finrod was different. Auspices were pronounced when he was born, by the Valar and those of our people who were foresighted; I remember that—the only one of our circle old enough to do so—and told the others in hushed voices, as a sort of consolation to Orodreth, who had failed to make the impressive showing of other second-born sons in our family. Orodreth was tender-hearted in a vague way that never even manifested as the genial manipulativeness of his father; it was Orodreth who kept our gambols from verging into cruelty. One couldn't help but to be defensive of Orodreth as of any tender thing not fully formed, and so we resented Finrod on his behalf for casting too long a shadow for Orodreth ever realize the greatness that had withered in darkness. Finrod, Curufin explained to us the year that he was studying the mythic tradition of our people, was a potent symbol: In him was the most complete mingling of the bloods of the three Eldarin lines. "Everyone," he concluded simply, "looks up to him as a result."

Except us. We were careful not to. And this was easily accomplished and not derailed by Finrod's considerable likeability because his very auspiciousness ensured that he was filled with every culturally relevant Eldarin skill: learning sculpture from my mother and lore from my brother and music in Alqualondë and governance from our grandfather and even serving as a page in Nienna's halls for a few years. We barely saw him much less knew him, and the likeness of him we constructed was perhaps even less accurate than his aggrandizement by the rest of our people.

When asked what he was like, his brothers would shrug; he was much older than them, betrothed at a young age to Amarië of the Vanyar, and without time for frivolities, so there simply wasn't much common ground upon which to build a relationship with him. When he visited my uncle's home, though, the tendency of all present to glom to him left us largely unattended and with considerable resulting freedom.

I remember such a night, even now, beside a subterranean river behind which a clever trick of light and glass gives the impression of a sunrise over the sea. Finrod and the adults (even though we were adults ourselves by then, we were unable to class ourselves with our parents and our grandparents or even my older brothers and Fingon) sat in a parlor with small jewel-bright glasses of wine, hearing his news from Taniquetil. "One swig! Not even a good one!" Aegnor hissed about their measures of wine, and Curufin added in a whisper, "Ugh, Atar, I am ashamed," because even though our father had filled his glass to brimming, the glass was still too small to possess any dignity.

We slipped from the room, then the house, and into the heavy, warm night, where we could speak in our normal voices. "I know for certain it's true!" Angrod was saying against Aegnor's protestations that there were no such things as "houses of love" permitted in Valinor. Angrod was the most athletic of us and a seeming sieve for the rumors that volleyed across the courts and fields where he spent his days.

"How do you know?" Aegnor challenged. "Have you been?" There was a dangerous note to his voice. Angrod had lately been firming up a relationship with a maiden too noble for our usual sorts of conquests.

"No. But I know someone who has."

The houses of love were something that every young Noldo in Tirion eventually came to hear of and wonder about. The side of Túna that lay directly opposite the Trees and, therefore, in shadow had never been built upon except for a narrow strip on the northwest side. The Calarnómë it was called, but I described it to Curufin and my cousins—having heard of it myself from Maedhros and Fingon and finally having someone younger than me to likewise initiate into knowledge of its existence—as "a place where things happen." Things? They wondered at so vague a word. "Native things. Avarin things." For some of those who would have remained behind in the Outer Lands followed loved ones to Valinor, and we understood them as essentially different from us in custom and appetite. They built in the shadow, for example, to approximate living beneath the stars in the Outer Lands, and in that place—and conveniently out of direct line of sight from Ezellohar, I added—they reverted to their native ways, and the Valar mostly turned a blind eye to it.

The houses of love were one such thing. "They marry," I explained, "but they are not—" I snapped my fingers as I sought the word.

"Monogamous," Curufin provided.

"Yes, I suppose. They take other partners outside of their primary commitment to their spouses. So the houses of love are where they go when they want someone other than their spouse. They get together there and then everyone goes home to their families." I felt myself blush a little atget together.

"They fuck there," said Aegnor, who liked to be shocking.

"Yes. Or … other things." None of us had direct experience yet in what those "other things" might be, but we had certainly heard of things—my older brothers could be particularly instructive after several glasses of wine—and dreamt of still more things in the silver hours of night that we imagined, in our youth, to have invented. "Getting together" we understood to be strictly off-limits until marriage—indeed, by some accounts, it was what annealed the bond between fëar—but the other things leading up to that point were permitted (and just as enjoyable, according to my brothers) and mostly harmless, aside from their damage to one's reputation and near-certainty of trouble with parents if discovered. None of us had figured out how to proceed from the fumbling kisses we enjoyed with girls to these "other things," though, which kept them solidly in the realm of speculation and fantasy.

We stood outside in the warm night that night and thought about the houses of love. "We should go then," Aegnor said, "and see. And if you're wrong," he said to Angrod, "we'll come up with some suitably awful punishment for you."

A nightingale trilled and bugs were rasping in the silvery-dark. We all looked from one to the other, waiting and half-wishing for someone to raise a good objection to going to the Calarnómë. No one said anything and I was on the verge of being bold as the eldest and starting down the road when a wedge of warm light from the house and the sound of voices indicated that the party was beginning to break up. So we didn't go to the houses of love, at least not that night.

Chapter Three 
Finrod

I was beginning to heal; I was beginning to open myself to the minds of others again.

I would sometimes wake in the mornings and perceive Nargothrond in its entirety, an act much like listening outside a crowded room. While a word here and there might be teased out from the general melee—just like the occasional image or emotion might surface from the churn of thoughts I perceived in Nargothrond—the overall effect was not dependent on these, and they slipped quickly from my memory. I had stood outside of ballrooms and counsel rooms, and the sound of the voices within had been vastly different. Likewise, Nargothrond felt different than, say, Mithrim or the crowd that gathered in Tirion on the night of the Darkening; it felt predominantly of joy, at peace, and most importantly, safe.

There was an almost somnolent undertone to it, like the long and restful sleep that precedes a productive day working at some stubborn and beautiful art, and upon that gray-hued drowse danced the inspirations of the poets and the artisans of Nargothrond: They were as peals of laughter or shouts of delight heard from outside a party, and they invited and enlivened and enticed. In the gray hours of morning, they drew me abruptly awake with a song in my heart.

I realized sometimes that the perception of mornings in Nargothrond, more than perhaps anything, showed how relatively untouched by the Dagor Bragollach we'd been. Yes, there was guilt in that. My brothers had lost their lives, Orodreth his home, and my people chiseled flowering vines and penned love songs to one another. It wasn't that they'd forgotten those of our people who had died, and it wasn't that they ignored them; such pain had not yet touched here, even though I'd marched forth with a contingent from Nargothrond, and many had been lost. But wasn't our safety here the very purpose of our labors? Wasn't it why Ulmo had spoken to me, alone of the Noldor, in a dream, while my kinsmen built villages and strongholds to become targets on Morgoth's map?

I raised such questions with Orodreth, who came to spend several hours each day with me. Mostly, we read and didn't say much; Orodreth had never been talkative and had been often dismissed by those who misunderstood his tendency to stare long at a fixed point upon the floor or wall as his being dull-witted. Behind his slow-blinking eyes, though, I knew that thoughts roiled and turned upon themselves, even moving without himself as only our sister could do. Orodreth had inherited our father's sensitivity without his savvy for turning that empathy into productive—albeit ultimately futile—action. He felt things in the same way that a raw wound will smart from the slightest breath of air across its surface and seemed unable to armor himself against letting that hurt define his existence.

He thought long on my professed guilt while I sketched ideas for carving a new room we'd recently discovered with a hot spring at its center. My leg was finally healed enough for the long hours of standing and climbing that would be involved, and I was eager to get started in order to show my people—and myself—that I was finally healed. "I don't think you should feel guilty for preserving a place innocent of pain, Finrod," Orodreth said finally. "The Valar tell us that this was Eru's intention, to live as we do now. You are doing blessed work. When Morgoth is defeated, our people will emerge having preserved what they could of Valinor."

"But wasn't that part of why Valinor failed, for trying to hold against a marring set in the stuff of Arda itself? When does innocence become naïveté?"

I liked to torment Orodreth with such questions. Speaking them and allowing him to debate them seemingly freed me from the obligation to do the same. I swapped my soft lead pencil for a firmer one and began to sketch in the details on my plan. Of all of us, I believed, Orodreth missed Valinor the most. In those first panicked days after the Darkening, Angrod and Aegnor had cleaved to our cousins Celegorm and Curufin, but Orodreth, oddly, had not followed. He'd stayed at our father's side, softly urging deliberation rather than rash action. On the march north, after our father turned back, Orodreth once disappeared for a few hours. I'd thought nothing of it and ordered no search; I was more surprised when he reappeared some hours later. I'd been certain he'd followed our father back.

"We are not naïve, Finrod," he said after several long minutes. "I will not believe that refusing to adjust our circumstances to invite the effects of Morgoth's marring—to invite fear and pain—is the same as naïveté." And so I was freed again to work by my brother, whom I knew when I'd asked always pardoned the ways of Valinor. I set my heart against thinking too hard about the repercussions of that. I concentrated harder on an intricate design that I was planning for the archway over the door. I became lost in my work, and when I next looked up, my brother was gone.

I walked later along an avenue, my limp nearly gone, taking the long route to the room I hoped to begin carving tomorrow. My plans were rolled and carried at my side, but my mind dove deep into the minds and feelings of Nargothrond. The tone, I realized, had changed after the Dagor Bragollach. I reached an open square, sat on the edge of a fountain, and opened my mind to Nargothrond. There was contentment, yes, but now also relief, the cool, rushing emotion that belonged to those who had known pain and fear and appreciated better than anyone else here the reprieve from them: my cousins' people, I realized. A giddy thought came with the realization: They make Nargothrond that much more beautiful.

I drifted long upon that feeling of relief that way that one might float upon his back on a slow-moving river, warmed by the sun above and tempered by the water beneath. Nargothrond is coming into a new perfection.

An image surfaced then upon my thoughts: a discontentment, a pressing claustrophobia from stone unseen but perceived heavy above, thoughts taking refuge in tall grass … a jumble of indecipherable memories flavored with elation and ecstasy and pain … a pendant upon a leather thong, slipped around a throat …

And, that quickly, I was returned.

I was returned to the square, to the fountain: My people were busy around me, paying me no mind, talking and laughing and trading wares; a painter was working furiously to capture the scene; two small children were weaving amid the legs and screaming with laughter. Someone here is unhappy, I realized, but no, that wasn't quite it: Someone here was happy enough with Nargothrond yet needed more than Nargothrond could give.

~oOo~

As a young artisan, I had wished to please everyone with my work. My Aunt Nerdanel and I planned long for the first showing of my sculpture. We found a gallery in a prominent location and with ideal light; we arranged my work and rearranged it again and again until it was perfect. We set up lamps and lanterns where the lighting was deficient to show off all of my sculptures' best qualities. Then we opened the door and waited.

As was traditional at student exhibitions, there were small cards by the door for comments. The illustriousness of the sculptors and artisans who came through that first day made my stomach turn queasily. They moved among my work, their faces inscrutable, their emotionless eyes scanning slowly down the lengths of my statues until I felt as exposed as though I myself stood naked before them. Here, I was not a prince but like any other student or apprentice and open for critique that might verge on denouncement; certainly, students to precede me had endured this. Aunt Nerdanel greeted each visitor as he or she entered and introduced me. They clasped my hand and smiled tepidly, their eyes ever roving around the room. By the end of the day, the little box of cards was already half-depleted.

Aunt Nerdanel and I sat among my sculptures that night after we closed the doors. On the floor between us, she put the basket where the cards were left after being written upon. She reached across and rubbed my arm in a way that was meant to be comforting, gave me the first real smile I'd seen from anyone all day, and began unfolding the cards.

She read each first, then handed it to me. The cards in her lap began to pile up as I savored the praise written upon each, reading it three and four times. They like my work. They like me. The praise began to melt together into a drone like a perfect chord sustained by a choir, yet I wished for the basket of cards to never end. I unfolded another, and another. The drone grew louder. I unfolded another—

The technique is excellent, as I would expect of a student of Nerdanel. There is impressive detail and awareness of composition. The vision is mediocre.

The last word was like a punch to the gut. I coughed to cover my surprise.

When the basket was empty, Aunt Nerdanel squeezed my hand and asked, "Happy?" and I nodded, and I even smiled—convincingly, I think—but my thoughts were thundering, mediocre, mediocre, mediocre.

Such a terrible word to be, I realized! To be awful was to imply at least having taken enough of a chance to provoke strong emotion. Aunt Nerdanel's work, I knew, had once been deplored by those who, as it turned out, hadn't understood it; now they praised her as a visionary and imitations of her style dotted the streets and parlors of the city. To be mediocre was to walk on safe, seamless ground, never courting so much as a pebble in the shoe much less disaster close to the edge; it was to have a voice but nothing worth saying with it.

I lay awake that night. I had frittered away many hours of work and study, I realized, perfecting technique for no reason. That technique would never advance a vision that mattered. It would perhaps fall back into its proper place making fruit bowls and lamp stands—objects of use where technique and composition were appreciated but not essential—but as far as making the kind of art that caused one's heart to lurch and mind to twist upon itself and eyes to close only to open slowly to see the world anew, I lacked the vision that huddled at the core of any great work of art. Even the rough creations brought to Valinor from the Outer Lands possessed a vision and, therefore, their own savage beauty. They lacked technique, one might say—or, more likely, adequate materials—but were valued more than mine for their vision.

I completed the show because it was expected of me and would have embarrassed my parents had I done otherwise—and they came through on the fifth day and wrote glowing remarks in their recognizable handwriting, each on a separate card—but all of the comments suddenly gravitated upon those two words: mediocre vision. If a card praised at length the lines of my seabird sculpture, I read that I had technique and knowledge of composition enough to create a recognizable seabird, but the commenter was reduced to praising this because my purpose in making the sculpture was inscrutable; the commenter certainly hadn't felt the bird's gratitude for the easy freedom it found upon Manwë's winds. And so it went. Even the kindest words were but covers for my mediocre vision.

The final day of the show was the most crowded, as all of the masters who had not yet come through were forced for an hour out of their workshops to pay due respect to a prince of the Noldor and student of the great Nerdanel—for that is how I'd come to think of myself, not as worthy of their attention in my own right, as an artisan. The basket was crammed full of cards. Nerdanel left the door open an hour later that night, until Telperion's light was only a thin silver sheen to the south of us. By the time the latch snapped into place, I was already hauling out the canvas covers from the room at the back of the gallery and matching each with the sculpture it was meant to cover.

Aunt Nerdanel laughed at me, assuming me industrious: a fair assumption for a Noldo. "Finrod, we still have three days to move out! Come! Sit and let's look at your last basket of cards."

I busied myself with pressing flat a piece of canvas that would only wrinkle again when I wrapped the sculpture with it. "Aunt Nerdanel, I have given it a lot of thought. And maybe I shouldn't continue as your student."

I warded my thoughts against hers and yet I felt it: a stabbing disappointment that I didn't quite know how to interpret. "You have decided to go with a different teacher?" she asked at last, and I realized then that she thought that fault was with her, and I wondered how she hadn't likewise perceived the awful flaw in my work.

"No! It is not that … Aunt Nerdanel, there is no better teacher, but … you are wasting your time with me. I don't need to look at today's comments to know that I have no real purpose here."

Her silence was long and astounded. At last she said, "But you have received only praise, Finrod. You are the fourth student I've seen through an introductory show, and I've never seen so many comments, and all praise. How could you interpret this as anything but an urging by the best sculptors among our people to continue?"

"But it hasn't been all praise!" I was exhausted, I realized, and sounded like a petulant child. My chin even trembled as I turned to fuss more with the canvas covers rather than turn to face her and allow her to witness the shame of my distress. The Noldor valued stoicism when receiving critiques; if any emotion was permitted, it was anger; many a sharp comment had set off an argument that came to be followed and discussed throughout the city as one might a novel or a play, as something possessing plot twists and conflict.

"Did someone say something to you, Finrod?" she asked in a low voice. She was, I realized, becoming defensive on my behalf, assuming that someone had spoken to me out of turn, a significant breach of etiquette. Teachers would fight for the respectful treatment of their students in such instances; the disrespect of the student was assumed likewise directed at the teacher. Her reaction on my behalf, though, only made me feel worse.

"No. No, nothing like that. Aunt Nerdanel … it was on one of the cards."

"I don't remember that, Finrod."

"It said—" The way those two words—mediocre vision—had been ricocheting in my head for the past two weeks, one would have assumed it relatively easy to coax them onto my tongue and into actuality. But I had to swallow hard, and my voice broke on, "I have mediocre vision."

Nerdanel was a mother; she had kissed the slight hurts and nursed the twinged hearts of her five sons. But her tone to me that day was forthright, without coddling: "You are a student and not yet of age. You should be grateful to be seen as having a vision at all, even a mediocre one." She folded her legs and sat upon the floor with the basket in front of her. "Now let's review these cards."

So mediocre vision had been changed in my mind from an insult to praise—however tepid I still believed it to be—but now I worried that I'd angered my aunt and teacher. It took packing up the exhibition and several lessons before I realized that her opinion of me was unchanged.

Grandfather's murder, the Darkening, Alqualondë, the exile, the Ice, the deaths of Angrod and Aegnor—so much loss and pain, and still I was stung by overhearing someone remark offhand that they would have preferred more beeches in the Thambas Yrn. And this—to fathom someone finding Nargothrond inadequate—devastated me. My stomach churned. I wondered who it was.

I was no longer in the mood to work on the new room, and my hands had clenched on my plans so that I crumpled the parchment. The voices in the square collided and melded into a din. Stung, I didn't dare plumb their emotions again. I rose quickly from the edge of the fountain and hurried back the way I'd come, back to my apartment. On my way, I passed my cousin Celegorm, sitting beneath a stone tree with the leaves carved so delicate and thin that the very light of the green lamps strung amid its branches gave it almost a lifelike glow. I steeled myself to feign a joyful greeting and possibly conversation, but he appeared to be distracted by something, and I don't even think he saw me.

Chapter Four 
Celegorm

I awoke one night from a nightmare. About my cousins. Dying.

We were in Valinor. We were sitting in our favored place along the edge of a fountain, our legs stretched long against the stones: Orodreth, Angrod, Aegnor, Curufin, and me. Our conversation was as inconsequential as ever: Like so much we'd done in Valinor, it seemed expendable now in a land that had fought always against death. In my dream, our mouths moved but no sound came out. Then Caranthir walked by, who we called—not Caranthir the dark as was becoming customary even then—Caranthir the magical, and we called to him in our silent voices, and he came.

(This is not part of the dream, for did truly call him Caranthir the magical, always waving our fingers as we said it like storybook wizards. My brother was profoundly strange, and although we'd tried to welcome him into our group—he was better than anyone at ferreting out secrets about our kinsmen and we coveted that—his profound lack of interest in our overtures signaled that he was barely cognizant of our presence, a rejection that stung worse than would have an actual rebuke. So to lessen the hurt of that we mocked him, and to conceal our legitimate unease at his strangeness, we named him Caranthir the magical and made light of what none of us could understand.)

Caranthir the magical paid attention to us in my dream the way he had not in life. Tell us a secret! we begged. Tell us our futures! Caranthir closed his eyes and hummed and all the moths of the city began to flap in his direction and pelt against him. He swayed. He chanted in no language I'd heard but that made me stop my ears with my hands and cringe. Candles and lanterns flickered down to the barest embers.

(Caranthir did not have these powers in life, but in my dream, they didn't seem caricatures but made my guts writhe coldly.)

When he opened his eyes, they were not gray but solid pools of black.

He swung out a pointed finger that grazed my chest and Orodreth's and Curufin's and landed on Angrod. "You," he said. "Will die with a sword in your belly." His finger swung to Aegnor beside him. "You. Will die with your throat cut, cut shallow, to bleed slowly."

And in my dream, I occupied Caranthir's mind for the barest moment, and I saw these things as though they were happening: My cousins bleeding slowly into the fountain in Valinor, their faces twisted with pain and fear, their fëar pulling slowly and agonizingly from their bodies and the light going from their faces with the same oozing slowness as when the Trees went dark.

I woke with a scream upon my lips.

I knew nothing of how my cousins had died, only that they had, information that came by way of a messenger on the road: no premonition, no intuition, just bald words delivered in a voice ragged with exhaustion and fear. Angrod and Aegnor, most of their people, gone … I hadn't thought of them in years because I hadn't allowed myself to think of them, to miss them and regret what had fallen between us. After their deaths, grief would at times surface almost violently, as it had the night of our arrival in Nargothrond, but it was easily subdued again by the weight of centuries and the forgetfulness imposed by distance and, most importantly, the profound responsibility of delivering our people safely to Nargothrond.

