The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 2: Celegorm

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.