The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 5: Finrod

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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.