Neither was the case now: My responsibilities were eased, and here, in the halls of their eldest brother—he whom they'd admired above all others save their mother and our grandfather—the distance didn't feel so long either, in time or place, to them I'd once have named brothers of my heart.

I rose from bed and walked to the window. The apartment Curufin and I had been given was several stories up in a high-ceiling chamber that served as one of Nargothrond's many communal squares, and we overlooked a waterfall and Finrod's endless carved trees. Finrod's arts gave the ceiling the illusion of stars at the proper hour, and their presence now told me that it was still night. I paced out onto the balcony. The high ceiling felt lower than it had upon my retiring to bed; the air felt thick enough to choke on. I wanted to scream but couldn't rid myself of the image of my voice lost not amid the numberless stars of an open sky but throwing itself upon the stone walls of Nargothrond, seeking escape and thwarted, screaming anew with each wall it encountered, until the echo of my terror had reached the furthest avenues and deepest recesses of my cousin's vast realm, and all lay awakened by it, their hearts that they had allowed to slumber in peace and safety touched by the cold finger of my fear, pattering quickly now and roused to some forgotten emotion.

I returned to my room where it was easier to forget where I was. I tried and tried to forget.

"We really need to schedule a supper with Finrod," Curufin said at breakfast the next morning. My sleep after the nightmare had been long in coming and then fitful, and I was tired and slightly nauseous at the site of the oaten porridge that the cook prepared every morning for breakfast. My brother set down his spoon and looked at me sharply. "Celegorm, are you listening?"

"I am. Sorry, Curufin. I didn't sleep well last night."

"It should take more than one night of ruined sleep to affect you," he retorted coldly and went right on to say, "We need to establish an advantage here."

My brother was the one capable of political machination. He once described to me that he thought of the Noldorin people as some vast organism, and he was something zipping through its blood and touching as many places as he could. "I am a smith, a loremaster, a councilor, and the closest we have left to Fëanor. The Noldor need me like a body needs oxygen, and so I get to touch everywhere and know a bit of everything." Nargothrond, to this point, had been beyond my brother's reach, Finrod still occupying the elevated position into which we'd placed him in our youth to where no approach to him in his secret realm seemed natural enough to be convincing. He didn't need smiths, loremasters, or councilors; his popularity in Valinor had ensured a significant supply of all; likewise, the local Elves had flocked to him as they had no other lord out of the west.

"I suppose," I said, and realizing that such an answer would not suit—indeed, would provoke—my brother, added quickly, "I mean that I agree wholly."

Curufin was already reaching for a parchment, ink pot, and quill, spooning porridge into his mouth with one hand and writing with the other. "I will send him a message now. Don't go far today. We might be meeting him for supper tonight. I'm going to suggest it."

In truth, I never wandered far. I remembered the look of penned animals, the aimless circling and dead eyes. At least, if I sat beside a "river" or beneath a "tree," I could believe I looked meditative.

"I'll stay close by." Curufin shoved the parchment at me to add my signature. He'd left a space above his own name, preserving the illusion that the elder brother led the household. Despite being written in haste with the other hand feeding himself, the calligraphy was impeccable. I added my name slowly and still felt I ruined it.

"Good." He set it aside to dry before sending it off with a messenger and leaned on his elbows on the table. "Now. What do we know of him?"

I knew my brother well enough to translate that to, What will be useful for worming into his heart?

I laughed. "You would know everything I did!"

"But of all our kinsmen, we always had the least on Finrod."

"Because his brothers didn't want to pursue much on him and we respected that." Curufin shrugged. "He's not perfect, Curufin! Not truly. He's flawed as much as we are."

"Is he? Then what do you know of his flaws?"

Silence. After a half-minute, Curufin stood and rolled his parchment. I heard the door to our apartment open and shut, and he returned a few minutes later, empty-handed. "So? Did you think of anything?"

I shook my head.

"Then that's his flaw. Our cousin is truly perfect."

~oOo~

But there was one thing. Only I'd never truly understood what I'd seen.

In Valinor, my cousins, my brother, and I kept a book that we called the Parma Ettirniva. It was kept in some aborted bookbinding project of mine from the time immediately after my father realized my uselessness in the forge and set about having me instructed in a string of practical crafts to find where my talents lay. (Nowhere, was the eventual conclusion.) I'd done the stitching wrong and used too much glue, so it was stiff to open, but there was no worry of the pages falling out, and it wasn't the beautiful sort of thing that people were inclined to open to discover what wonders it concealed; it was homely even for a ledgerbook, and no one wanted to look in that. We could leave it out in open sight, and the worst that happened was that prettier books were stacked upon it.

In it, we wrote secret things that we'd discovered about our relatives and other important figures in the city. Each person had a page (some people—like our Uncle Fingolfin—had more than one), and Curufin would record the secrets in his small, precise handwriting on the correct page. Every week, each of us had to bring a new secret; this was the dues we paid to the group. In our minds, we imagined a time when the secrets contained in the book might be enough to lever us out of our profound mediocrity; when fear or shame of a secret being revealed might make someone important see us in a new light, as capable of cunning at the least, and inclined to extend to us an undeserved opportunity.

We always started with the youngest. Aegnor said, "Atar and Amil fucked in the courtyard the other night. He leaned her over the fountain and went wild." While Curufin scratched the date and the incident onto our uncle's page, the rest of us sat and silently thought about that.

Angrod's turn. "Uncle Fingolfin has a nest of baby rabbits in his front garden, and he takes them lettuces and talks to them early every morning."

This provoked snickers. Fingolfin had the fewest children of our grandfather's sons, yet all three carried themselves with an aura of greatness, as though he'd poured more energy into each while our fathers doled it out thinly in order to produce large broods of mostly nondescript offspring. Since none of Fingolfin's children deigned to keep company with us, he and our Aunt Anairë were frequent targets of our spying and had several pages each in the book.

Orodreth said, "The healer told my parents not to have any more children."

That one was rather sad, so we mulled it appropriately, except for Curufin who said, as he wrote, "My parents were told that after Celegorm and certainly after the little magical one, and yet here I am." He finished writing, turned to Maglor's page, and spoke as he wrote, "Maglor and Vingarië had a spectacular row about how she finds it annoying that he blows on his soup. They both cried and stormed off at the end. And no makeup sex, at least that night—I listened. He slept in Maedhros's room."

We laughed uproariously at this one. My brother Maglor was the only one of our generation so far to marry, and watching him fumble through it made a strong case against the institution. "We should go back to how it was at Cuiviénen," Aegnor said, predictably, "when we could just fuck whoever we wanted." Aegnor looked for every excuse he could find to say the word fuck.

"I'm going to wait a good long time, I think," said Orodreth, "before getting married."

"Not me," said Curufin, finishing his entry with a flourish. "As soon as I find a girl who's willing, I'm going to marry her and get a son on her right away." There was a general cry of horror. "It's worth it for the regular access to sex," he explained.

"Curufinwë, truly," said Aegnor, "with his mind ever on—"

I cut him off before he could say fucking again. "But there's plenty to do with a girl that satisfies … that."

"Yes, but it's so much plotting," said Curufin. "So if you want her to put her mouth on you." Our minds went as one to consider the prospect, I'm sure, except for Curufin, who spoke as he might about fixing a belt buckle. "First you have to find a time and a place to be alone, which we all know is not easy in families as big as ours. Then you have to make the plans with her. And the plans can't just be, go to the place you picked, at the time you picked, off with the trousers, on with the action, because she's not going to just do that. You have to structure all around that, plan nice things to do, so she feels romantic when the time comes. You have to make a lot of effort leading up to it. Then you have to think of what arguments or worries she might have and find answers to them before she leaves you, literally, with your trousers down and not knowing how to answer if she thinks it will bond you or looks weird or—"

"Looks weird?!" That was Orodreth, who was pie-eyed by this point.

"Well, yeah, girls and boys are different there, so maybe she'd think it looked weird, if she'd never seen it before. Girls are so much tidier."

(Curufin was the most experienced of all of us. Every season, we confessed a secret of our own to the book in order to assure each other's loyalty. He who betrayed the group would quickly find his secrets having made the rounds of the city. Curufin had told us quite willingly the last time that he'd been naked with Terentaulë exactly once, but it had only involved hands and they'd only undone each other's clothes but hadn't taken them all the way off. But it was obviously enough of a formative experience that, ever since, he'd been obsessed with doing it again.)

"Celegorm, it's your turn."

I'd rather forgotten about the sharing of secrets. "Oh. Well. Fëanor—my father—takes books to read into the water closet with him."

"Everyone knows that, Celegorm," my brother said. His stare was very direct, and he didn't begin writing.

"They're storybooks, though, mostly mythology from the Outer Lands."

Curufin sighed. "Also not really a secret." But he began writing.

"I didn't know that," Orodreth said quietly to me. No one else said anything until Curufin's quill stopped scratching and Aegnor asked if Terentaulë had thought that Curufin's looked weird.

"It was dark," he said. "We were behind the house in Telperion's hours. I don't even know if she saw it."

That evening, I sat in the parlor, pretending to read and watching Telperion grow brighter to the south. I was terrible at the spy game, and that was becoming increasingly obvious. I was too big to sneak around: If I tried to duck behind something, I inevitably knocked something loud to the ground; if I tried to listen at a door, the floor creaked when I stepped on it. And I was restless, so even if I could find a place to fold my long legs and cram my broad shoulders to wait for something interesting and worth spying on to happen, within a few minutes, my limbs were practically twitching with the effort of suppressing my energy, and I was unfolding myself to stretch or rolling my shoulders and clunking into something. So I watched closely the ordinary actions of people for something I might winnow out that might be considered secretive. But Curufin was right. Everyone knew that our father took storybooks into the water closet with him because he came into our rooms to borrow them and then left them so that, if we wanted to read them, we'd have to go to the water closet to find them in the tottering pile beside the privy. Curufin was losing his patience with me, I knew. The others were too polite to say anything, but we all knew I wasn't upholding my part of the bargain. I wondered if they'd kick me out of the group.

I steepled my knees and buried my face in them. Hot tears seeped out from behind my eyelids and made twin wet spots on the knees of my trousers. I heard myself mewl a little. My friendship with them started right around the time that my father had begun to abandon any idea of my having a practical and appropriately Noldorin career. Maedhros served in our grandfather's court, Maglor had ascended to regard as one of the best musicians among the Noldor, Caranthir did a full day's work in the forge every day on utilitarian projects beneath my father's skill, and Curufin was already distinguishing himself in multiple crafts and branches of lore. I went to my father's table each day and ate more than my fair share of food and took up more than my fair share of space and then idled in the house until I couldn't take the confinement anymore and saddled a horse and rode into the forest. That was it. Every day. I'd come back and see Caranthir with wearied shoulders and soot-dark skin and Curufin darting around him with some new treasure in his hands and Maedhros maybe returning from the city and Maglor maybe heading into it for an evening performance, and I'd feel utterly useless. I'd longed for the day when I wouldn't disappoint my father, but when that day came, I felt empty, wrung-out, for it wasn't that I'd done something to please him but, rather, I'd gone so long without pleasing him that he'd lost all expectation that one day I might. He stopped looking at me at breakfast as though hoping I might take a cue from my brothers and at least hammer out some plowshares or go make nice to some lord in Tirion. He passed me the eggs without looking up from the treatise he was reading and said, "Don't take out Calimarocco today; he's lame from a stone in his shoe."

In a family like mine, to be mediocre was itself notable. I first recognized that my cousins shared my strange and cruel fate in the face of Orodreth. Their family was visiting ours outside the city, and the conversation was of course dominated by praise of Finrod, who was then serving Nienna and so not present. Aunt Eärwen—perhaps recognizing that the son who was in attendance was picking at his chard with his eyes fixed on the tablecloth—made some announcement of an accomplishment of Orodreth's where the excitement in her voice was far overblown for what such a meager achievement required. Orodreth's forehead clenched briefly before he went back to his food. He was more mortified by the attention than he'd been by the silence. I imagined my own entrance into my father's list of my brother's spectacular accomplishments: "And Celegorm brought home five partridges for our table." Leisure twisted into something triumphant. Thankfully, neither my father nor my mother were inclined to such deceptions, and what I did with my time simply went unmentioned.

My friendship with my cousins formed not long after. And now it was going to end. I wondered what there would be in my life once it did. The solitude of the forest? My heart rebelled at the thought of keeping company again only with horses, but if that was to be my fate, then I would have to face it, and bravely. I squeezed my eyes shut to wring out the last of the tears and wiped my eyes and nose on my trousers and lifted my head to face whatever came next in my life.

And Caranthir was standing in the doorway.

I hadn't heard him approach, but that was not unusual; Caranthir could walk in complete silence, almost invisible like a shadow against the dark. I had no idea how long he'd been standing there. I hoped he hadn't heard me mewl. His face was devoid of any emotion or judgment; he was neither delighted nor dismayed to find me weeping into my knees in the parlor, my book dropped and discarded on the floor. He simply marked it as he marked many things that slipped beneath the awareness of all others. He had worked that day—he worked every day that our father went to the forge and many than he did not—and was fresh from the bath, his hair damp and his skin smelling of soap. He wore a plain dark blue tunic, black trousers, and black boots—no jewelry, no embroidery, no braids in his hair even—and yet looked stunning, neither willowy like our older brothers nor overlarge like me but a picture of perfection, akin to the paintings of our grandfather striding through the wilds in the Outer Lands, elegant in his simplicity.

"I need something from you," he said.

"What—" My voice began as a croak, so I gulped and settled for just nodding.

"Atar and Amil will be home soon. They will expect me for supper and—" he waved his fingers dismissively, so close to the gesture we made when naming him Caranthir the magical that it would have been hilarious had my heart not been breaking—"whatever family things they cook up for after. Some new song, probably, with Maglor here. I need you to tell them that I rode to the neighbors for a book, and I'm going to eat over there and probably stay the night."

I was beginning to realize in those days that my brother had a significant social life entirely apart from our family. He didn't think, in his boundless eccentricity, to share it much less brag on it—indeed, as I saw now, he seemed to prefer to hide it—and I had no idea where he went, who he saw, or what he did when he left the house for long spells in the evening, sometimes staying overnight, only that he always bathed before he went and put on his good black boots rather than the battered ones he wore in the forge and everywhere else our mother would permit them. I wondered briefly if a girl was involved, but the idea was so absurd that I abandoned it just as quickly. Maybe there was a society of similar miscreants who spent their days banging out plain metal objects in a forge and making people uneasy by sneaking around and speaking their thoughts. I tucked away that thought for my next outing with my brother and cousins. The League of Magical Miscreants, I titled it, and thought that good, for me. And his social life might even serve as a suitable secret for the Parma Ettirniva—

A secret. An idea struck me then, and I scooched upright on the couch, into what I hoped was a more dignified position, and put my feet back on the floor.

Although I'd said nothing, Caranthir lifted an eyebrow.

"I will cover for you," I said, hoping my voice didn't sound too watery from crying, "if you do something for me too."

"What."

"I want to know a secret. One of your secrets. A good one."

How Caranthir knew what he knew was beyond my comprehension. I'd once wished fervently for a hound puppy for my begetting day, telling no one. The day before, Caranthir strode up to me and said, "You're not getting it. Cry now so you won't tomorrow," and then strode away again. I received a history book and a golden torque but no hound puppy. I hadn't cried, not then anyway.

He stood for a while, unmoving. Whether he thought on my offer or about what secret to give me, I do not know. At last, he spoke.

"You and your companions wonder about the Calarnómë." (I don't know how he knew that either.) "Go there, to the street beneath the marble arch, on the days that the Festival Council meets at the palace. Finarfin is on that council, and Eärwen eats with Fingolfin's family on those nights. Go there and watch for Finrod. Follow him." He dipped his chin at me. "Until tomorrow, good night."

When our family assembled later for a late supper, my father glanced down the length of the table, at all of us, his sons. One place stood empty. "Did someone call Caranthir?"

"Oh." I swallowed the food I was chewing. "He told me to tell you. He went to the neighbors for a book. He got a late start, so he'll eat there and probably just stay the night."

My father simply nodded and then said something about the wine, and that quickly, Caranthir's absence was forgotten.

I thought on Curufin's elaborate theories on achieving opportunities for intimacy with girls. I wondered what Caranthir knew about that. I wondered what he was doing, right now, in his simple tunic and good boots, most decidedly not at our neighbors, with a whole night before him for which he did not have to account.

And I wondered about the secret.

The Council of Festivals didn't meet again for almost a fortnight. I wanted to tell my brother and my cousins about my conversation with Caranthir, but I dreaded disappointing them if his instructions amounted to nothing. (His sneaking out for a full night, though, more than satisfied my required secret for the next meeting and even drew speculative comment from Curufin. None of us could imagine him meeting a girl but couldn't imagine why else a young man would stay out all night.) Knowing my brother, he'd sent me to this supposed "Calarnómë"—which, so far as I knew, didn't even really exist—so that he could laugh at my naïveté. Only my brother wasn't wont to laugh.

I hadn't the faintest idea where I was going, only that my cousins had reported that this place, if it did in fact exist, was on the shadowed northwestern side of the city. I went to the lowest road, that which circled the base of the hill just inside the low wall placed there more for ornamentation and the practical purpose of deciding who owed taxes to the city than the protection that city walls would too soon come to afford. The craftsmen with the noisier and smellier workshops tended to set up down here, where there were fewer neighbors to disturb with clanging hammers and acrid, billowing smoke. At this hour, early in the evening, most of the workshops were closed, canvas curtains pulled down over their open fronts in case of rain. A few tired-looking apprentices pumped bellows and slowly swung hammers at steel cooling to orange, then gray, then black, likely finishing orders for a pickup the next day. I felt the ache in my right arm that I'd gladly thought I'd forgotten and hurried on.

Soon, even the workshops grew sparse, replaced by low stone houses made of an ugly, rough stone. The shadows were deep here. These, I suspected, were the homes of those who would have preferred to have stayed in the Outer Lands, never knowing the fullness of Light from the Trees but only the meager light of the stars. A young woman sat on the steps in front of one of them, weaving a basket made of dried fronds while a child scratched in the dirt at her feet. She called a greeting to me in an accent musical and unlike my own; I lifted my hand in return. Cooking smells were coming out of the houses, I realized: meat and bread. Small gardens in front of each grew the wild plants that I knew one could eat of in the forest; civilization, though, had taught us better plants, tastier and more nutritious, to eat, yet I saw none of those here. Hung over each doorway was a lantern: a simple wooden cage with a single Fëanorian lamp suspended at its center, the one concession to the accomplishments that life in Valinor had allowed us.

I'm here, I realized. The Calarnómë.

The street hooked then around the side of the hill. It was dark here in a way I'd only known as an artificial construction: hiding in a closet or behind a drawn shade to see what it was like, darkness. It was the way of things here. The street bifurcated and then turned off from there, and I saw that the city here climbed the hillside as it did on the south side of Túna, only instead of broad and gently sloped avenues, the higher tiers here were accessed by narrow paths and steep stairs, even ladders in some places. And each building was marked by a single lantern over the door.

I couldn't quite discern the purpose of the buildings here. Some were clearly homes but many more might have been shops or taverns; it was hard to tell in the dark and, although the Noldor like a neat sign in front of every structure, identifying its purpose and its owner, there were no signs here. Elves leaned on doorways and called to passersby in the streets, who called back in a language not quite our own. The streets were full of mulling people, some who drank from tall clay mugs, others who crouched in little circles of conversation, others who danced to the beat of the music that was coming from one of the buildings on the top tier. I saw the drummer leaning over the edge of the path, his legs dangling in the air. The drum he played was the same pitch as my heartbeat in my ears, and I had to press my hand to my chest, convinced that my heart was matching the drum's rapid, pounding beat; it was.

I almost had to sit down, but then I saw it: the stone arch Caranthir had told me about, leading back into a small alley formed between two outcroppings of rock. The buildings there, I saw, had been carved into the rock itself. The lanterns were even more plenteous there—gracing windows and doorways both—and the dark crevice blazed with light.

There was a tavern across from the arch that was packed with Elves standing elbow-to-elbow and holding those clay mugs. I sank into the crowd as best as possible for one of my size and with my not-exactly-inconspicuous golden hair. I had no idea what they were drinking and so said, "One, please," to the barkeep and hoped there weren't choices beyond that. I was relieved to have a mug delivered into my hands, filled to the point of foaming over with a strong ale that tasted familiar when I sipped it. It took me a moment to realize that my father had this ale at home sometimes.

