The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 4: Celegorm

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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.