The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 6: Celegorm

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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.