I positioned myself where I could see the arch between the heads of the people in front of me but was, I hoped, mostly concealed by the crowd. I realized where I was and what I was doing then, and my heart soared in my chest: I was in the Calarnómë, and I would have one great story to bring back to Curufin and my cousins. Depending on who or what I saw here, I might even stretch this evening to cover multiple weeks' obligation. Between glimpses at the alley descending beneath the stone arch, I looked around myself, trying to memorize every detail of the place until I could tell them about it. This should secure my place in the group for a while yet. I was the oldest in the group and, now, with this intrepid act, I was behaving like it.

I was so consumed by looking around and congratulating myself on discovering this (they didn't need to know anything more about Caranthir, I decided) that I almost missed Finrod. I thought he might be wearing a cloak or some sort of disguise, if indeed this was a worthy secret, but he came openly but quickly, moving with a purposeful briskness. I had just enough time to empty my mug and shove it back onto the bar before his golden head disappeared beneath the stone arch and into the dark alley beyond. I jostled my way out of the tavern and across the street to the arch. The alley was close but crowded, and I was sure that I'd lost him but then spotted his golden hair as he eased sideways through a crowd gathered around a woman telling a loud and—judging from the volume of laughter in her audience—very funny story. I went to the edges of that crowd and realized that I could see Finrod making his way down the street. I waited and watched.

A form unfolded itself from the shadows, and lantern light revealed it to be a young man of delicate frame and fair face with pale brown hair. He wore the roughspun clothes of these people but for the ornament at his throat, some kind of necklace, I thought. I stared down into the alley, allowing my eyes to adjust to the dark. No, not a necklace but a strip of leather, fastened with a buckle like a belt at his throat. The leather was elaborately tooled with an elegant design.

My cousin stopped in front of him, and then the strange thing happened: The young man sank to his knees on the ground. He appeared to be fumbling at my cousin's shoes. I leaned closer and saw Finrod extend his hand to touch all five fingertips to the crown of the young man's head. A king and his subject, I thought, but that made no sense: My cousin was far from ever being a king, and no one knelt for princes.

My cousin looped his finger through the collar at the young man's neck, and the young man scrambled to his feet. He hurried forward to open a door, bowing as my cousin passed inside, and then followed him. The door shut.

The woman's story was over, and the crowd was dispersing. I followed closely behind two couples who strode, laughing and weaving, into the alley. The house into which Finrod had gone was nondescript. Lamps blazed in every window, making it impossible to see inside.

~oOo~

I don't know why I said nothing. And I say nothing of it to Curufin now.

When next I met with my brother and cousins by the fountain, I said something about Maedhros leaving our grandfather's hall to fart loudly, earning me another displeased look from Curufin that I didn't see because, in my mind, I kept replaying the odd scene I'd witnessed between my cousin and the young man with the collar, as I had all week. I didn't know what to make of it. Maybe, if I said something, my brother or cousins could explain it.

Yet the secret felt dangerous, like a bit of knowledge wrapped in ordinary words and printed in bland black ink on a page that, if translated into some kind of action, would provoke an unquenchable conflagration.

So I said nothing.

Chapter Five 
Finrod

Celegorm handed me a bottle of wine at the door so exceedingly rare that I was almost loathe to take it lest I be the one who drops and breaks it. It must have come in someone's satchel from Himlad and, before that, made a long journey from the warm lands south of the Ered Luin; who knows what favor he—or more likely Curufin—promised to wrest it from the hands of the one who'd valued it enough to carry it halfway across Beleriand. "This is too rich a wine for what I fear is a simple supper!" I protested as both of my cousins embraced me. With the wine cradled in my arms, I could not return the gesture.

"It is not in honor of the supper but in honor of you," said Celegorm in that disarmingly sincere way of his. I had grown so accustomed to sycophancy that the open emotion in his big blue eyes made my face warm with the compliment in a way that it hadn't in a very long time. Celegorm always reminded me of the hounds he kept: incapable of artfulness but able to display a startling range of emotions, all of them seemingly extreme, like the dog who tore the throat out of a beast one moment and then curled across your feet and licked your hand the next.

A smile slid across Curufin's face. "We have been remiss in not coming sooner. It is the least we can do."

My cousins' message this morning had surprised me. I'd assumed their distance to be the understandable result of the long years of estrangement between our houses; indeed, the last time I'd been with both of my cousins together, prior to their arrival here, had been the disastrous council where Caranthir and Angrod might have slain each other but for Angrod's precarious temperance and Maedhros's ability to rein in even Caranthir. Most had heard only an argument about rights to speak for the Noldor; I heard the thunderous thoughts exchanged between the two of them, inflamed by Caranthir's many long years as my brothers' favorite victim—they'd been able but unwilling to understand the cause of Caranthir's eccentricity—and the profundity of the harm they'd done him the time they'd provoked a romance with an unusual young lady that resulted in a wholly unacceptable betrothal that took some time to end. Celegorm and Curufin might have intuited the reason for Caranthir's otherwise irrational outburst and the establishment of open animosity between our houses; before that, there had been the matter of the ships and the slaying of my mother's people. So yes, deep and profound were the reasons why my cousins might be loathe to approach me in friendship.

But they were here now, pulling out chairs around the cozy, round dining table where I usually took my meals with Orodreth—Orodreth, who wasn't yet ready to face his cousins and so was dining alone with his daughter tonight—while I sent the wine with a waiter to be opened. Despite my claims of a simple meal, I'd had my cook prepare the best possible on such short notice, and as the wine was being poured, the first course was being delivered upon covered silver platters. This was an important allegiance, and I perceived it as still fragile. My cousins' people swelled the population of Nargothrond significantly but, more importantly, enriched it. Many of the finest Noldorin craftsmen had, of course, gone with Curufin to Himlad—to say nothing of Curufin himself and his son, whose presence alone consolidated a technological advantage onto Nargothrond, even without their followers—and as I'd perceived that day in the square, my cousins' people had a certain worldliness that mine lacked that, I hoped, would result in prudent counsel and allow Nargothrond to remain hidden and safe. Provided they remained in Nargothrond, of course.

I'd worried that I might lack topics of conversation suitable for the supper table, but Curufin handled that neatly by praising the work he'd seen being done in my forges. Anything being done there—and I wasn't even fully sure what was—was surely pedestrian compared to what Curufin and Celebrimbor had been doing in Himlad prior to the Dagor Bragollach, but Curufin had always been the most diplomatic of Fëanor's sons, except perhaps Maedhros. I laughed and confessed that I knew little of the progress in my own forges so that Curufin could delight in telling me about it, and I could touch my mind to his and perceive the truth behind his polished words. But Curufin's mind was fast-whirling like the wheels of a machine, as it had ever been, and even in touching it, I felt imperiled, like if I turned wrong, a piece of me would become snagged and torn and left behind. He wanted this allegiance too; I saw that much before I fled for safety, as I had done from many of the more dangerous Noldorin arts in which my cousin excelled.

Celegorm listened in silent earnestness, eating his food in steady bites and watching Curufin's face with a well-honed mask of feigned interest.The stranger: I remembered the cruel rumors of Celegorm's begetting and what I'd perceived of my uncle's well-hidden but persistent displeasure in his third-born son. Celegorm was not Noldorin in appearance, skill, or bearing. If we trusted in the tales told to children about babies being brought from Eru by the Great Eagles, then Celegorm had been dropped not only upon the wrong people but on the wrong side of the sea; he should be aiming arrows and singing paeans to trees south of the Hithaeglir.

He reached for his glass of wine, letting his gaze stray from his brother's face, and he caught my eye then and found me watching him. His thoughts pressed mine: His secret … I never told Curufin … I never understood …

I shut my mind to his unguarded thoughts. "Rings?" I asked Curufin.

He waved his hand dismissively. "You'd have to ask my son. I've always put my energy—and my faith—into the might of swords and left the jewelry for wooing women."

The meal passed with surprising speed and ease. My cousins, I realized, were remarkably easy to talk to. A friendship with my brothers that I'd always assumed—and disdainfully, I must confess—to have coalesced around a shared penchant for mischief verging on cruelty began to make a different sort of sense to me. Ices were being brought out already in cups of rough-chiseled quartz; I was speaking with excitement of my new room, and Curufin was eager to see the plans. The wine bottle stood empty.

"Let's finish these first," I said, "lest I insult my cook, for ice is hard to come by at this time of year." I gestured to the head waiter to hold the dessert course, and we ate the ices in haste and rose from the table before the cups were even cleared.

In my study, I cleared a place on my desk to unroll the plans. I felt Curufin crowded to one side of me and Celegorm to the other. Celegorm was surely feigning interest, but he asked the right questions, although he was quickly drowned out and subdued into silence by Curufin's stream of questions and critiques. "This column? Here? But it impedes the view from the terrace."

"The survey of the room found the ceiling weak there." I scrambled through papers to find the survey to show Curufin. His fingers plotted places upon the survey and the plan, his eyes darting between the two as he pondered. "Here!" he said at last. "Here. It will offer enough support here, and the view will be opened up a good bit."

I saw what he was saying, "Yes! Yes, you are precisely right." My fingers itched to take up a pencil and make the correction now. "Will you stop by the site tomorrow and—"

"Yes."

I laughed. "That column! That column kept me awake nights, and I was convinced there was no better solution, and in thirty seconds, you solved it. Curufin, I am grateful."

I hadn't felt so joyful since the Dagor Bragollach. The wine, the happiness, the elation of a mathematical problem thought unsolvable suddenly solved—I felt my guard slip away. Curufin's whirling wheels were still there, gnawing on numbers now and seemingly far less perilous to my unguarded sentiments. I marveled at the perfect and delicate machinery of his mind the way one might the gossamer and brutally efficient wings of a locust. My curiosity and my joy were so profound in that moment that when the feeling of claustrophobia crushed suddenly against me, I almost physically staggered.

There was a feeling of the stone ceiling descending upon us … a memory of diving to hide in tall grass … a pendant around a throat, pulsing there … a leather thong severed with a snap …

These were the memories I'd perceived that day in the square. Someone is unhappy in Nargothrond, I'd thought, but I'd been wrong. No, someone was being utterly crushed by Nargothrond.

He was dropped not only upon the wrong people but on the wrong side of the sea.

The stranger.

Celegorm.

Curufin was still speaking, now on the depth of the stairs leading to the terrace, which he felt should be deeper to give more the impression of a slowly ascending hillside. I heard myself responding even as I darted a glance in Celegorm's direction. He was watching us with the same painted expression of mild interest as earlier, his gaze affixed on his brother's face. The pendant snapped from around his neck … I imagined myself reaching out and catching it. It was made of wood. It was still warm from the touch of his body.

His eyes jerked to mine.

For a moment, he couldn't hide the pain that churned there with the same fury as an animal that finds itself in a trap and will chew through its own leg to achieve freedom. But he marshaled control with a speed that astounded me—but of course, he had not survived so long as a son of Fëanor by being emotionally vulnerable—and I found myself back in the room with the roughish texture of the parchment beneath my fingers and Curufin's voice prattling close to my ear and utterly sober. And Celegorm was wearing the same expression of mild interest as before and even brushed the drawing with his fingers and said, "I like this here, the way the leaves fall, like it's a real tree."

~oOo~

Like his father had always done, Curufin began working in the first light of the morning. The blush of false dawn had first warmed the pale stones of Nargothrond when I saw Curufin hasten into the street with Celebrimbor fast upon his heels, listening intently to whatever wisdom his father was animatedly imparting. They didn't see me moving slowly up the street, coming from the opposite direction of the forges, as they turned and hastened away from me.

I waited for them to disappear around the corner before picking up my own pace and proceeding to Celegorm and Curufin's apartment. It was only the night prior that I had descended these stairs, in the early hours of the morning, after finishing several bottles of wine and accepting many of Curufin's suggested changes to my plans. My thoughts twitched and squirmed with the restlessness of an artisan constrained from his work, but there was something I was compelled to do before going to work on the new room; something that I felt was more important, even, than adorning the world with new beauty arisen from my hands.

It was too early yet for the servants of Celegorm and Curufin to have arrived, so I was long waiting on the threshold after knocking before Celegorm opened the door. His face was unguarded by the early hour and his likely expectation that he was admitting the servant early rather than his cousin and king: Weariness drew tight the skin beneath his eyes, and he was rubbing his face as though to waken himself. His hair was unbraided and uncombed. My heart leaped at the touch of a desire I hadn't allowed myself to feel for many centuries, goaded by the allure of seeing someone of his beauty in an unguarded, intimate moment. I focused my gaze at a harmless point on his forehead and allowed myself to feel in my upright posture and immaculate dress again stately and decorous, a king and not a man.

He blinked at me for a few long seconds before alertness snapped into his face. "Finrod!" One hand went to his body and found himself still in his nightshirt while the other bunched back his hair from his face as though that would coax it into a more dignified restraint. Just as quickly, it rebelled and tumbled back over his shoulders. "I was not expecting you. Let me—" He inclined in the direction of his bedroom and proper dress, Noldorin dignity.

"Of course you weren't. And I apologize for the lack of conventionality. I wanted to speak to you away from your brother."

That rooted his feet to the spot. "Why?" The surprise and mistrust was plain in his eyes. In the Noldorin court, Celegorm's lack of artfulness had provoked smug speculations about his lack of intelligence. Such an accusation seemed suddenly bitterly unfair to me: I had, after all, surprised him in his nightclothes, in the dim hours of the morning.

"I will wait for you to be ready, Celegorm. I did not mean to surprise you unpleasantly."

He was not long in his bedroom, but Celegorm had never been one for ostentation. He wore a cream-colored tunic over brown trousers; his hair he left unbound. "You didn't," he said, as he poured us each a glass of cider.

"Didn't what?"

"Unpleasantly surprise me." He kept his back to me as he spoke. "I simply assumed you'd wish to speak to my brother before me." My brother is of use; I am not.

"I am not here to ask anything of you."

He was very careful of handing my glass to me. He had filled it to brimming. Then why are you here?

I concentrated on accepting the glass without spilling it so as to shut his thoughts out of my mind.

We sipped our cider in silence for a moment before I spoke. "I know that you are not wholly content here, Celegorm," I said at last. Actually, I knew that he was not content at all, but such forthrightness seemed inadvisable. Our relationship, I knew, was still precarious.

His blue eyes flashed to mine. "You are wrong, cousin," he said quickly. "I am very grateful to be here."

"I didn't say grateful, Celegorm. I said content." I sipped my cider while his mouth opened and shut as he sought for an appropriate response and found none aside from a slightly desperate, "You are wrong, Finrod."

"It is not an accusation, Celegorm. As long as I can remember, you have wandered freely in the forest. Why would I believe you to be content, shut beneath the earth in halls of stone? I am grateful for you and your brother and for the people you have brought. You have enriched—you areenriching—my kingdom." I thought how best to diplomatically present my next words and decided to, like Celegorm, have away with the artfulness. "I don't want you to leave," I said. "I want you to be content here, and for our people to coexist and keep a place of beauty and peace yet in Beleriand."

His wide blue eyes, I realized, made him look much younger than he was. Younger than me, certainly, with an almost innocence about him. I could not imagine a sword in his hand, bringing death upon my mother's people, nor could I imagine him firelit and swearing a heretic's oath, although I had seen him in the latter aspect. "I cannot change my nature, Finrod." He swallowed and said in a low voice, "I am an—"

initiate of Oromë

"—a hunter. The forest is my home." He took a quick, deep swig of his cider. "Yet how dare I complain? How many have lost their homes? Your brothers … they lost their lives. As I said—" he gazed into his glass—"I am grateful to be here."

"Celegorm, I would like you to lead one of the patrols of Nargothrond. They range out into the surrounding lands. They keep our borders safe. They hunt and bring what they can back to the city."

"I—" He threw a look over his shoulder in the direction of Curufin's bedroom door. "I accept."

I did not expect it to be so easy, and I fear that my face betrayed my surprise minutely. He saw it, and distrust narrowed his eyes again. My thoughts flashed again to the disastrous council where, prior to their arrival here, I'd last seen Celegorm and Curufin together and the slow amounting of small offenses that had perhaps sundered our houses with more finality than even what transpired in the first months after the Darkening. Grievous mistakes made under the duress of Melkor's crime could be forgiven, I realized, but the long years of torment Celegorm, Curufin, and my brothers had subjected Caranthir to under the guise of innocent and youthful jests could be dismissed as anything but an enduring taste for cruelty and the complicity of the rest of us—including myself—as the poorest of judgment. Caranthir's reaction at that council had been understandable. I knew that. Celegorm knew it too, and perhaps worst, knew that I knew it. He had been proven degenerate at a time of purported innocence when such things were believed impossible. Not all of the burdens we carried here upon our souls were of Melkor's making.

"You thought you would come here and make your offer, and I'd turn you down, like a proper Noldo." Celegorm spoke with such haste that his words were barely decipherable. "Didn't you? But then you could content yourself in knowing that you'd done what you could, and hold yourself blameless for my depravity, come what may."

"I don't think you depraved, Celegorm."

"The oath will call someday."

"I know it will."

This startled him. "And yet you'd have us here."

"I would. And I'd have you on my border guard, if you still wish to accept. I was surprised that you accepted so easily. That is all. Nothing more."

"I am tired," he said, and I could see that he was. I forced myself to watch his hands, gripping each other in his lap, so that, in his unguardedness, I did not see again the beautiful blue-eyed boy from Valinor, the stranger. "I am tired of pretending. I pretended for many years to satisfy my father, and yet I never did. My brother would now have certain things of me that I am too wearied to provide because I know I will likewise fail, and he is a Noldo and does not understand effort alone as a reason for gratitude. Eru played a cruel joke when he assigned me to this people. I am no Noldo. And so, yes, I will accept."

Some days later, I was wedged upon a rocky ledge, working on a carving high upon the wall, when I caught myself humming a Telerin tune that I probably hadn't heard or thought of since my sister was yet a child. Nargothrond, I realized, had changed again. A feeling like a fresh breeze that dispels a pestilence had swept through my kingdom, and I knew that we were closer to that perfect peace that, I realized now, we'd never even had in Valinor.

My birth had been prodigious for the Eldar; I hadn't been very old before I'd realized that. In me was the joining of the three Eldarin kindreds: I was a symbol of the end of fragmentation based on an ancient assignment to a kindred and the beginning of a new unity among all of the Eldarin people—or so had been spoken by Manwë on the occasion of my birth.

I am no Noldo … When I touched my mind to his, I felt the grass lashing my legs, my blood coming hard in my veins, and a bow taut in my arms: a primitive, untaught joy that had been with our people since their awakening. His patrol had left yesterday. The designation of Noldo, to Celegorm,had been a term wielded to wound, to exclude, and was something to be freed from, leaving all else beyond that narrow constraint permissible. And yet, through my own life, to be called a Noldo or a Vanya or a Teler was a gathering in, an acceptance into kinship, and an endearment. "I can perceive your son's Telerin blood," King Olwë said once to my parents, after I stayed with him in Alqualondë for a few weeks, "in his voice, his hands upon the harp, and his generous spirit." When I kept my footing upon a listing ship, the same was said; when I held my rum in a tavern with Olwë's sons, the same. "Your Vanyarin blood," said Nienna once, "makes you a quick learner and receptive to matters of the spirit." So was my golden hair, my penchant for elaborate dress, my tendency toward polite obedience. "Thank Eru for your son's Noldorin blood," said my Uncle Fëanor, toasting me on the occasion of my first show completed under his wife's tutelage, "for his work glorifies this family." The same was said when I wore ostentatious jewelry or spent too long reading or wanted to study an ancient language for no reason beyond interest or spoke a provocative idea at a council. I remember once thinking, proudly, that all wanted to see some of themselves in me, who had been held up a paragon of the Eldar.

But what of me wasn't accounted for by one of these designations, the three of them combined forming progressively smaller circumscriptions into which my behavior and even my thoughts were constrained? What of me was my very own? At the moment my begetting was announced, it was prescribed the man I would become: the first to be born with such great proportions of the blood of all three kindreds in my veins, the descendant of three kings. I had never grown in the way that children do into an identity of my own; I had stepped in a fate ordained before I'd taken my first breath of air. And I had accepted it, for I was never brave enough to reject the hope of a people, of the gods themselves. Only in one matter—and that only briefly and never thought of now—had I ever transgressed.

I slid down from my perch upon the rock, leaving my chisel and hammer behind, my mind too restless now to work. I went, as I always did, to Orodreth.

"I will avoid telling you that this level of introspection proves your Vanyarin blood," he said dryly. I paced; he sipped wine, the book I had interrupted him in reading lying splayed open upon his knee.

"I used to be proud of it, truly," I began.

"How Noldorin," Orodreth interrupted.

"Stop it. Please." I felt a muscle flutter beneath my eye.

He sighed. "Because you are acting wholly Noldorin, Finrod, and missing the larger point here."

