The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 1: Finrod

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.