"I fail to see that. All I see is that the supposed unity I represent is in fact nothing more than a person compliant enough to be bound by the rules of three peoples rather than just one. And …" I drew a shuddering breath, thinking again of Celegorm and his visceral joy of riding beneath a rainy sky, "there is no escape for me from that fate."

"Finrod, have you ever thought of the fact that we—your brothers and your sister—have the same blood as you? And yet no one says, 'Orodreth, you were unusually kind to that child; you must be showing your Telerin side.'"

"You are not a firstborn. It's different."

He laughed. "No, the true difference is in deeds. Angrod and Aegnor will be remembered for dying in a battle, and not even heroically but because they happened to be in the way. If I am lucky, I will be remembered for the same. All of us will, perhaps, be remembered as friends of the sons of Fëanor, but not in the sense of promoting cohesion among the Noldorin people or using that friendship for diplomacy. No one looks for the virtues of their people in us—why would they?"

"And I—"

"Won't be remembered as your person serving as a symbol of unity between the people of the Eldar."

I raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Truly? What then?"

He waved a hand in a loose circle around his head. "This. Nargothrond. The manifestation, in Beleriand, of something we could not even achieve in Valinor: unity and peace in the service of fellowship and beauty. The defiance of the natural order of chaos and pain." Orodreth did not often acknowledge the imperfections of Valinor, and when he spoke of Nargothrond, it was as a means to replicate Valinor in the midst of an imperiled land, to slowly chisel perfection from pervasive imperfection. He sensed my surprise and smiled. "Not everything was perfect there, brother. The Eldar arrived there and seemingly each group went to their respective corners, so much so that, hundreds of years after arriving there, your bloodline was noteworthy. Why should it have been? There should have been many children of similar family circumstances as ours. Is it noteworthy that a child of parents from two of the groups should wish to marry a child from the third? The Valar, I regret to say, only helped perpetuate the illusion of our separateness by giving one or another group attention to the exclusion of the others, of trying to find their own qualities in us and using that to pardon obvious favoritism." Perhaps realizing the uncharacteristic nature and weight of his accusations at last, he added, "I suspect they know that now and would do things differently if they could. But you have done just that. Here in Nargothrond, many people live side by side, and the contributions of all are appreciated. You may have been unusually and even unfairly constrained by others' expectations of you, but you have turned that into greater freedom for your people than they have ever known."

I didn't stay much longer after that. I returned to my work, and left Orodreth to his book.

That evening, on my way home to supper, I made a point to find out when Celegorm's patrol was due to return. I had intentions of meeting it. Three days hence, I was told, but when the time came, I was engrossed in my work and missed it.

Chapter Six 
Celegorm

Curufin scuffed the toe of his boot against a chiseled design that ran along the front of each step in Finrod's new room. "He uses this everywhere,throughout the whole city."

It was two threads that wrapped and swirled around each other in elaborate knots. Every now and then, one would divide and the second strand would break off into a flowering branch or a stylized bird's head—each of these was unique—but at the end, the two strands simply circled, one up and one down, to link to each other. The two threads were an illusion, having been one all along.

"Perhaps it has a special meaning to him," I suggested.

"Perhaps. But I can't help but feel the city would be enriched with more variety."

The pattern had a suggestion of familiarity, in fact, but I couldn't remember where I had seen it outside of Nargothrond—and Curufin was right that it was ever-present here. I thought about mentioning it to Curufin, but Finrod was descending the ladder by then, smiling broadly and wiping the stone dust from his hands with a rag. He embraced us both and then swept his arms in a circle around the room. "Well? What do you think? It is almost finished. I am working on the ceiling now."

I wondered if Curufin would mention the repetitive pattern, but he did not. He had only good things to say about the room and quickly wandered off to climb ladders and poke around corners, leaving me alone with Finrod. I ran my finger along the edge of a stone leaf chiseled so thin that a strong light behind it would give the illusion of color and reveal the intricacies inside the stone akin to the inner machinery of actual leaves, so that I didn't have to look into his curious gray eyes. "I took your suggestion, you see, and did those leaves like that, to give a cascading, sheltering effect," he volunteered.

I had forgotten that I'd even made a suggestion but, yes, the night we'd first gone to his apartment for supper and he'd shared his plans with us: I remembered now. To avoid the awkwardness and presumed incompetence of my prolonged silence, I had made some vague suggestion about letting the occasional carved bough droop lower, as though with the weight of leaves and fruit. I'd said something about observing that in the forest. About the symbolism of plenty. He'd responded with the brightness typical of Finrod, but I'd assumed he was being polite.

"I've already heard some of the apprentices commenting on the privacy it affords making it an ideal place to bring their girlfriends," he added.

I looked around for Curufin. I could see his boots on one of the ledges, the rest of him lost behind a cascade of delicate stone leaves. I wondered why Finrod wasn't with him, talking about whatever craftsmen talked about. My inspection of the leaf was becoming contrived, so I let my hand drop.

"The patrols?" Finrod asked. "I trust they suit you well?"

"They do," I said, and I had no choice but to turn and meet his eyes. I realized that he wanted to see me pleased and did not know what to make of that. Most of my life had been spent trying to alter myself—or at least my appearances—to please others.  This time, I didn't have to. "I thank you for it," I said and let sincerity into my voice. "I hope to serve Nargothrond well."

"And your brother—"

"No longer has to make an effort to include me in mealtime conversations with his son."

Finrod laughed. I had never seen him laugh with abandon before, I realized. He looked and sounded like Aegnor. We might have been back in Valinor, reclining along a fountain, his head thrown back in appreciation of some joke Curufin had made or some outlandish comment by Angrod. Something in my chest ached.

I thought I hid it but, when I looked at him again, the mirth in his eyes glittered over a deeper sorrow, and I realized that he had seen that fleeting image of his brother by the fountain, remembered in my mind, heard his laughter, felt my long loneliness without him. He embraced me then. His nose came only to my shoulder and yet the gesture reminded me of being held by my grandfather long ago, when in some hurt inflicted by my father, I'd fled to Tirion. "Me too," he said, and then he released me and was off to show Curufin how he'd implemented a plan they'd worked upon together, and I was free to slip from the room and back to my apartment, to nurse my grief in peace till I could again ride under the open sky.

~oOo~

I was saddling my horse, tightening the buckle on the girth, when I remembered where I had seen the design that Finrod used ubiquitously throughout Nargothrond. The Calarnómë. The dark alley. The thin-framed boy who'd knelt before my cousin as a supplicant before a king. Finrod's pale, graceful fingers spread to touch the crown of his head. The unusual leather collar around his neck, decorated with a design burned into the leather: the two strands braided and united at their ends that, in Nargothrond, one could not set his foot down without seeing.

~oOo~

"So did you go?" Caranthir had surprised me one morning, just out of the bath. I had just dropped the towel from around my waist to put on my underpants when he spoke from the chair in the corner, where he was sitting with his thumb marking his place in a book, wearing black breeches and a purple tunic so dark that it might as well have been black. I scrambled to pull the towel back up around my waist. Just two days before, I had been laughing at Angrod's observation that Caranthir wore his tunics unusually short. Mid-thigh-length and slightly loose was the current style, but Caranthir's came just past his hips and were tailored close to his body. "He likes people to see the shape of his ass," Angrod said, and it had been hilarious at the time and even more hilarious when Caranthir happened unexpectedly past, his backside twinkling in his riding breeches. His tunic was as short today as it had been then, but alone with him, he was much harder to laugh at than he'd been two days ago.

"I did." I was still trying to tuck the towel around my hips. Caranthir and I were brothers close in age; his naked body was nearly as familiar as my own, and I'm sure the same was true of mine to him, but lately, when he looked at me, I had the feeling that he knew things about me that I would die before confessing. Like last night's dream when an unseen lover had bound my hands over my head in the dark with the belt from my trousers (which was lying innocently across the dresser not an arm's breadth from Caranthir), and when I awoke, I had to change my nightshirt … Caranthir smiled. "Can I get dressed?"

"I'll just go," he said and stood up, treating me to the sight of his short tunic and tailored trousers, which remained wholly unfunny when I was naked except for a wet bath towel and had the feeling that he knew every improper thought to cross my mind.

"No, it's okay then. I … umm, I saw Finrod."

He raised an eyebrow. "Did you?"

"But I don't understand what I saw."

Caranthir laughed. His laughter suggested many things but never humor. This one was derisive with an edge of disbelief. "At the end of it all, although older than me and prone to braggadocio with our cousins about your purported 'conquests,' you are still a perfect innocent, Celegorm. Tell me what you saw."

I swallowed. "Well. I saw him go under the arch, like you said, and into that dark alley. There were a lot of people down there but the buildings didn't seem to be shops." I recalled memorizing these details to tell Curufin and my cousins. Never had I imagined I'd be regaling Caranthir instead! "Perhaps they were houses. I don't know. Anyway, Finrod went to one near the end. The shadows were deep. He wasn't disguised or anything, but I had the feeling he would prefer to stay hidden. He knocked on a door. A boy answered who was very thin but—" I struggled with how to say beautiful. Caranthir tilted his head a little and smirked—"ethereal. Like an Avar from the Outer Lands. He … he knelt down in front of Finrod, like Finrod was a king or something." I laughed to show how ridiculous I thought that idea to be—Finrod was the child of a third-born son!—but Caranthir's expression didn't change. "He did something to Finrod's shoes. Finrod put his hand on his hair, just the fingertips, like this." I spread my fingers in the air in the shape of a star. "The boy stood up but bowed when Finrod passed, again like he was king or something. They went in the house. Oh, and the weirdest thing of all? He was wearing … like a belt or a collar around his neck. It was tooled with a really pretty swirly design. It had a silver buckle. It was … rather pretty. But unusual."

"You thought it was pretty?" Caranthir asked, lifting his eyebrows.

"Rather, yes. Just strange. Maybe they're in style in Alqualondë?" Most of the current fashion came from Alqualondë. I wondered at what length they wore their tunics there.

Caranthir made a coughing noise that might have been a laugh or might have been a tickle in his throat. "I doubt it."

"So what does it mean? Do you know?"

"I do."

"Are you going to tell me?"

He seemed to give that a moment of sincere consideration before shaking his head. "No. But I will leave you this." He tossed the book he'd been reading onto my bed. "I'm not finished with it, so I'll be back for it in three days. Not that I expect, once you begin reading it, that you'll even need that long to finish it." He began to walk toward the door. "Oh. And show it to no one."

After he left, I lifted the book from the bed. It reminded me of the Parma Ettirniva because it was not well made. The leather cover was uneven and had been poorly cured, so the moisture in the air had begun to warp it, and I could see the remains of the follicles where the animal's hair had been. The paper was coarse and imperfect, the calligraphy blockish and downward-slanting on most pages. The first page had no information about the title or who had authored it, only an awkwardly drawn pair of hands with a twisting pattern similar to that on the boy's collar looped around them and, beneath it, a heart.

I read the first two pages and quickly surmised that it was a story. No one in our family was particularly apt in the study of literature—that was more the purview of Nolofinwë and his brood—but I had read enough literature to know that this wasn't it. The characters moved and spoke awkwardly on the page with the same hasty and purposeful manner as two acquaintances encountering each other on the street while both were late for other errands. There were certain niceties to be observed, but both were more concerned with getting as quickly as possible to that other destination. The book's destination, I discovered soon enough.

She pressed him to the bed with both hands pinned to the pillow over his head. He squirmed his hips to quell the ache in his throbbing member. "No!" she shouted. He lay still. She poised over him, barely touching him, teasing the head of his cock, until he didn't think he could bear it any longer.

An hour later, I became aware of the fact that I was still wearing only a bath towel and that my hair had mostly dried, uncombed. The man served the woman and her husband both. He wore two collars, one to signify belonging to each of them. The book was a vague and terse domestic drama punctuated by lengthy and deliciously detailed erotic scenes in which the collared man was sometimes tied up, sometimes ordered around, sometimes made to pleasure one or both of his masters, but always subdued by them. My awareness of my surroundings was mostly due to the almost painful erection tenting up the bath towel around my waist. I shoved the book under a pillow, lay back on the bed, and with a few quick strokes, had to bite my own wrist to keep from crying out my satisfaction.

By midday of the second day, I was done with the book. When my father remarked at supper that night that I had gone for two full days without going into the forest, and I replied that I'd been reading in my room, he looked more surprised than Caranthir did, who went on eating his potatoes in a rather mechanical fashion.

Finrod was a dom. My gentle cousin who chiseled stylized statues of birds and fish, who'd served Nienna for two years and was a candle-bearer in the annual Meryalë Calato held in Valmar, who managed to be inoffensive to everyone in our excessively volatile family, had some sort of concubine in the shadowed part of the city that he liked to boss around. That probably meant that he wasn't a virgin either, which seemed utterly at odds with his Vanyarin piety (and offered intriguing insights into the truth behind the matter of the bonding of fëar after the act of physical union). That night in my room, I found myself thinking about those revelations a lot—and the fact that the concubine was a boy. And my cousin was a boy. So many possibilities I'd never considered, and yet they made some kind of sense, as though they'd been drifting all along beneath the thoughts the way a leaf will ripple and swirl beneath a river with a strong current and then abruptly surface as a bright spot upon silver water that you cannot believe you didn't see before.

All of this, I realized, raised my status among my brother and cousins. Although the oldest, I'd long felt the least knowledgeable or experienced of the group; now I suspected I could name things even Angrod hadn't heard of and share information even Curufin didn't know. Even if I didn't reveal what I knew of Finrod—and that seemed a treasure worth preserving, a bit of information that would all but ensure my status in the group—what I had learned from the book alone would suffice for many weeks of secrets for the Parma Ettirniva. Tomorrow, Caranthir would reclaim the book. I opened it to reread the erotic passages, to learn what I could of them, before he did so.

There was a knock at the door. I shoved the book beneath a pillow and arranged the blanket to cover my growing erection. Curufin didn't wait for me to answer before entering. "It's Caranthir," he said, and my heart leaped, thinking he (like Caranthir, in fact, often seemed to do) had been reading my mind. "Bleeding Caranthir. He's having some kind of drama with a girl, I suppose, and pacing around the room and throwing things at the walls. I cannot concentrate." He flopped down on the opposite side of the bed from me. "Atar went in to console him, but Caranthir acted like an ass, as always. How someone like him even has a girlfriend is beyond me."

Curufin's head was a mere three inches above the reason I suspected why.

"So do you mind if I sleep in here tonight, with you? He'll be pacing around all night and I just can't take another minute of it."

"I don't mind at all," I replied, hoping he would rise soon to use the lavatory or fetch a jar of ale for us so that I could move the book to a safer place. Our parents, to quell the animosity between my two younger brothers, had given them adjoining rooms, which only seemed to make them hate each other more. Curufin claimed Caranthir's tantrums disturbed his studies, and Caranthir claimed that Curufin's constant recitation of long-dead languages drove him mad. Curufin spent half of his nights in my room, and even though he talked in his sleep and flopped back and forth throughout the night, to be chosen as his favorite—as a person of value to someone—ensured I'd never complain.

"I've been meaning to ask you," he said, turning onto his side and bunching up the pillow under his head, "about Terentaulë. I—" His hand must have bumped the book then, because he lifted the pillow and drew it out. His forehead wrinkled in confusion as he thumbed through the pages, looking for a title and author, as I had done, and encountering the awkward drawing of the hands twined together. "What is this?"

For a moment I couldn't answer, even if I'd known what to say. It felt like someone had driven a fist just under my ribs and knocked the wind from me. Then my breath came back and, with it, my heart knocked double-time. Curufin was reading the book. I'd sworn to Caranthir that I wouldn't share it with anyone, and while my loyalties lay with Curufin and my cousins, always, before any other, the realization seeped slow and unassuming as a cold mist into my mind that, despite the fact that he deliberately sought to depict himself as intriguing and, in that aspect, deliberately tried to perturb me, Caranthir had never wronged me. In fact, he'd been quite good to me—much better than most, even.

Curufin was reading a page midway through the book. His eyes widened, and he paged quickly through the next few leaves before turning to me and whispering, "This is a smut book!"

"A—what?" I could have guessed what a "smut book" was, but I longed to prolong the decision of where my loyalties lay: Curufin or Caranthir.

"A smut book. A book written just for sex." Sex he whispered. Then came the inevitable: "Where did you get this?"

My heart pounded. I heard a voice that must have been mine say, "Caranthir. I found it on the sofa after Caranthir was there."

Caranthir, after all, was not my friend. He may have given me information once, but he did so only because I demanded it in return for covering for him. The book— He was showing off. He wanted me to know how much more experienced than me that he was, even though he was younger. He wanted me to feel stupid and inadequate. Curufin was my friend. He slept in my bed most nights. He knew my secrets, and I knew his. We didn't play intrigue with each other. He loved me. I loved him.

I'd made the right choice.

"Does he know you have it?" Curufin asked in an excited whisper.

"I don't know. Probably not. I only found it a short while ago."

"Have you read it?"

"Only the beginning."

"Yeah, these kinds of books never get to the smut right away," he said by way of explanation, as though he truly knew. "They set up a boring story first and then get to it. You probably didn't even know what you were reading."

"I guess I didn't."

I felt dumb, almost bovine, laying there next to him: a placid, stupid thing to be led around. I scrubbed that thought from my mind. It was Caranthir—Caranthir had tried to make me feel stupid.

I'd made the right choice.

Curufin read the book intently for a few minutes before rolling abruptly to his side and saying, "We have to do something with this." He was close enough that I felt his breath on my face and smelled the remains of the wine we'd had with supper.

"Like give it to Atar?"

"No! Atar won't care. He'll probably take it to read in the privy. I mean like we could get Caranthir with this. Somehow." He rolled onto his back again and studied the ceiling, as though the thread-thin crack forming in the plaster there hid answers.

I felt myself nodding; I heard myself agreeing. I felt slightly sick to my stomach and turned onto my side, away from Curufin, who had resumed reading the smut book. Some years later, in another land but still compelled to Curufin's side, I would realize that it was my first betrayal. It would not be my last.

~oOo~

Those days marked a change in me. I had long drifted along, defined by nots: I was not a smith, not an artisan, not a scholar, not gifted in really anything, not even black-haired and gray-eyed like Noldor were supposed to be. Once you chipped away what I was not, there I was … and I yet Iwasn't, for I never defined qualities for myself. I never said that I was usually kind or a loyal friend or a good hunter, for those things didn't seem to matter; they carried no weight in the Noldorin society into which I had been born. Life after coming of age a Noldo was supposed to be a blur of apprenticeships and lectures and research presentations and art exhibitions, adorned with dalliances that whittled down to courtship and eventually solidified into betrothal. I certainly had none of the former, and my discovery of the smut book and the subsequent surfacing of my awareness of sexual possibilities I'd never considered only confused me more. No girl had ever kindled in me more than a feeble desire; I could admit that she was beautiful and might even hold her image in my mind as I touched myself, but there was none of that heaving, ferocious passion that seemed to render others helpless.

I went frequently to the Calarnómë in those days. In the crowded streets, I could be alone. I was no stranger than anyone else there. I was a golden-haired, talentless Noldo watching a slim silver-haired Telerin girl spin hoops of fire, listening to a man who would have been an Avar but for his beloved Noldorin sister preach about a goddess above even Ilúvatar, and sitting elbow-to-elbow in the tavern with a beautiful girl who lay with anyone who would bring her books. "There are one thousand libraries in the city," I said when she told me, and she smiled as she said, "I know."

If one chipped away the expectations for the Eldar, those who left them unmet fled to the shadowy side of the city, where no one bothered to question them. They were, like me, defined by nots.

The day my life changed began ordinarily enough. It was some ancient festival day from the Outer Lands that permitted us to cut the workday short and spend the rest of the day in leisure. Curufin and I went into the city to meet with our cousins for a short hour before they were hauled off by their father to some official ceremony he had coordinated at the palace; thankfully, Fëanor had no interest in attending and so we didn't have to go. Curufin was meeting Terentaulë and bade me farewell at the gates to royal Tirion.

I began a slow descent of the city streets but found myself always choosing the routes that verged westward, even though this took me away from the main gate and the road home. When I reached the low road and turned from the main gate entirely, I could no longer deny where I was going. The smelly shops gave way to the low, ugly houses with their tangled gardens of weeds; all of this was familiar now. The shadows grew longer and deeper as I turned north, then overtook everything, and I was there.

It was in an uproar. I had never seen it so crowded, but most everyone in Tirion took a half-workday on this day, and I assumed that explained it. I went to my usual tavern across from the stone archway—I had never seen Finrod after that first day, although I'd seen Caranthir several times—and the barkeep had my drink made before I had time to sidle my way to the bar. "Are you going?" he asked. The drums were thundering from all directions overhead. He had to shout.

"Going where?"

He laughed. "I forget that you are new here! Tonight is the Festival of Oromë, the night he found our ancestors at Cuiviénen. Young men your age initiate into his cult tonight, but even if fucking and cutting aren't your things, they throw a wild party."

"Are you going?"

"Of course." As though to make good on his promise, he threw aside his apron, stepped from behind the bar, and took my arm.

Beyond the walls of the city, in the shadow of Túna was a forest dark and untouched, a tangle of trees that had never been cut with tops so high that even when I tilted back my neck to the point of dizziness, I could not see them. The stars were picked out of the sky extra-bright here, like gems upon black velvet. Hunting in the forest was forbidden; entry into the forest was forbidden—or so I'd thought. A river of people were following the sound of drums that, as we moved closer to the forest's edge, I realized were coming from within the forest, as though the ancient trees there had a heartbeat. People were dancing and whirling to the rhythm; many of the young men had removed their shirts to reveal matching scars slashed across the left sides of their chests, crossing the heart. The barkeep, I realized, had done the same, was drinking from a clay tureen, whooping and swinging his arm over his head. The edge of the forest seemed an impermeable wall of brush and trees and I didn't know how we'd walk inside, but then we were there, I was holding the clay tureen and licking its scaldingly potent contents from my lips and letting myself be pressed into a clearing with a roaring fire at its center and a throbbing tangle of dancers twisting and winding through every available scrap of space.

The drums, the drums, they addled my brain … or maybe it was what I was drinking. I left that aside, but it was too late. A girl had taken my head into her lap; my bleary eyes perceived three others in our circle listening rapt to something that I realized that I was saying. We were sitting on a rock at the edge of the clearing, and the dancers seemed a single organism with a thousand arms and an occasional enraptured face flashing to the surface before being swallowed into the dance anew. My voice seemed to tumble over and over on top of the pulse of the drums, the way that something caught in a strong current will dive and reel even as it floats upon the surface. My voice, like the dancers. "I do not fit he does not understand they do not understand this is where I feel at peace only in the forest with the animals and the trees but that is no life and no living and I cannot claim to be an adult on that alone," and on and on and on. "You are wrong," one of the girls was saying. "You are wrong." She traced her finger down the scar on the man's chest next to her. They all, I realized, wore matching pendants of stylized antlers that overlapped and linked in the middle, carved from polished wood.

"You do not understand," the man was saying. "You are not alone." He was black-haired, gray-eyed, big-armed: a smith. "You are not the only one. There are many of us." He went to sweep his arm around the clearing, but he could only raise it halfway before tipping off-balance and having to lower it again. "Here we are. The initiates of Oromë, those who take solace in the forest and in something greater that unites our people beyond even being Eldar."

"You were called here, don't you see?" asked the girl whose lap my head lay in a reverent whisper. "All the loneliness you've endured can end tonight. You can be one with us." Her lips against mine and the drums and the tangled limbs. My heartbeat at my temples, the drums at my heart, her hand on my belly, at the waistband of my trousers.

I next remember being naked and up to my waist in a cold river. Two young men with pink scars on their chests were washing me. "You must be pure when you go to her," one of them explained. Water was poured over my hair. My shoulders were laved, my back, my belly, between my legs. I was hard down there. "That is good," said the man who washed me, with a secretive smile. The other, I realized, was holding me upright. My limbs had the strength of spun silk. "All the hurt that you bring with you, from the falsely constructed Eldarin societies of Valinor, you must wash free," said the one supporting me. He lifted a jar to my lips of whatever scalding liquor was, I suppose, washing me on the inside. My buttocks, my hips, my legs, my feet: I was clean. I stepped forward—or was pushed forward—out of the river and into a coarse-woven brown cloak put around my shoulders.

I was in a tent, or something like one, maybe coarse cloth suspended among the branches of several young trees. It was dark but for a brazier in the corner. A man with only a scrap of leather around his waist instructed me, "Lie down on your cloak on the ground." He pulled a mask, something hideous and antlered, over his face. He was dipping a keen-edged blade in and out of the fire. I lay naked, still erect; I watched the blade flitting in and out of the flame and felt as I'd felt, lying exposed and afraid, at the healer's, awaiting something painful and necessary; whatever I was drinking was wearing off. My heart was pounding. My erection wilting.

And then she came forth from the shadows.

Like blood armors upon a wound, so the shadows clotted to give her shape, naked but for the scrap of skin at her waist like that worn by the man and a belt of bones that rattled almost musically as she took slow steps toward me. Her breasts were bare and smeared with fresh blood. She was beautiful in a way I'd never imagined; I dug my heels into the earth and moaned. "Do you know what is about to be done, Celegorm?" she asked me. I opened my mouth soundlessly. "Long ago, before the Elves arose at Cuiviénen, Oromë opened his body and gave himself to Arda. He gave himself to Arda so that he would ever be attuned to Her, to know Her hurts and to wield Her power for his own. The stories the Valar tell you of Cuiviénen are lies, Celegorm. We women were born from the clay of Arda, not with our spouses at our sides but with our spouses in our wombs. We gave them birth. And so we are the stuff of Arda but you are the stuff of the stars, and if you wish to unite with Arda as did Oromë, then you must give of yourself into Arda."

The belt of bones clattered as it fell to the ground. She was naked, and I was hard again, but I had no time to think of what might happen next before the man seized my hands, held them fast over my head, knelt upon them as she lowered herself onto me. I gasped, with pain, with pleasure. "The world is a place of light and dark, of agony and ecstasy. One cannot exist without the other." She was rocking her hips slowly. I tried to pull free of the man, for I wanted to touch her breasts, her waist. What held me down was stronger than I was. "What the Valar and the Eldar want is a deceit. You are coming into the true way." I felt something hot touch my chest and tried to flinch away, but I was held fast. She was quickening her hips; he was drawing the blade slowly down my chest; I was screaming, with what I did not know, but then it was done. It was done, it was done. I curled on my side, wracked with the last spasms of ecstasy, my blood dripping into the earth. The man was wiping clean the blade and putting it back in the brazier; the woman was holding me in the circle of her body as I must have once been held in the womb. She was kissing my shoulders. You have given yourself to me.

We knelt around the fire, the new priestesses and initiates of Oromë. The antler pendants were tied around each neck in turn upon a thong of leather. I looked for the woman I'd loved among the priestesses, but none had that staggering beauty that merely to recall made my loins ache anew with desire. A clay jar came into my hands. Deeply, I drank.

I next awoke on my side, lying on the ground, a man's arms around me from behind. He was stroking me; he was hard against my thigh. I felt spent and sore and yet throbbed with desire. "Again, already, Celegorm?" he asked, the barkeep, his own pendant digging into my back as he bent to kiss my throat.

~oOo~

Curufin had succeeded in getting his hand not only onto Terentaulë's breast but inside her tunic, and he was telling us all about it. "Her nipple felt kind of rubbery," he concluded at last, "but I guess that's how nipples feel."

Only Angrod reached inside his own tunic to check but they were all thinking about it, I could tell. I wasn't thinking about anything. Or I was thinking about everything. How a week ago, I'd lain upon the verge of this very fountain, unkissed, touched only in dreams, and now I'd lain with a woman and man both (I assumed that was all; I didn't remember much) in the same night; I'd had things in places they couldn't even imagine: tongues, hands, lips. I'd known ecstasy that my memory could reconcile only as a white flame, still with the power to weaken my knees. My pendant lay against my chest.

Only Orodreth had noticed it. "What is that?" He'd seen the leather cord and fished the pendant from beneath my tunic, worn high-necked to avoid any chance of revelation of the cut on my chest, which had healed within a few days to leave a sleek, pink scar.

"I found it," I'd told him.

He was watching me strangely even now and, several times, seemed on the verge of saying something, but tucked his lips into his teeth in that way of his and said nothing. Nodded and went all appropriately wide-eyed at the story of Curufin's conquest. "I'm going to lose my virginity first and you'll all owe me an ale at the tavern," Curufin boasted.

I laughed.

"What?" he snapped.

"Nothing. Just thinking about something else."

"Be careful," said Orodreth. "What if the thing they say about bonding is true?"

"It's not true," said Curufin with a wave of his hand. "It's physically impossible." Orodreth didn't look convinced.

After the initiation, I'd eventually awakened to find myself in my bed with little notion of how I'd gotten there. My body ached in some very private places and the cut on my chest itched and throbbed. But I lay in bed and tried to perceive if it was there: a bond, a knowledge of the beautiful priestess who'd emerged from the shadows. I felt nothing like I expected, but the wind in the trees seemed louder, and as I sat up slowly, I watched a sparrow flutter past my window and veer off suddenly in pursuit of a grasshopper. I felt the grasshopper die, felt its flash of fear as its body was crushed in two, felt as it was absorbed into the quick-beating body of the sparrow, as its knowledge of clasping fast to a nodding stalk of grass, of mechanically chewing, of being only ever on the verge of satiation, became knowledge of the wide blue sky, of strong, tiny wings, of a throat fairly bursting with song.

Thankfully, I made it to the water closet before I was sick.

This new knowledge of myself jarred uncomfortably with my former identify in the vague realm of nots. I had carnal experience now, I was some kind of deviant, I was an adherent to a spiritual belief I'd not even known of a week before but knew was illicit for one of the Eldar, and certainly not permissible for a son of a royal house. When my father said the Eruhantalë, I remembered the young woman's words about something greater even than Eru Ilúvatar. But what? I was bonded to something, but what? I rode out hunting and perceived myself through the eyes of the deer. I aimed my bow and felt their terror and their acknowledgement of the inevitability—the necessity—of their death. I touched my mind to the one I killed and felt its sense of self fade into darkness. It was food now, ready to nurture a new life. I cut the flesh from the one I killed and cooked it there over a fire and gained its knowledge of places where the grass was lush and the shadows deep and where brooks ran with sweet, cold water.

Everything in the forest scurried to kill and reclaim, kill and reclaim. From that, life boomed. Even when I shit in the forest and covered it over, the soil set immediately to reclaim what it could; the roots of the plants set to take from the soil, the trees from the plants as they rotted, the deer from the trees, I from the deer. Over and over. It roared. The forest seethed with it, all life and beauty perched triumphantly upon death for a few frail moments before being whelmed under and awaiting to surface anew.

In comparison, Tirion was silent. The slow work of the wind upon the stones was nothing to the boiling cacophony of the forest. At first I thought it a relief. Even the shouts and hammerfalls and clatter of wheels upon the cobblestones seemed nearer to silence than the bestial roar of the forest. Eventually, though, the silence became emptiness of the sort to provoke restlessness.

"Stop moving your feet," said Aegnor from a lazy half-drowse. We had all fallen into companionable silence. My feet were pressed against him, and I was curling and uncurling my toes without cease. I shifted so that I could curl and uncurl them against the stones instead. The wind took minutely from the stones. The silence screamed.

~oOo~

I had somehow become the lover Tauretor the barkeep, through assumption, I suppose. I didn't recall much of him from the night of the initiation, but when I next went to the tavern, he served me my drink and then leaned over the bar, his lips touching my ear, and said, "I want to bend you over this bar and fuck you blind."

Later that night, I let him. After that, we went quite regularly to his small room over the tavern with barely enough room for a narrow bed and a single chair. I didn't ask who served out mugs of strong ale downstairs while he pressed me facedown into the straw mattress and moaned out his pleasure atop me. He was never long. He would kiss me and caress me for a minute or two afterward before springing up abruptly and announcing, "I have to get back downstairs!" Sometimes I would leave, and sometimes I would drift to sleep in his narrow bed and be there when he came back up, tired from a long day's work, after the tavern closed for the night. We might make love slower then; he might pleasure me before he turned me over on the mattress and swept aside my hair to kiss the back of my neck.

One night, he brought up a large jar of the ale served downstairs, and we sat naked in his bed after our love—my back to his chest and his legs clasping me—and passed it between us. In my slowly deepening delirium, I told him about what I heard in the forest: the endless round of life and death, the thoughts of the animals, the gabbling hunger of the plants and trees. I felt him go rigid behind me but I kept talking, as though once loosened, my tongue moved on its own accord.

"You weren't a virgin that night, were you?" he asked when I gave him a moment of silence long enough to interject.

"Of course I was," I said.

I felt his belly shake with his shout of laughter. In the room above his, it made a baby awaken; I heard it start crying and the rhythmic footsteps of the mother drawn from sleep to calm it. "Celegorm, son of Fëanor, was a virgin," he said once he'd calmed down enough to speak.

"Of course I was. Why would you think otherwise?"

"Because you're so fucking gorgeous that I don't understand how people didn't just stop to fuck you in the street."

"What? How can you—" There was a little breathless squeak at the end of that. A long silence followed.

"You honestly don't know? How beautiful you are?"

"No!" I fumbled for words. "Of course—"

"Yeah, yeah. 'Of course not.' Because I'm sure the great Fëanor doesn't have mirrors in his house, or you never bothered to look into one. So this is news to you. But here it is: You are topped maybe by your brother Maedhros. Maybe. And that's it. The consensus is that one's opinion on that depends on whether one prefers slender and red-haired or strong and blond."

People discuss this, my brother, me? My mouth flapped open and then shut again but the only sound that came out was a little creak in the back of my throat.

"But if you were truly never fucked before that night, then that is why you are experiencing what you are. Almost no initiates go to their initiations as virgins. It's one of those unspoken truths that if you pursue deviant spirituality, then by that point, you've usually deviated in other ways too. If you want to start a rousing debate, then ask if a disbelief in Eru as the supreme god inspires disbelief in bonding, or if discovery of the untruth of bonding encourages disbelief in Eru's supremacy. Those who are virgins, though—"

"What?"

"Well, it's hard to explain. I don't want to lend credibility to that horrid lie put forth by the Valar that one becomes spiritually bound to the first person one makes love to. That is only to stop people from making love to each other, because it is much better if they spend that energy pounding out crafts and playing at swordfights, I suppose. But your first was no ordinary first, Celegorm; she embodied Arda Herself. Oromë also went to Arda an innocent, and it let him take into himself more of Her powers. You have done the same. You are a priest of Oromë now, if you would believe it."

Now it was my turn to laugh. "No, I'm not!"

"You are. Priests of Oromë go to their initiation untouched in love. Most of the time, they are called young and so stay pure, until they are old enough to be initiated. How fast did your cut heal?"

"In about three days. It healed so fast that it actually hurt."

"See?" He swung around to straddle me. "Priests of Oromë heal almost right away. Mine took three weeks." We'd lain together twice today already, but he was hard again. "I am fucking a son of Fëanor and a priest of Oromë. Arda be praised, no wonder you're such a fucking good lay."

I was exhausted by the long day and the seemingly endless new incursions of ams into my realm of nots. I am a priest of Oromë. Tauretor was kissing my mouth, now my neck, and I was aroused again in spite of myself. He pressed me beneath him until I was lying flat on my back. We'd never made love facing each other before, I realized, as my legs wrapped his waist. His cock pressed against mine, and I moaned with the pleasure of it and thrust my hips harder into his, hoping he'd get the hint. He didn't. Damp with sweat and panting, he reached for the oil with one hand and guided me onto my belly with the other. I folded my arms so that the mattress wouldn't smother me. I waited for his fingers. There. Once, twice. I braced for the initial hurt of it. It came. I didn't complain.

Chapter Seven 
Finrod

The most difficult part of getting away for the festival was Curufin. In the years since he and Celegorm arrived in the tumultuous first months after the Dagor Bragollach, Curufin had become almost a permanent fixture at my supper table, Celegorm having become such a favorite among my border guard, especially the Avarin guards, that he was barely returned for a day before he was accepting a new assignment and riding out again. I didn't even extend supper invitations to Curufin anymore; he simply showed up. If I was late, I sometimes entered the dining room to find him already seated and started on the soup course. Sometimes Celebrimbor came, but Celebrimbor seemed more consumed in his work these days than Curufin and often stayed late in the laboratory or forge. At first, Orodreth had stayed away, but slowly, the incidental encounters bound to occur between the two of them—my two most frequent visitors—had dulled the dread of the mere sight of each other, and then Orodreth, too, returned to my table. He remained cautionary, however: cordial, while gently deflecting any overtures of friendship Curufin made. Now it was Iwho counted Curufin a friend. Many a late evening we spent reviewing plans for expanding Nargothrond—this in the early days—and then more and more often discussing how best to rule such a realm, until Curufin was my best advisor, and Orodreth no longer.

But one point on which we differed irreparably concerned the festivals of the Avarin and Sindarin citizens. I attended these, and doing so had helped me to achieve legitimacy with peoples disinclined to trust a king from over the sea, especially one who would abandon a realm among trees and beneath an open sky in favor of ensconcing himself in stone. Curufin, though, had been raised with his father's beliefs—and these beliefs were, ironically, just as deviant from one-time status quo of Valinor as some of the lingering Avarin and Sindarin traditions—and was not inclined to accept anything else. Eru Ilúvatar was the supreme, the only god, and all others were akin to servants and, in Curufin's words, "My father was never inclined to beg something of a servant when he could ask it directly of the king."

Curufin was initially curious about the native beliefs, and he and I spent a long, enjoyable evening conversing about what I had learned in my years as king of Nargothrond. Once he discovered, however, that I actually did approach these beliefs with a willingness to grant legitimacy, rather than relegating them to something with which to be shocked or maybe amused before working insidiously to stamp them out, then he was appalled. It was the closest to a fight we'd had. "It is irresponsible of us, Finrod," he said in a voice edged simultaneously with anger and disbelief, "to withhold our superior knowledge of spiritual matters from those who never journeyed to Aman and have no way to know, just as it would be irresponsible to send them into war with wooden darts while we forge in steel."

"Their knowledge isn't necessarily inferior, though," I argued gently. "They simply use different evidence to answer the same questions. Lacking access to the Valar, they have observed the natural world and found their answers there."

"I can accept your continued faith in the whole hierarchical scheme involving the Valar and Maiar as intercessories for Eru Ilúvatar," he said, his voice maintaining its dangerous edge, "because that is how you were raised by your father. But I have trouble accepting someone of your intelligence and education accepting the primitive worship of mud and trees, when as certainly as I have, you have felt the supremacy of Eru in our banishment from Aman, if nothing else. Our utter dissociation from that land, as you surely realize, cannot be the work of the Valar alone."

"I tend to feel, Curufin," I replied, "that all spiritual paths that are couched in the desire to live right and do good lead to the same place."

"You walk a dangerous path, Finrod. You know these people are wrong. You should be guiding them—and that is your gift, is it not? to offer such guidance?—to the right knowledge, not withholding what you know from them so as not to hurt their feelings. And to live right? Do good? You see that among people who copulate freely, abandon marriage, and sometimes raise the children of two or three different mates? Finrod, I fear such immortality will prove Nargothrond's downfall. I understand your need to tread lightly, yet tread you must upon such wrongheaded and dangerous ideas."

Subsequently, I could not mention an Avarin or Sindarin festival without having the argument with him anew, so I simply stopped mentioning when I attended such festivals. This required some duplicity, however, as I needed to avoid having supper periodically with him without informing him of the reasons why. Appointments with my lords sometimes kept me from my own table, and I used these as excuses, although a certain narrowing of his eyes and hardening of his mouth—the scrutinizing look of a master artisan seeking the flaw he knew existed in an otherwise perfect piece—suggested that he knew the real reasons for my absences, which was not surprising, since these festivals fell at regular intervals upon the calendar. He, however, seemingly wanted another argument as little as I did, for even as he certainly suspected, he said nothing.

Today was the Festival of Oromë, the day when Oromë was supposed to have discovered the Elves at Cuiviénen. In Valinor, I remember it being a half-day of work and an afternoon and evening spent in the taverns. To the Avari, it was the most important festival day of the year, the day their young men and women come-of-age were initiated into certain religious mysteries and the day that the king renewed his sovereignty through symbolic union with the living earth. In the Avarin belief, the women at Cuiviénen preceded the men since their observations led to the not-illogical conclusion that naught could be born without woman; likewise, it was Arda herself who gave birth to Ilúvatar. This particular belief drove Curufin to distraction. I begged out of supper, telling him that one of my counselors had invited me to hear his daughter's musical composition over supper. "It is well," he said, "for I have much to do at the forge tonight." He had that scrutinizing look but bowed and left without further word. I told myself that an artisan of his caliber would likely wear that look as a matter of course, and I ordered my horse be readied and chose clothing appropriate for the occasion.

The Avarin festivals were always held well away from the city gates. I did not often pass outside of Nargothrond and was always startled by the air temperature—no longer held at a constant pleasant mildness by our depth underground but sometimes freezing, sometimes uncomfortably warm—and the force of the wind. Tonight, there was even rain, coming in short, cold bursts. If spring was upon us, then Manwë had thus rejected the gentle hand of Vána, preferring the clammy adornments of Ulmo upon his spring winds. The sun was beginning to set, although it was hidden utterly behind the clouds. In the wet grass, the silvered path of those who'd departed the city before me made the way easy to find.

I concentrated on all of these things to avoid thinking of the ceremony itself, which I told myself was a necessary exercise in order to maintain legitimacy among the Avari and even many of the Sindar who made their homes in my realm. I'd had some indiscretions in my youth, and then I'd been betrothed to Amarië and prepared myself for a settled sexuality primarily intended to beget children; when she'd not come with me to the Outer Lands and especially upon the assumption of my responsibilities as the head of my household, I'd abandoned any notion of marriage or sexual fulfillment and instead assumed a life of chastity. Given the heat of my passions at times in my youth—for I'd done things that would have ruined the reputation of my father's house, if discovered—I was surprised at how easy it was to simply shut down that part of myself that had once so utterly commanded me. I'd heard older Elves in Valinor speak of how, once their children were born, the constant intensity of physical affection proved more wearying than satisfying, and they simply made up their minds to indulge it no more, and I'd doubted that, as long as blood coursed in my veins, it wouldn't rouse me to passion. Yet I had tamed my baser nature so that it did just that.

Except for this night, once per year, for I was the king, and so I was the one ceremonially bonded to Arda according to the Avarin tradition. And I would lie if I did not admit that, in the embrace of the priestess that year selected to serve that role, with drums in my ears and the heat of the fire on my skin, with so many eyes watching me, my blood did not burn with the same ardor as it had in my youth, and in the week after, my gaze turned to beautiful youths in Nargothrond with more than a monarchial affection, and only with great effort did I prevent myself from taking the deep road to the place in Nargothrond where I knew my desires could be fully sated, as once they'd been in the Calarnómë, by those who didn't share the sexual compunctions of the Elves come from over the sea.

The wind was blowing such that I smelled the fires before even I heard the drums. Twilight had rendered the world around me a palette of black and varying hues of bluish-gray. I felt the drums as a tremor beneath my skin before I detected the sound of them, and then I saw the blush of the fires on the horizon. Then I was over the hill, and there they were, the fires leaping high amid the newly plowed fields. Elves swirled in a ceaseless dance around them, sometimes falling to the edge to couple in the furrows. It was considered good luck and a guarantee of a fruitful harvest; many children were born in the late spring to my Avarin citizens as a result.

At the top of the hill, a man took my horse, and the crowd parted as though by magic to make way for me. "The king," I heard them whisper. "The king, the king," but it was not in homage for they came not before me as my subjects; I came before them as a sovereign seeking another year of their loyalty and trust. This was a rite of passage enacted annually as surely as was the ceremony the young Avarin men and women would endure tonight. I made my way among the people. Some touched me; others simply fell aside. At the centermost fire, once I finished my procession, I knew that I would be met by one of the priests of Oromë, who would prepare me and guide me into the union with the priestess of Arda. I felt my body stirring already beneath the simple robes I wore.

I was almost to the centermost fire. The dancers made way, pulling back to leave a circle of bare earth around the fire. The priest of Oromë was waiting there, tall for an Avar and broad in the shoulders, masked as they always were in a rough leather mask and the antlers of a stag, wearing only a scrap of skin at the waist that left his leg bare to the hip. His hair was secured in a knot at his neck, but an escaped tendril revealed that he was pale-haired, as was rare among these people; that alone might have been the cause for reserving him to become a priest. Furthermore, he towered over me, which was not an accustomed—or entirely pleasant—feeling; his hands were strong as they led me forward. There was something unusual about the flash of his eyes that I saw beneath the mask, but I was so quickly propelled before him that I hadn't the chance to note precisely what.

And there she was: the priestess of Arda, upon her back on the bare earth and naked except for the same scrap of skin that the priests wore. She was different every year, and some lay passive while others clasped me with their legs and turned me over to press my back into the earth; there were prognosticators among the Avari who read the year's harvest in the coupling of the king with the priestess of Arda. This one was silver-haired, her small breasts pressed even flatter by the position in which she lay, and youthful of face. The priest was behind me, removing my robes; I watched the priestess, who had lifted her head slightly to look at me, who parted her legs just enough that I could see a shadowy place under the minute covering that she wore. When my robes dropped from my naked body, my desire was unmistakable.

One rough tug at the knot at her waist and even that meager covering dropped away. The drums were increasing in their intensity and even the fire seemed hotter and brighter. I slid my hands down her naked hips. She was small, slender, and silver-haired, like one expected the Avari to be—the priest who had led me to her notwithstanding—and she was grasping my buttocks to pull me into her. This one was eager. Sweat and desire were slick between us and made the coupling quick. I groaned, and she cried out in a high voice that might have been pain if not for the fact that she wrapped her legs around my waist to draw me in deeper. I tried to keep a slow and steady pace, but the drums were beating faster, and it was hard not to match them, especially with the intensity of the pleasure building in my loins. I was burning from within and without. I cared about neither. I heard my ragged breathing and moans of pleasure answered by her wordless cries, and then I felt her climax beneath me—something that only rarely happened during these couplings, the priestesses being heretofore untouched—and her nails bit into the flesh of my back and buttocks, and I could restrain myself no longer and heard myself shout with the intensity of it—it having been a year for me, since I'd resisted even touching myself in that time—and heard the people cry in answer: the legitimacy of the Noldorin king under the earth was again proved, the union between Nargothrond and the living earth again enacted.

I would have held her longer and spent myself further upon her, for I was hard again, but we were drawn apart by the priests of Oromë. Her fingers trailed my chest as I was lifted from her; she would have accepted. The priest who wrapped me in a cloak and led me away was different from the one who'd brought me down: as small as expected of the Avari, nimble-fingered, brown-eyed behind his mask. Around the fire, the revelry was intensifying, but I was not required and so did not partake in the excessively potent liquor that drove them into a riotous oblivion. The priest led me to one of the enclosures where they would initiate boys into Oromë's priesthood tonight. The usual brazier burned in the corner. Two other priests mulled in their scant dress and ragged masks, including—I saw—the tall, strong-built one from earlier. I was seated upon a log and my cloak gently lowered so that the scratches upon my back could be ministered to. My blood had been kindled by the ceremonial coupling but especially the girl's responsiveness and her roughness. My back stung as one of the priests dabbed salve onto the scratches, and my heart pounded harder with each touch. I was hard again, if in fact my erection had ever withered. The tall one was preparing the knives for initiations across the tent from where I sat, and the light from the brazier played on his well-muscled legs, his slender hips, his strong back and broad shoulders. I had the sudden thought that once, probably not long ago—for his strength belied almost certain youth—he had been held down in a tent much like this one and cut over his heart so that his blood could feed the earth. The force with which I wanted to be the one to have held him down was so violent and sudden that I felt as though the wind had been knocked from me.

I was doubled over and trembling, the priest who was caring for my back calling to the others in rough Avarin for a flagon of cold water, kept hidden beneath one of the tent flaps for those initiates who panicked and fainted when they were cut. I was on the verge of climax again, just from the thought of that powerful body reduced to helplessness and fucked and scarred, perhaps against his will, his purity having been preserved for more than fifty years in anticipation of enduring just such an assault. The cold water was brought by the other smaller priest. The tall one kept his back to me. The knife passed in and out of the fire. I spat out the water that they put in my mouth. The tall one turned.

The eyes behind the mask were strange, not what one expected of the Avari, because the eyes behind the mask were blue.

He said something roughly to the others in strangely accented Avarin. I was mistaken about his youth, I realized. The scar on his chest was faded almost to invisibility. His authority boomed in his voice. He was older than me. I felt the hands touching me recede. He came forward, beautiful as a god. He knelt before me. Golden hair fell over his shoulders as he lowered his head. He touched my feet. His blue eyes asked. "Gods, yes," I gasped, and with three quick strokes of his hand, I was done, shouting and clutching his bowed head to my chest over my thundering heart. And I realized that Celegorm son of Fëanor knew my secret as surely as I knew his.

~oOo~

I laughed at the sense of it. We were seated at the edge of Nargothrond's tallest waterfall, a place practically designed for sharing secrets. He looked every inch the Noldorin lord: the proud shoulders, the tidy and intricately embellished attire, the braids that would have kept his hair from spilling into the fire or compounds, had he any skill in the forge or the laboratory or any of the myriad other hazardous places where the Noldor became comfortable.

"I assumed you had Curufin's canniness," I said through my laughter, "to command such genuine affection from my Avarin and Sindarin guards. And all along you were one of them!"

"All along," he said. "Since we were still young in Valinor."

"What did your father say?"

"My father had no idea."

"You brother?"

"Has no idea."

"How did they not wonder at the scar?"

He shrugged. "I was always riding in the forest. I have a lot of scars. They wouldn't have known the significance of it anyway."

"But you were initiated in Valinor? How exactly?"

"There was quite a following of the cult of Oromë in the Calarnómë. I'm surprised you didn't know." His eyes darted to mine. "I know you went there too. Caranthir told me, and I followed you once. That's how I found the place myself. So you might say that I am here right now because of you, in some roundabout way." He was watching me closely to see what I'd say.

Caranthir. The long feud between my brothers and my dark cousin had begun there, in the Calarnómë, so long ago, my cousins and my brothers having allegedly coaxed wholly inappropriate love affair between Caranthir and a girl who granted favors of her body for books. I remembered the stone arch and the dark alley behind it. I remembered how my blood had leaped at the mere sight—the mere thought—of it. How it leaped now, to remember what I had done there, until the fateful afternoon that I'd gone home to find my father overjoyed that he'd made a possible match for me with Amarië of the Vanyar. And, with that clarion summons back to my duty, the one time that I'd lived outside of the confines of the triplicate expectations of the Eldarin people had come to an end.

"Whatever you thought you knew of me then is long ended," I told him.

He watched me for a long time before speaking. "I don't think that it is," he said at last, and his finger lightly brushed my throat where my pulse still pounded at the memory of the stone arch, the dark alley, the strong and beautiful priest kneeling at my feet and asking to touch me with his eyes. So easily, he replaced another who had knelt at my feet in much the same way: the pale-haired boy from the Calarnómë. He'd in fact been not much younger than me, yet I thought of him as a boy. No, I didn't think of him at all—not anymore. But once I'd thought of him as a boy for his plaintive pleases and my lords, for his dutiful obedience, for his malleability in the bedroom, as though he'd not yet developed desires of his own.

I'd loved him. I'd thought I had. It had been impossible to tell; impossible to winnow genuine love from the welter of passion and defiance, and yes, power that his presence in my life inspired. With him, I—circumscribed by so many expectations—felt a sense of not only autonomy but of command, as though I was truly a prince as I’d been told, with a freedom to wander beyond the boundaries of propriety without fear of reprisal. In a hierarchical society as ours was, where one answered always to those above him, I felt pressed as though by a weight of stones by those above me: my father, my uncles and aunts, my grandfathers the kings, the Valar, each crowding upon me so that it was harder and harder to stand on my own. I was less free, I realized, to have my way than a common-born child would have been. But with him, those expectations evaporated, and it was as those who look with envy upon princes and kings wish it to be, and the world confined within the four walls of his apartment in the Calarnómë was a world of my making. I told him to change the laces in my boots and he did. I told him to draw me a bath and he did. I told him to whisper to me of the greatness of my kingdom while I made love to him. He did. I tied him to the bed, I left him unfulfilled, I explored and experimented with his body—and he allowed me.

I went home and my father had added my name to the list of attendees of a new lecture series, my uncle made a passive-aggressive remark that amounted to the conclusion that my table manners were become slovenly, and I should work on that, my mother had scheduled me to be fitted for new dress robes, I was no longer allowed to have pastries in my bedroom because the chambermaid had discovered ants … and the expectations looped around me in ever tighter and tighter concentricities—and I allowed it, for I had no choice.

When word came that I would be courting and hopefully marrying Amarië of the Vanyar, I told him that I would not be returning. He accepted that with the same uncomplaining obedience as he'd allowed many indignities done to his body. I thought that my love for him would generate such turbid emotions that I'd be forced to lie sick abed as lovers did in insipid novels of romance, but instead, I felt cold as I walked back through the streets that had once engendered such heat in me. Just as lovers did in those novels, I'd wanted him this once to surmount his submissiveness and beg me—no, insist that I—stay. But he hadn't. It had been, "Yes, my lord. I understand, my lord," and the removal of my collar from around his neck while his hands lay still in his lap, then I was one final time down the avenue to the main city and gone from his life.

Celegorm's fingers were still at my throat. I snatched them away. "Don't you dare," I said to him. His head lowered, as it had the night of the festival, when he touched me. I knew the gesture well. The broad shoulders, the lord's raiment, the Fëanorian pendant at his throat: These were the trappings of authority and strength, of one who commanded. And yet beneath that well-made raiment, I knew that he bore the mark of a servant, of one committed not even to a person but to a mere belief not even belonging to his own culture or family. My heart thundered with the thought of possessing him as once I'd possessed the boy. That one such as he should consent to be restrained and cut and fucked and forced to kneel excited me. I remembered those quick, expert strokes bringing me again to climax. My erection strained against my breeches.

"When is your next patrol, Celegorm?" I asked him.

His eyes remained lowered. I had never noticed before how thick his eyelashes were: Eyes made for bowing low, I found myself thinking. "Tomorrow evening. My king."

"Do not go. Wait for a message from me. I will tell you where to meet me. Expect to stay for however long it takes."

"Yes, my king."

Chapter Eight 
Celegorm

The apartment was along the deep road. It was thus far unclaimed, being small and well apart from the city center. It had two rooms with a window in the front room, so he made the back room our bedroom so that we could have the privacy we needed. When I went there, someone had filled it with lanterns and installed a wide bed with luxurious coverings and curtains tied aside with crimson silk ropes; I did not know—and did not ask—who.

This arrangement sometimes seemed too sudden to be believed. For many long centuries, I'd served Oromë. I'd seen Finrod initiated as the year-king a half-dozen times, hiding always in the churning crowd, masked so as not to be identified. In these recent years, I'd become trusted by the Avarin and Sindarin border guard so that they named me one of their own. This entitled me, when it was my turn to sleep while another stood watch, to periodic and frantic couplings with the other guards, so my lusts did not go unsated. Yet this year, the ritual had felt different. Always I'd seen the union of the king with the priestess of Arda as symbolic of the contribution of the king to the fertility of the earth, as a service, as a sacrificing of himself, an act that seemed very much in keeping with the spirit of Finrod's house. But this year, as I watched Finrod wrest pleasure from the virgin priestess, it occurred to me that he wasn't giving of himself so much as willing the earth to respond to him as he wanted, an act that ultimately pleasured him, when successful. The ritual was a display not of his obsequiousness but of his authority: Even the earth itself rejoiced in him and bowed to his command. Nargothrond itself, I realized as I walked beneath its stone trees, was more than mere artificiality but was itself emblematic of his authority.

When Gwaelathron brought him to the tent that night, his power had been such that it could not be sated upon the earth alone. I watched him sit there naked, legs opened slightly, his erection still wet and throbbing anew, and utterly shameless of all of these things, as a king should be who embodied the greatness to which the rest of us could only aspire. I had known such power only once before, and—despite my continued presence in his cult, my dutiful observance of his worship—Oromë would have naught to do with me now. Even centuries after it became caught upon a branch, snapped, and lost in the grass on the march north to Araman, my neck still felt naked without the pendant placed there as a symbol of my obedience to him.

I arrived at the apartment alone and ascended the stairs. I lighted that lanterns and lay upon the bed, but unlike when I'd awaited my lover from the tavern in the Calarnómë, I could not find sleep here. Desire, anticipation, and yes, confusion stirred my heart.

In the weeks after my initiation into the cult of Oromë, I'd remained unbelieving of it. I'd touched my scar on occasion and wondered how something so dramatic had happened so quickly and seemingly without my full consent. Such a choice seemed as though it should have required long deliberation and full consciousness; not surfacing from oblivion in various places that pressed me closer and closer to … I'd touched my pendant, then my scar. To this, which I still hadn't fully understood.

As I didn't fully understand this now. If asked, I would have easily identified Finrod's suitability as a lover or at least an object of desire, for it seemed the most desirable traits of each of the three kindreds were represented and illuminated in his person. But he and I had always traveled in different circles on account of the wildly different expectations pressed upon each of us: Finrod who was a paragon of the Eldarin people and I, who was so wholly antithetical to anything in the way of great expectations that, eventually, even my father who claimed that naught undone was impossible stopped sparing the energy to muster disappointment in my mediocrity.

I rose from the bed and went to the front room to look out the window. Nargothrond was blushed with false twilight, the lamp-lighters making their rounds as the first artful stars emerged from the roof of Nargothrond. Even a breeze stirred the curtains, although I knew not whence it came; my breath caught with the realization that my cousin's artfulness verged on godliness. The deep road was mostly quiet at this hour. A horse drawing a cart clopped slowly past. Faint music filtered down the road from an apartment up the street.

I do not know how he entered the apartment unless it was by a secret way kept from me. I turned and started to find him standing there, still in the intricately embroidered robes he wore in performing his duties as king; still with his hair bound in braids in a way that emphasized his high cheekbones and strong, straight nose. His gray eyes seemed alight from within. He said nothing. I hesitated, then went to him.

"I—I don't—"

"As you would for Oromë."

And as once a prince had been made a king, so a king was made a god.

I knelt and took his hand. I kissed each finger, lingering over the right index where once the ring of his house had rested. I kissed his palms, roughened by the work of the Noldor. I lifted the hems of his robes to unlace his boots, then held them so that he could step out of them. I rose to unlace his robes. "No. Remove my braids."

He sat on the bed while I did. His hair was softer and fairer than mine, the braids nearly falling away on their own accord once I released the pins that secured them. His hair came to the middle of his back, still holding a slight wave from the braids. I wanted to press my face into it, to know its scent, but I did not. I did lift it in my palm to feel its warmth and weight.

"There is a meal in the larder," he said without turning, so I went and set it out on the rough-hewn wooden table in the front room. I set two places but he declined to have anything more than a cup of wine. "I have eaten supper already with your brother," he said. "But I anticipate that you are hungry."

"I am."

The meal was simple—bread and cheese and smoked venison—but of the finest quality, the kind available to a king. I wanted to ask what he and my brother discussed every night at supper, but I did not. Thought alone of Curufin filled me with a delicious sense of the forbidden. I wondered what he would say if he knew that the upright cousin whose company he'd just left and the brother he assumed absent on patrol were on the verge of becoming lovers. (Or had we? Did my hasty pleasuring of him after the ceremony count? I was unclear on this point.)

He watched me intently as I ate but said nothing. When I had drained the last of my wine, he said, "Clear the dishes, then go to the bedroom. Undress. Get onto the bed and wait for me."

Though much had passed between the tavern and today, it was a familiar feeling to lie upon a bed, naked, and wait for a lover, yet I felt as nervous as I had in the early days of my affair with Tauretor. Ornate vials of oils and lotions stood upon a table at one side of the bed. I supposed that I would use them on him; only when drunk had Tauretor taken much concern for my pleasure. I didn't suppose that Finrod would take much concern for it either. I wondered if I would like it with Finrod or if it would hurt as it often had with Tauretor. If, when the pain began to diminish, it would become boring, as it had with Tauretor. If I had made a mistake.

My stomach in knots, I began to regret the food I'd eaten.

Finrod entered and began to remove his robes. I sat up slightly, as though to ask if he wanted my help, but he jerked his chin at me, and I took my signal and laid back down. He did not bother to hide that he was staring at me. I felt self-conscious even as my desire began to grow, as though his eyes had the weight of actual caresses. I arranged myself slightly so that I might look more pleasing to him. His fingers on the seemingly interminable clasps that held shut the front of his robes quickened.

He threw the robes on the back of a chair in the corner without much mind for the rich material that would become crumpled by his haste. He wore a silk tunic and breeches beneath, and as such, he came to climb upon the bed from the opposite side of me. For a long while, he knelt and looked down at me without touching, but then he lowered his face and kissed my mouth.

When had I been kissed like this? There had been the first awkward advances with maidens in Tirion, but then my lovemaking had been confined to rituals and Tauretor, who kissed my neck and chest (and sometimes left marks) but only rarely my mouth; there were the other guards in the field, but the kinds of pleasure we gave each other relieved a need and was not a time for kissing. His mouth was soft and tasted of the wine he'd drunk; even before he parted his lips and touched me with his tongue, he had explored my mouth with more thoroughness than anyone had explored any part of me before.

By the time our mouths opened to each other, I was breathless.

His hand rested on my knee and then slipped upward to stroke my inner thigh. I wanted to wriggle until it was in a more pleasing place but knew that my role in this forbade it. His thumb traced along the juncture of my leg and my body, and I couldn't help but to moan into his mouth. He shushed me, but tenderly, with a hand pressing my chest, then drew away and left me wanting, squeezing my eyes shut so that sight of him alone would not drive me to climax.

"Celegorm, I would have you as my lover. Do you consent to this?" I nodded. "No. Speak. I would hear your words."

"I consent to it," I said in a whisper.

"Do you understand what that means? You saw me at the Calarnómë, but do you understand why I went there?"

I remembered the pale-haired boy. I remembered the collar at his throat. I remembered the book Caranthir had given me: the man who lay submissive to the woman and her husband, who allowed all manner of things to be done to him, whether he wished it or not. In the worst moments with Tauretor, I had remembered that book, and the pain and frustration had only seemed to fuel my desire. I wondered what Finrod's expectation would precisely be. In the book, the husband had sometimes been rough with the man who served him, and then the wife would nurse the injuries done. Tauretor hadn't done much nursing, and I had borne him for longer than I should have. But Finrod— I remembered the kiss and the gentle way he touched me. That, I thought, I could bear forever.

"I understand."

"And yet you still consent?"

"I still consent."

He rose to his knees and pulled the tunic over his head. Quickly, he unlaced his breeches and pushed them from his hips. He was magnificent.

He reached for one of the glass bottles beside the bed and began to prepare himself. "You are a border guard, so I trust you have been touched by a man before."

"Oh yes."

He smiled at that, fleetingly, before his face fell calm again. "You like it in that way, then, rough and quick?"

"I know no other way, my lord."

He flinched at the words my lord. "Sometimes we will be rough, but I generally prefer to be tender. Like now, I would kiss you again. Then I will have you prepare yourself as I watch. Then I will take you on your hands and knees."

"Yes, my lord. I understand."

He kissed me again. The kiss between us before, I understood now, was akin to stretching from the side of a ship to trail one's fingers into a warm sea. Now I was submerged utterly. The length of his body pressed mine, his oiled erection slick against mine as he thrust against me. Hips, belly, chest pressed one another; his pounding heart gave lie to the calm, slow way in which he'd spoken to and touched me and now moved his body with such delicious slowness against mine. This was not the kind of love I'd had with Tauretor. I wasn't fully certain how to respond, but he seemed to like that: He pressed harder and faster.

When neither of us could bear the torment of the other any longer, he placed the jar into my hands and said, "I will take you now." He could have put a knife to my chest and said, "I will slay you now," and I would not have protested. When he thrust into me, I shouted, but it was not a protest, and he did not shush me this time.

~oOo~

I heated water for his bath and poured it over his body stretched long inside the copper tub. As the soap foamed high around him, agitated by the action of the water, I regretted covering him as such. His head was fallen back against the towel I had rolled there for him, his eyes shut, the ends of his hair trailing against the floor, his penis small again and spent. He had exhausted himself with me, I realized with satisfaction.

The water filled to his belly, his eyes still closed, he stretched a hand out blindly toward me. "You need a bath too," he said and pulled me toward the tub. I hesitated. "Go on. Get in with me."

I stood between his steepled knees, unsure how I should sit. He solved the quandary for me, pulling me down into the tub so that my head was resting against his chest, his arms tight around me. Something rose in my chest to be held that way, as I had not since I was very small, in a time I'd allowed myself to forget rather than endure the pain of remembering.

"You are weeping." He could not keep the edge of concern from his voice.

"Not for unhappiness."

He held me for a long time—so long that I wondered if he'd drifted to sleep—before speaking again. "Either of us can end this at any time. That is the only authority allowed to you; I will command you in all else. But should you wish for this to end, then we will part, and I will continue to welcome you in my kingdom as a cousin and friend. Nothing need change."

That, I knew, was a lie, and by the stiff way that he caressed me as he said it, I knew he knew it too. I would speak my own lie. I would promise to relinquish authority to him even in this, so that it might never end. I would promise to love him forever, above all else. But something larger than these two rooms and this single tub ground on around us with its silent but omnipresent machinery. I felt it stirring even now. It would outlast all of us. I could not even move my tongue, not even to utter a lie.

~oOo~

"Your patrols are shorter, are they not? At least, I see you more than once or twice a moon now," Curufin asked me one night at supper. Indeed, Finrod released me with greater frequency than I'd once returned from patrols, and I slept in my own apartment and my own bed for those few days, before returning by the deep road to the two rooms that we shared.

"They are," I said. "I missed you and Celebrimbor so I requested it of our cousin." He smiled at that. I wondered if I should mention his observation to Finrod, but surely Finrod knew that spacing of his own patrols and preferred my schedule to change. No, I decided; I would say nothing.

"Our cousin," mused Curufin, and my heart squeezed fearfully for a moment, thinking he had intuited what lay between us. "I see our cousin Finrod quite a bit these days, you know. I think it is safe to say, at this point, that my aim of gaining his graces has been accomplished. He speaks with me before any other, even poor, heartsick Orodreth. And you—"

"What of me?" I asked quickly.

"You have the loyalty of the Avari and Sindar here, do you not? They love you, do they not? Maybe even more than they love him?"

"They love me," I said, "but likely not more than they love him."

He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. "You are falsely modest. I hear how you are spoken of here. My point is that we wield a lot of power here, Celegorm. You do realize that."

"I do." I lied to silence him. I busied myself with cutting my meat into small, precise squares to avoid the inevitable places that thoughts of power took me: to the apartment, to Finrod's bed, to his gentle commands and the ecstasy that obedience to him so effortlessly brought to me. Even the sound of his name, uttered at incidental moments during the day by people I didn't know, could stir me to arousal.

I had once felt crushed in Nargothrond, and the patrols liberated me to where the thought of being confined again underground would have seemed unbearable to me. Now I spent most of my days confined not just to Nargothrond but to a mere two rooms, and yet my heart and mind felt as free as though left to wander unbound amid the stars of Eä. "I will want to come to you every night," Finrod had explained, "but that often won't be possible. Stretches of days may even pass when I cannot come to you. I will neither hear nor entertain protests of this fact. There will be a servant to attend your every need. You need only to trust that my preference would be always to come to you, that I suffer when absent, and that I shall return to you as soon as possible."

He did indeed come most evenings. I ate supper while he watched and drank wine. Sometimes we made love afterward; sometimes I massaged his back and shoulders, tense from the challenges of ruling; sometimes he drank until he fell asleep. He never stayed the night. "That is impossible," he said. "I must be where I am expected at night, lest I am needed and lest talk arise."

Perhaps, I realized, that was why he released me more frequently, assuming my misery in his absence. Yet I was not miserable. I anticipated his return, yes, but I was loved. One thousand times a day I said that: I am loved. Not since my friendship with my cousins, Finrod's brothers, had I felt so securely loved, and even then, I'd had reason to doubt.

~oOo~

"We haven't seen you in weeks."

It had been weeks since I'd attended a meeting by the fountain. It was Curufin who made the remark, his voice dripping with false innocence and cheer. My cousins, on the other hand, looked legitimately pleased to see me but held their emotions in check out of deference to Curufin. When had that happened? When had my brother come to look so startlingly like my father that none questioned the easy way he assumed the same degree of authority, authority that should be unthinkable in the voice of a fifth-born son?

"My brother has been hunting a lot," Curufin told our cousins as they shuffled to create room for me at the edge of the fountain. There was a slight emphasis on hunting; he knew it was not a pursuit respectable enough to justify my long absence, or anything really. He was correct as to my pursuit but not as to its frivolity; I hadn't been hunting so much as sounding my newfound abilities. I would lay with my ear to the earth and listen to the cheerful growth of roots or mourn with those stretching in vain for water or being devoured and slowly dying. I united with the thoughts of everything from the caterpillars that inched along twigs to the eagles that looked down from above. And I began to slowly issue my own commands, simple things like willing a thornbush to bend off of the path, nothing that yet brought something that would otherwise escape into the snare of death. But to tell of anyone of these things would require a rolling back in history to tell of what preceded it, and that—even to my most trusted friends—I could not do.

"I have been exploring in the forest," I corrected him.

Curufin scoffed. "He keeps saying that, but he cannot seem to name what he is exploring, or what he hopes to discover in a land that is more a pleasure garden than a forest."

In that, he was woefully wrong—death came to Valinor with the same frequency and ferocity as it visited anywhere else and certainly with greater frequency than came pleasure—but I could hardly say as much. "I am not just hunting," I said, "but mastering the use of terrain in order to be a more efficient hunter." The Noldor loved efficiency. My cousins nodded, and even Curufin was left without much else to pursue.

"Nonetheless," he said, changing directions. "You have been absent for two meetings now. So you owe the Parma Ettirniva not one but threesecrets."

I blinked. I hadn't counted on this. I had brought my one dull secret about my parents making love amid the drying laundry in the courtyard and mashing one of Maedhros's good velvet cloaks; Curufin would sigh at its inadequacy, but the others would tolerate it, I knew. Otherwise, I had nothing, for I had not come often lately among my own kind. Now if he wished to know where the hummingbirds nested or where the does took their fawns for their first mouthfuls of the tenderest grass, then I could tell him. But of our people? I could say nothing.

"I have only one," I said. "I wasn't expecting—give me until next week and—"

The way a spark touched to a clump of dry grass will alight each neighboring clump in turn, a glance passed among my cousins and fell last to my brother, who watched me with a directness that was disconcerting. "We have talked," began Angrod, brave Angrod, but his words faltered into silence, and what they talked about, he didn't say. He shot a look at Curufin that begged for rescue.

"We have," Curufin said so slowly that he almost drawled his words. "Celegorm, it is obvious of late that you are not as committed as you once were to this group."

A hunter learns to study and observe the movements of animals and the shape of the terrain to where he can almost discern the future. Flush to the left there and the buck will dash between those two trees—and sure enough, it came to pass. I could see such a pattern emerging now: I am about to be kicked out of the group. So many times, this threat had floated above me, yet it had never seemed truly real. Now it did, and it was as though the bottom had dropped out of chest, leaving my stomach in freefall.

The only thing other Noldor ever found to truly praise me about was the power of my speech, but this was empty praise, for it wasn't the speech itself—not like it was with my father and certain of my brothers—the artful braiding of word and inflection, but my inability to control my emotions. That happened now. A tear sliced down my cheek. "I beg you to believe that is not true." My voice trembled; there was no art in that. "I know I have been absent, and now I am found wanting. I know, and I am sorry, and I beg your forgiveness. Send me away today, if you must, and let me return next week with my secrets, but do not forsake me. I beg you. You are as my brothers, and it would break my heart." My voice broke on heart. "My absence has had nothing to do with you. I have been … finding myself … in the forest—"

Curufin actually laughed at that.

"Celegorm, your artful speech doesn't work among those who have long profited from it."

My cousins, on the other hand, looked distressed. Angrod was scratching his cheek and avoiding my eyes. Aegnor was restlessly folding and unfolding his legs beneath himself, trying to give the appearance of seeking comfort. Orodreth looked straight into my face and, for a moment, I feared straight into my fëa. The scar on my chest itched and all the secrets I had hidden in the past months—or thought I had hidden—seemed to shimmer momentarily in the naked air between us. Then they dropped away and back into obscurity. My hand—risen to press my scar—dropped back to my side.

"You must produce your three secrets," Curufin went on, "or you must leave us and cannot return, certainly no time soon and possibly ever."

Tears dripped freely from my chin now. Suddenly, the whole of my past few months seemed ripe for the taking if I could save my place with them. I thought frantically. The Calarnómë. Caranthir. I seized them as a drowning man gropes for one still afloat, even though the action will likely drown them both. "There is something," I said.

I heard myself tell of the Calarnómë. I described its streets, its squalor, the pounding drums and smells of humanity and smoke and food. As I spoke, certain features I occluded without thinking of it: the stone arch, the dark alley, the tavern and the barkeep and his apartment, anything to do with Finrod (for my cousins, I told myself, could not bear to hear ill of the brother whom they so deeply loved and admired). My omissions made no difference; even Curufin was wide-eyed to hear tell of it. "So it is real," said Aegnor at last.

"It is real," I affirmed. "And Caranthir—"

After my first visit, I had seen or heard nothing more of Finrod, but the same could not be said of Caranthir. He commanded the kind of respect and fame in his shadowy world that we all longed to command in the world of light. "You are Caranthir's brother," more than one person had said to me, unmindful of the fact that I was the elder (and so he was my brother). "Oh, I haven't met him. Just heard of him." Although, quite a few had met him as well. "He is well-known," I said. "Infamous, almost." Infamous seemed a bit strong; I justified it in my own mind by reminding myself that anyone well-known there must naturally have a touch of infamy.

"There are places there called drinking clubs," I said. "They meet underground, literally. The doorways are little iron gates between buildings that you could miss if you didn't know to look. He is a member in the most prestigious one."

The drinking clubs, Tauretor explained to me, heard unusual poetry, listened to esoteric music, and debated heretical ideas. Members of these clubs were known for their sexual precocity, exchanging erotic books and manuals on the arts of love, and Caranthir certainly fit that stereotype, having been found suitably learned in the amorous arts (these all Tauretor 's words, although I naturally didn't tell Curufin and my cousins that) by several distinguished women.

"The book!" Curufin interjected there, and I agreed, "Yes, the book."

Unlike most in the drinking clubs, he didn't favor casual dalliances but had had several brief but intense affairs that he would have certainly described (from his side anyway) as love. One woman he nearly married, but she was accepted into the university in Valmar—of all places!—and would make no marital commitment until she completed her term. And, like any untended fire, without proximity and frequent contact, their romance quickly withered to ash.

"Caranthir is not a virgin," Curufin interrupted, "is what you are telling us."

"Yes."

"Caranthir?"

"Yes."

"Caranthir!"

"Yes. I have heard he is currently unattached, though not for lack of interest from the women who know him there."

All were wide-eyed, and only a second of silence passed before they were all asking me questions at once. I answered them and basked in my return to their good graces and my momentary fame. I spared a thought for Caranthir, who had never done anything wrong to me and had in fact shown me his version of kindness, but the guilt at what I had just done was too immense to acknowledge without a penance of walking away now, before the startling knowledge of my brother—declared an enemy for no better reason than his preference for the company of others over us—metamorphosed into some type of plan against him. And I could not bring myself to walk away. I swallowed hard and forgot his kindness. Under my brother's command and at my cousins' sides, I began to plot.

~oOo~

I jerked awake from a dream. I was in the wide bed in the apartment. Through the open door separating the two rooms, I could see night beyond the small window, or the pale blue light that signaled night. Finrod hadn't come. I wondered, as I always did, what kept him.

My face was wet with tears, my body damp with sweat. I felt more exhausted than when I'd lain upon the bed to sleep, as though I'd been enduring some agonizing torment. I even patted my body through my clothes but found no mark. I rose gingerly, expecting pain; none came. The dream—I tried to recall the dream I'd been having when I'd awakened. It felt like it had spooled out over the course of hours, though certainly that could not be true. That was what had left me feeling wrung out.

I'd been apologizing. To a line of people. As each stepped forward, his or her face became clear; behind each were the faceless gray shadow-figures of those who still awaited my words. First my mother, for choosing my father over her. Then my father, for being such a disappointment.

Grandfather Finwë: for fleeing the Dark, for who knew if I had ridden with haste to Formenos if I could have saved him.

Grandfather Mahtan and Grandmother Istarnië: for leaving Tirion without saying goodbye.

The Telerin mariners I'd slain took a while. I thought King Olwë would follow last, but it was his wife, and I had to apologize for the death of her sons.

My cousins, for abandoning them to cross the Helcaraxë. One by one, with Turgon next-to-last, his daughter in his arms, and Orodreth last of all, for he'd been the best of all of them to me. Maedhros, for casting my vote to leave him to torment in Angband. Amras for striking his face when he challenged me about that with words that I could not refute.

By the time Caranthir came to me, there was only one shadow left behind him. "I loved you best of all when we were children," he said. "Even more than Atar." There was no accusation in his voice, only fact. I knew this, although I had forgotten. "Even once we were grown, I preferred you to the others and treated you accordingly."

There was a silver band upon his finger. He wrenched it off with great difficulty, presented it upon an outstretched palm. "Take it." "No." "Take it." "No." He tipped his hand and let it fall to the floor. He stepped upon it, and it was shattered beneath his foot with a scream of broken glass.

"Caranthir." I was weeping now, taking his naked hand and holding it to my face. "Caranthir, I am sorry, I am sorry."

"Yours was not the first but it was the betrayal that hurt me worst of all."

"I know, I know, I beg your—"

But he walked away. The shadow behind him began to come forward. Features began to arrange themselves into light and shadows, done in shades of gray. Oromë, I thought. It will be Oromë. I didn't think I could bear it. He would be holding my lost pendant in his fist, and I would know that its loss was deliberate and not an accident painfully coincident with my exile. I would know that I had long been found unworthy of him. I began to scramble for an escape—coward—but stone enclosed me on all sides, like Nargothrond but not, the work of a king but not—

Finrod.

It was Finrod who stepped forward.

His robes were as blue as the midnight sky, inlaid with jewels that winked and flashed crimson and gold like stars. At his throat sat the Nauglamír; upon his head, he wore his crown. Upon his hand—the right finger where a wedding band should rest—was his father's ring: the twined serpents and the crown of gold. His hair was unbound, still waved from his braids and damp at the ends from his bath. There was neither anger nor sadness upon his face, as there had been upon the others. He was almost beatific in his resignation.

"Of what? Of what do I have to apologize to you for? The Helcaraxë? For starting the rift between our families?"

"You know I love you more than those things matter."

"Then what?"

With my scream, I awoke.

~oOo~

My sleep was restless that night. Not for the first time, I wished for Finrod beside me, although I knew it was impossible and that I was forbidden to even suggest it. I tossed and grew too warm beneath the blankets, threw them aside, and then awoke too cold. Dreams marched through my restive thoughts as flashes of the impossible and inexplicable: seemingly meaningless or even innocent things that seemed to carry a sudden weight. Once, I rose to check the light, certain that morning must be near, but the lamps still flared bright and the stars had just begun to move: The night was, at most, only a few hours old.

I poured a glass of wine, hoping it would soothe my thoughts and allow me to sleep, and when I returned to the bedroom with it in my hand, Finrod was there.

There was a secret stair, I had since learned, that he used. He was perched upon the edge of the bed with a rigidity that suggested nervousness—impossible, I knew—and was, disturbingly, dressed almost as he'd been in my dream: in dark blue robes picked through with silver thread and an ornate necklace (but not the Nauglamír) at his throat. My eyes darted to his hands—I do not know why—but they were bare of rings. The ring of his house, I realized not for the first time, that he'd brought over the Ice upon his hand, I had yet to see upon his hand in Nargothrond. His hair was still braided. Wherever he'd been before here, it was in his capacity as king.

My surprise must have shown on my face to find him in the apartment so suddenly and so late because he gave me a rare explanation for his behavior. "I have something very important to ask of you tonight. I was detained, but I would not wait. Please bring me a glass of wine."

When I returned, he was removing his robes. There were laces in the lower part of the back, and I loosened them for him. (Who, I wondered, tightened them?) He drank his wine as I undid his braids. "More please." That was quick. "Bring the bottle this time so that you don't have to leave the room again." I did as instructed. "I would have a bath." By the time I had set the water to warm, his second glass of wine was gone too.

Under the guise of bathing him, I could touch him intimately, but he didn't become aroused tonight when I did, nor did he kiss me as I leaned over him, nor did he say much to me at all. He turned his attention primarily to his wine. I was beginning to fear that he was going to invoke his right to end our relationship—my heart quailed at the mere thought—and I was steeling myself to respond with a measure of self-respect when he held out his hand to me, his familiar gesture that indicated that he wanted me to join him.

I undressed and lowered myself into the water between his knees, in our usual way of reclining in the tub with my back against his chest, but he caught my wrist and said, "No, not tonight. I'd have you face me. I wish to speak to you."

He was on his fifth glass of wine, and by the looseness in his voice, I knew it was beginning to addle him a bit. "You have been loyal to me and done everything that I've asked, Celegorm," he said. "This time with you has been like a dream I don't want to end."

How fiercely I wished I could tell him that I didn't want it to end either! I held my tongue, yet he smiled at me like he knew.

"Our initial agreement obligated you to obey me and submit to me, asserting your own will only if you wished to end our relationship. I would deepen our commitment." He was watching me carefully. He took another deep drink of wine. "I would regard you as my own, as an extension of my person, and treat you as such."

"My lord?"

"Do you remember how I claimed Arda at the festival? I would likewise claim you, and have you wear the emblem of that claim. Going forth, we would think of each other as the same as ourselves." He drained his glass and stood. His legs, I saw, trembled. "I will let you think on it. I must return to my rooms."

"My lord, I—" I began to rise from the tub, but he was already toweling himself dry.

"If you decide you want to go forth with it, we will have the ceremony when next we meet. I have much on my mind these days." He let the towel fall to the floor and began to dress with his back to me. "I do not know when I will be able to return next. You will likely have several days to make your decision."

"My lord, I answer yes."

"Think on it, Celegorm. I do not ask for your answer now, and it is not to be embarked upon lightly." He turned to me. "What comes to me will come to you. You will feel my joy and suffering both, and I yours." He shrugged into his robes but didn't bother to lace them. "Think on it."

Chapter Nine 
Finrod

Orodreth had come to me that night. Curufin and I were speaking idly while the servants cleared away the custard dishes, when Orodreth burst into the room, his clothing disheveled and hair coming loose from his braids. "Finrod, I must speak to you." He gripped the back of a chair, his knuckles squeezed white; his pupils were dilated to where his eyes seemed more black than gray. I felt a sickening lurch of fear. The madness was coming upon him. I hadn't seen it in a very long time. The peace of Nargothrond had kept it from him, or so I'd assumed. I could laugh at the pride underlying such a foolish assumption.

Curufin glanced at me and made a coughing sound that might have been the start of a laugh that died in his throat at the sight of the black pools of Orodreth's eyes. He was breathing hard, wheezing with every breath. "I—" said Curufin. When he looked at me next, his face was drawn with fear. "I should leave?"

It was not often that Curufin was so reduced. I felt all of the arts of discourse he had mastered crumble before the raw terror in my brother's eyes. "You should. My apologies, and I will send you a message in the morning. He is ill."

I took him to my bedroom, shouting to my servants to bring towels soaked in cool water and sleep-wine. Halfway down the hall, he began to fight me, but Orodreth was never physically powerful, and I wrapped my arms around him as I had been doing since we were children, when these attacks were upon him. In such a manner, I guided him backwards down the hall. He retched and vomited a clear stream of liquid onto the floor. "You don't understand—I must—you must—listen to—I know—I know—I see—"

The servant helped me lift him onto the bed. "No!" he shouted when I held his arms to the bed and he saw the servant advancing with the sleep-wine. "No!" And in a burst of lucidity, he completed a sentence: "Finrod, I dreamt of the ring with the twined serpents."

I lifted my hand to stall the servant from forcing the sleep-wine upon him. I had told no one that I had given the ring to Barahir, not even Orodreth. Although it had been my father's, I had worn it only rarely; my father had smaller hands than me, and it fit poorly and, besides, was not a design I preferred. Serpents—of all animals!—and a crown of gold for a house that had no ambition or even hope for sovereignty. I had often wondered at my father's choice in it. "Two minds upon one body," he'd said when he gave it to me at his departure, "yet one supports the crown of kingship while the other devours it. Mind the meaning of it, Finrod."

"Finrod, you must listen to me," Orodreth said, "and then I will lie still and sleep. The two oaths—they are moving. Like the gears in machines. They are moving and converging, and when they do, I fear so many lives will be crushed between them." He began to weep. "You will leave Nargothrond. Both oaths will push you hence. I cannot see the good in him that you can, Finrod. Forgive me, forgive me, for I will drive him from your doors. But it will be too late for you by then. I am in the dark with you, I am in the dark, and I cannot see you, but I know you are there. I am in the dark, and I have no idea what is going to happen next." As delirium seized him again, his words became nearly indecipherable, but I touched my mind to his and felt and saw what he saw. Stone walls rose about me, but I was not in Nargothrond. I felt them, icy and damp, as fear like none I'd ever known—even on the verge of death during the Dagor Bragollach—writhed inside my guts. Orodreth had stopped fighting me and silently wept. "Now let me sleep. Let me sleep! I would see no more."

~oOo~

When I was almost come of age, Grandfather Finwë invited me to stay overnight at the palace. Grandmother was visiting her relatives in Valmar, and he summoned me under a pretense of desiring my companionship to alleviate his loneliness at her absence. I remember that we rode together to some of the lower streets of the city and sat on the wall and ate ices. He told me stories late into the night, as he had done when I'd been a child, and in the familiar comfort of his presence, the confusion of adolescence had almost melted away. But when I sat opposite him at breakfast the next morning, he spoke to me as a child no longer but the man I would soon become. "Finrod, I have brought you here for a purpose beyond my own selfish wishes. There is something of great importance that I wish you to know."

I had by then begun to perceive the moods of others. I had assumed, as a boy, that all could do it, until I realized one day that my uncle had walked directly into an easily avoided—to my mind—argument with Aunt Anairë because he'd been ignorant of her black mood. Strong thoughts had begun to force their way into my mind of late as well. "Our family is blessed and cursed with it, the mindspeak," said my grandfather. "It comes through me. It skipped all of my sons save your father, but I see it even stronger in my grandchildren. Caranthir was the first, and I didn't know it when it manifested in him, and I am afraid that my ignorance has done him great harm. Your Uncle Fingolfin's children it has mostly skipped, save a slight susceptibility in Turgon. But you and your siblings all have it, through your father. Yours is not as strong as some of the others, but you must nonetheless learn how to control it, then use it responsibly."

I was still young enough to be competitive, and I asked immediately, "Who has it the strongest, if not me?"

Grandfather Finwë chuckled. "You cannot be the best at everything, Finrod. Caranthir has it the strongest, stronger even than me; it is something he often cannot control. Your brother Orodreth and your sister experience it strongly as well. Your sister has a masterful mind, and it will be truly a gift to her, and she will wield it with great skill. But Orodreth is not as strong and will not always be able to control it. Then you must protect and care for him, and most of all, listen to him."

For in those who had it the strongest, Grandfather explained, the emotions of others became so palpable that they felt those emotions as their own. They could perceive thoughts, although it took time and practice to discern accurately the person thinking those thoughts and avoid being deceived. And they could, at times, move in time as they moved in space.

That puzzled me. "You can go where you will in space, can you not, Finrod? You can sit here for an hour without moving, or you can spend that hour walking into the east, or you can spend that hour running hither and thither in all directions. But time marches forward at a steady pace and always in one direction, and you are swept along as though upon the current of a river. Those like your brother can sometimes move along time as you would move around in space. They can go back and perceive what happened in the past. They can go forward and see what is yet to come. This movement is not entirely free. But as far as I have been able to tell, something innocent in the environment will act as a trigger, and this trigger opens the mind to move out of the march of time."

"Are you sure I'll never be able to do this?" I'd asked, sorely jealous that I would not, for at the time it had seemed a great power to possess.

"I cannot guarantee that. Your powers are lesser than your cousin's and brother's but remain considerable. But it is not something to envy, Finrod. It thrusts the mind into an unnatural place and so provokes illness in the mind and, therefore—since one is linked to the other—in the body as well. You must be prepared to care for your brother when this comes upon him. I have told your father and mother as well, but they do not have the gift and so won't understand as you will."

I gave him my word, and I have kept it.

~oOo~

The two oaths—they are moving. Like the gears in machines. They are moving and converging, and when they do, I fear so many lives will be crushed between them.

Orodreth lay in sleep free from dreams. I lay beside him, holding him loosely.

The oaths are moving.

I had an awful vision of two enormous animals rising from the earth. For bones they were filled with the machinery of fate, grinding ever steadily onward; some slow gear had clicked into place after centuries, and now their legs straightened and pushed them toward the surface. Mountains crumpled and slid from their backs. They left wounds within the earth that the insatiable sea rushed to fill. When they bellowed, the stars shivered.

The two oaths.

I knew, of course, of what he spoke: my oath to Barahir, and the Fëanorions' long-ago oath in Valinor. But I lay with a Fëanorion in love. I shared one of the deepest bonds with him that two people could share. With Orodreth's prognostication, I too felt those oaths stirring—many lives will be crushed between them—and I wondered, would that bond be enough to lessen if not forestall the inevitable collision? What if the monstrous machinery of fate could move in unison rather than at variance with one another, synchronized by the love that the poets would have us believe was all-powerful? I did not know if such a thing was even possible, but I had to try.

~oOo~

I had brought many things out of Valinor that had, in hindsight upon the Helcaraxë, seemed frivolous: jewelry, old toys from my childhood, storybooks, elegant clothing. I could have left them, a monument upon the Ice to the last of the Noldorin innocence, in a place where it was likely to endure perhaps even longer than those who bore the forsaken burdens. Yet I did not, for in caring for these burdens, my mind was kept from recalling those now beyond my care. When I navigated a trunk of ceremonial clothing up a steep hill of ice, my mind could not dwell upon how easily Amarië had broken our engagement. I let the ache in my shoulders from carrying a cask of jewels fill my thoughts so that I would not think of my father's preference for his own safety over the right pursuit against Morgoth. I passed out toys for the children to clutch and perhaps forget, in some small measure, their terror and misery, and that barest kindling of joy in their eyes became as a polestar that I strayed ever toward, rather than remembering my grandfathers and my mother and wandering deeper into grief.

Upon establishing myself in Beleriand, some of the items I'd brought found use again and others I gave away, but a few receded deeper into my stores as the years passed for reasons not always easily articulated. Under my apartment in Nargothrond were a string of rough-hewn rooms too small to make much out of, and in one of those, I stowed the trunks—now moldering, the wood chipped in places, succumbing to inevitable decay—that I'd brought forth from Valinor. As Orodreth slept his dreamless sleep that night, I went down to this room. I was still dressed as though for court and supper with Curufin, in dark blue robes threaded with silver, a heavy necklace worrying at my neck, and braids dignified a few short hours ago and now achingly tight.

The trunk was not hard to find, for it was the shabbiest of them all, containing nothing that I wanted to work to preserve. There were old riding clothes in it that fell apart with the barest touch, rough books filled with notes and sketches that hadn't amounted to anything, shoes that were a gift from my grandmother but always pinched my feet and still smelled faintly of the lavender sachets she'd given me to keep in them. I tipped one, and shreds of cloth and flowers fell out of the toe, and I wanted to weep.

I had once made some ugly watercolors for Grandfather Olwë's begetting day but had never given them to him—realizing their ugliness, I suppose—and I moved them to the side. There was a box of glass beads that I used to use in playing jewelsmith with Galadriel before she very quickly grew out of that. I set it to the side. A box of comments from one of my later and less successful exhibitions. To the side. Disintegrated paper that had become a mouse's nest. I scrounged through it with my fingers and there found what I sought.

The leather was thin and supple. I'd burned the design on it myself, remembering the dual sensations of adoration and lust as I'd imagined fastening it at his throat. I smelled it, but it smelled only faintly of leather, not of the pale boy from the Calarnómë. The design gave the impression of two separate strands—I remember explaining this patiently to him while he listened with his hands pressed between his knees—but once one bothered to untangle them, there was only one. It was a symbol of unity, I'd added, in case he hadn't gotten that; he wasn't Noldorin, and I didn't trust that his mind found meaning in the same way that mine did.

It was a symbol of union too, not that we'd achieved anything like that. Once installed at Amarië's side, I'd forgotten him easily. And yet, when sweeping items seemingly at random from my shelves and drawers into these trunks upon my departure from Tirion, when I'd found this small strip of leather curled at the bottom of a drawer, I hadn't had to think twice before tossing it in with the rest.

I sat on the floor in that rough-hewn room and let my thumb trace the design upon the collar. I'd no doubt that Celegorm would accept. I understood less what I hoped to accomplish in the asking. The two oaths—the stern stone floor beneath my knees seemed to belie the motion of the two oaths that Orodreth had perceived as gargantuan machinery far beneath even the deepest halls of Nargothrond, yet I trusted him that the time would come where, even here, we would feel their laborious and hulking ascendance. Did I truly think that this would stop it? I spoke aloud to the empty room and said again, "I have to try."

But that wasn't all of it either. "Maybe this once I can choose love alongside duty." Maybe when I walked away this time—as Orodreth had foreseen that I would—as I too knew that I would—then I would not leave love forsaken behind me.

Nargothrond itself was sprung of a great unfailing hope. While my cousins and my brothers made war to the north, then I made a sanctuary. I carved a piece of paradise from the living rock and bent the will of the corrupted earth to my desires rather than Morgoth's. I was sick with my own unquenchable hope, a king who had united kindreds and willed peace in the midst of roaring discord, who curled around a strip of leather clutched to my chest, fighting not to weep.

~oOo~

I waited five agonizing days after making my proposal to Celegorm before returning to the apartment.

Orodreth was often ill with his visions in those days, and I let caring for him keep me from straying in the direction of the deep road. Curufin, happy to assist me in any capacity during my brother's convalescence—or so he assured me—brought me documents to sign and reports from my court, recalling entire speeches and conversations verbatim while I hastily spooned stew into my mouth, listening for my brother to cry in his distress from behind the closed bedroom door, already poised to rise when he did.

"I understand," Curufin had told me, nodding and saying simply, but in a voice laden with meaning, "Caranthir."

On the fifth day, Orodreth had no episodes and came to the table for both breakfast and luncheon. Our conversation meandered about the dull philosophical topics that we both enjoyed, though shying away from true argument. He had a half-glass of wine and drank prodigious amounts of water. "I think I will return to my rooms today," he said as the dishes were cleared from lunch.

Ordinarily, I would insist he stay for one day more at least. Instead, I asked merely, "Are you certain that is wise?" and he replied, "I will have my daughter stay the night with me."

That left me descending to the deep road earlier than usual, with the light still full and bright and the streets full of noise. Many called to me, and I forced myself to stop and hear their tales and share their laughter so as not to appear suspicious. I even stopped and watched the work of a young artist whose sketches I admired. My heart thundered, and I had to remind myself that others couldn't hear it. I had to remind myself that no one watched so closely as to see the extra haste in my step or the fast-beating pulse at my throat.

Just before the deep road was a waterfall that plunged into a stream that ran beneath the bridge at the top of the road. I ducked behind the waterfall and used a key to open one of the few locked doors within Nargothrond.

Fëanorian lamps bathed the passageway in a perpetual bluish glow. As once sight alone—thought alone—of the archway and the dark alley in the Calarnómë stirred my arousal, so this narrow stone tunnel did the same, and with the door locked behind me, I no longer had to exercise decorum. My footsteps slapped the ground at a trot, then a run. I stopped only to compose myself before the door to the apartment before entering.

Celegorm rarely noticed when I entered, for the hidden door was behind a promontory of stone that disguised my entrance. He was lying facedown on the bed, reading a book. He wore light trousers and went shirtless—a wooden practice sword rested against the wall and he'd kicked off his boots at the bottom of the bed, revealing how he'd been engaged only minutes earlier—and a thin sheen of sweat on his skin caught the lamplight and placed the contours of his body in a relief of cobalt and gold. His honey-golden hair gleamed and fell unfettered over his shoulders. He was beautiful. My breath caught.

I eased forward and still he did not see me. He cleared his throat into his hand and turned the page. His buttocks were very round beneath the thin material of his trousers. He swirled his foot in a figure-eight pattern upon the bedspread. His shoulders and arms were well-muscled and powerful, as his legs would be too, once I took the trousers from him, I knew. My admiration hardened into desire. I stepped forward fully into the light.

As many times as I'd come to him, he always looked surprised to see me and scrambled for a moment as though unsure how to best please me. He reached for his shirt even as he shoved the book away and then abandoned both to come forward. "My lord. You are early."

He knelt before me. I caught his face in my hands and made him look up at me. "I could wait no longer."

"The answer," he said, "is still yes."

I stood before him in my full splendor: the king of Nargothrond, richly clad and graced with jewels, presiding over the most remarkable realm in Beleriand. He crouched low, and I had to lift his chin again as I drew the collar from the deep pocket of my robes. His eyes flashed to mine, and I knew he recognized it. He drew back slightly. "I am not worthy of this …"

"Celegorm, son of Fëanor, you are."

I slipped it around his neck. He was still damp beneath his hair, and his skin was fairly glowing with warmth. As I tightened the buckle, I felt his pulse beating fast at his throat.

"Celegorm, son of Fëanor, this collar symbolizes our unity. Our lives and our fates are entwined as a single thread. I love you as I love myself, and no longer shall I think of us as two but as one, and all that I choose shall be with you at the forefront of my mind."

"I am one with you, Finrod Felagund, King of Nargothrond," he murmured in reply.

I hooked my finger into the collar and drew him to his feet. I had forgotten the pleasurable ease of such a gesture. "Undress and lie down," I commanded, and he did, and I undressed myself slowly before him, so that I could watch upon his naked body every response of his desire.

The curtains of the bed were tied back with braids of red silk rope. I undid one and watched the confusion and anticipation flit across his face. "As I have united with Arda as the year-king," I told him, "so I will unite with you. As has come to pass with Arda, our fates will be joined, and you will be mine to command, as long as you wear my collar at your throat."

I had dreamt many times of his initiation, of what it must have been like for the priest who held him down so that, delirious and frightened, he could be taken. I wondered if he fought as many did, or if he was resigned, as he usually was with me. I lay his arms above his head. I kissed the throbbing pulse at his wrist and the tender undersides of his arms, even as I looped the rope around his wrists. He gasped when I tightened it and swiftly lashed it to the bedpost. I felt at once his desire and unease as the full awareness of his helplessness descended upon him; as I had shaped the earth to my will, so I was trying to shape him. I watched the muscles in his arms flex and relax, flex and relax, as he tested his restraints. He pulled hard, and the bedpost creaked, but the tether did not give. His blue eyes were bright with fear at what I was attempting.

I straddled him and sat on his legs. "I could do anything to you now." To remind him of what that entailed, I traced the scar on his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut as though remembering and bit his lip. His memories came upon me. I felt his ecstasy and scribed upon it the pain of his marking and a quiver of shame that he was so easily subjected to both. "You are lucky that I love you."

I kissed his mouth and his throat. I took his nipple between my teeth, and his feet pedaled against the bedclothes and then lay still, as he realized that I was not going to hurt him. The bedpost creaked again. I moved my mouth down the taut, quavering muscles of his belly, stopping when I reached the golden hair at his groin. He groaned in frustration as I left his cock, slick at the tip already, untouched, but the bedpost didn't creak this time. "Good. You are learning," I said to him, but I didn't give him the reward he craved.

"Spread your legs," I said, and he did. "Lift your knees." He did. I poured oil upon my palm and prepared him. He was tense with anticipation, and one finger was uncomfortable; he made a sound in his throat when I added the second. "Relax," I told him. In this, he was not so easily commanded. I withdrew my fingers and knelt between his knees. "What is it that you want?" I asked.

"I want you to fuck me. I want you to love me."

I poured more oil into my palm and prepared myself hastily. I gripped his thighs, lifted his hips, and thrust into him. His back arched away from the bed. He bit his lip harder to keep from crying out. I moved steadily and hard inside him. His bound hands were clenched into fists, but he fought his restraints no longer. He is mine. The thought made my lust for him build to unbearable levels. Mine. Again and again I thrust into him until no amount of obedience could keep him from crying my name, and I climaxed at the sound of it.

He trembled in my arms as I held him—or was it I who trembled? He'd bitten his own lip to the point of blood. I kissed it clean. When I trusted my hands enough to fumble the knots undone, then I released him from the rope. His arms must have ached from it, but once freed, he didn't stretch or wring out his fingers, certainly numb by now. He held me in his arms and pressed his face to my chest.

Come what may, our lives—our fates—were entwined.

~oOo~

I had told him I would never stay the night, but this seemed the night to break that rule, if ever there was one. He was still sleeping when dawn's first light crept up the walls of Nargothrond, but I woke him to say goodbye. Half-asleep, he whispered, "You stayed," and rose to help me dress, but I pressed him back to the bed and kissed him and bade him sleep.

The streets were almost deserted except for a few farmers taking carts out of Nargothrond to bring back the harvest. The fullest time of the year was upon us, the time when we never had to worry about going in want. I certainly did not want for anything, I realized. I balled my fists inside my robes to keep my body from leaping and gnawed my lip to save my face from the ridiculous grin that sought to announce my happiness to the few passersby awake so early in the morning.

Whatever monsters of fate were yet far below Nargothrond, and whatever fears Orodreth had spun from out of the deeps of time hovered still well above the stone ceilings. I had made Nargothrond as a place for peace and free of fear. Perhaps for the first time since my lantern had revealed the unhewn stone and infinite potential of its walls, I knew those feelings for myself.

As I approached my apartment, a figure detached itself from pacing in front of my door: one of the border guards, his face worn with having waited for me all night and drawn with worry. I stopped where I stood and let him approach. Peace and happiness suffused every inch of my being. I willed time to slow. The oaths would awaken, and the visions would descend upon us. But not in this moment. I stood regally and let him approach, as befitted a king. Not in this moment! Make it last forever.