The Sovereign and the Priest by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 8: Celegorm

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Chapter Eight 
Celegorm

The apartment was along the deep road. It was thus far unclaimed, being small and well apart from the city center. It had two rooms with a window in the front room, so he made the back room our bedroom so that we could have the privacy we needed. When I went there, someone had filled it with lanterns and installed a wide bed with luxurious coverings and curtains tied aside with crimson silk ropes; I did not know—and did not ask—who.

This arrangement sometimes seemed too sudden to be believed. For many long centuries, I'd served Oromë. I'd seen Finrod initiated as the year-king a half-dozen times, hiding always in the churning crowd, masked so as not to be identified. In these recent years, I'd become trusted by the Avarin and Sindarin border guard so that they named me one of their own. This entitled me, when it was my turn to sleep while another stood watch, to periodic and frantic couplings with the other guards, so my lusts did not go unsated. Yet this year, the ritual had felt different. Always I'd seen the union of the king with the priestess of Arda as symbolic of the contribution of the king to the fertility of the earth, as a service, as a sacrificing of himself, an act that seemed very much in keeping with the spirit of Finrod's house. But this year, as I watched Finrod wrest pleasure from the virgin priestess, it occurred to me that he wasn't giving of himself so much as willing the earth to respond to him as he wanted, an act that ultimately pleasured him, when successful. The ritual was a display not of his obsequiousness but of his authority: Even the earth itself rejoiced in him and bowed to his command. Nargothrond itself, I realized as I walked beneath its stone trees, was more than mere artificiality but was itself emblematic of his authority.

When Gwaelathron brought him to the tent that night, his power had been such that it could not be sated upon the earth alone. I watched him sit there naked, legs opened slightly, his erection still wet and throbbing anew, and utterly shameless of all of these things, as a king should be who embodied the greatness to which the rest of us could only aspire. I had known such power only once before, and—despite my continued presence in his cult, my dutiful observance of his worship—Oromë would have naught to do with me now. Even centuries after it became caught upon a branch, snapped, and lost in the grass on the march north to Araman, my neck still felt naked without the pendant placed there as a symbol of my obedience to him.

I arrived at the apartment alone and ascended the stairs. I lighted that lanterns and lay upon the bed, but unlike when I'd awaited my lover from the tavern in the Calarnómë, I could not find sleep here. Desire, anticipation, and yes, confusion stirred my heart.

In the weeks after my initiation into the cult of Oromë, I'd remained unbelieving of it. I'd touched my scar on occasion and wondered how something so dramatic had happened so quickly and seemingly without my full consent. Such a choice seemed as though it should have required long deliberation and full consciousness; not surfacing from oblivion in various places that pressed me closer and closer to … I'd touched my pendant, then my scar. To this, which I still hadn't fully understood.

As I didn't fully understand this now. If asked, I would have easily identified Finrod's suitability as a lover or at least an object of desire, for it seemed the most desirable traits of each of the three kindreds were represented and illuminated in his person. But he and I had always traveled in different circles on account of the wildly different expectations pressed upon each of us: Finrod who was a paragon of the Eldarin people and I, who was so wholly antithetical to anything in the way of great expectations that, eventually, even my father who claimed that naught undone was impossible stopped sparing the energy to muster disappointment in my mediocrity.

I rose from the bed and went to the front room to look out the window. Nargothrond was blushed with false twilight, the lamp-lighters making their rounds as the first artful stars emerged from the roof of Nargothrond. Even a breeze stirred the curtains, although I knew not whence it came; my breath caught with the realization that my cousin's artfulness verged on godliness. The deep road was mostly quiet at this hour. A horse drawing a cart clopped slowly past. Faint music filtered down the road from an apartment up the street.

I do not know how he entered the apartment unless it was by a secret way kept from me. I turned and started to find him standing there, still in the intricately embroidered robes he wore in performing his duties as king; still with his hair bound in braids in a way that emphasized his high cheekbones and strong, straight nose. His gray eyes seemed alight from within. He said nothing. I hesitated, then went to him.

"I—I don't—"

"As you would for Oromë."

And as once a prince had been made a king, so a king was made a god.

I knelt and took his hand. I kissed each finger, lingering over the right index where once the ring of his house had rested. I kissed his palms, roughened by the work of the Noldor. I lifted the hems of his robes to unlace his boots, then held them so that he could step out of them. I rose to unlace his robes. "No. Remove my braids."

He sat on the bed while I did. His hair was softer and fairer than mine, the braids nearly falling away on their own accord once I released the pins that secured them. His hair came to the middle of his back, still holding a slight wave from the braids. I wanted to press my face into it, to know its scent, but I did not. I did lift it in my palm to feel its warmth and weight.

"There is a meal in the larder," he said without turning, so I went and set it out on the rough-hewn wooden table in the front room. I set two places but he declined to have anything more than a cup of wine. "I have eaten supper already with your brother," he said. "But I anticipate that you are hungry."

"I am."

The meal was simple—bread and cheese and smoked venison—but of the finest quality, the kind available to a king. I wanted to ask what he and my brother discussed every night at supper, but I did not. Thought alone of Curufin filled me with a delicious sense of the forbidden. I wondered what he would say if he knew that the upright cousin whose company he'd just left and the brother he assumed absent on patrol were on the verge of becoming lovers. (Or had we? Did my hasty pleasuring of him after the ceremony count? I was unclear on this point.)

He watched me intently as I ate but said nothing. When I had drained the last of my wine, he said, "Clear the dishes, then go to the bedroom. Undress. Get onto the bed and wait for me."

Though much had passed between the tavern and today, it was a familiar feeling to lie upon a bed, naked, and wait for a lover, yet I felt as nervous as I had in the early days of my affair with Tauretor. Ornate vials of oils and lotions stood upon a table at one side of the bed. I supposed that I would use them on him; only when drunk had Tauretor taken much concern for my pleasure. I didn't suppose that Finrod would take much concern for it either. I wondered if I would like it with Finrod or if it would hurt as it often had with Tauretor. If, when the pain began to diminish, it would become boring, as it had with Tauretor. If I had made a mistake.

My stomach in knots, I began to regret the food I'd eaten.

Finrod entered and began to remove his robes. I sat up slightly, as though to ask if he wanted my help, but he jerked his chin at me, and I took my signal and laid back down. He did not bother to hide that he was staring at me. I felt self-conscious even as my desire began to grow, as though his eyes had the weight of actual caresses. I arranged myself slightly so that I might look more pleasing to him. His fingers on the seemingly interminable clasps that held shut the front of his robes quickened.

He threw the robes on the back of a chair in the corner without much mind for the rich material that would become crumpled by his haste. He wore a silk tunic and breeches beneath, and as such, he came to climb upon the bed from the opposite side of me. For a long while, he knelt and looked down at me without touching, but then he lowered his face and kissed my mouth.

When had I been kissed like this? There had been the first awkward advances with maidens in Tirion, but then my lovemaking had been confined to rituals and Tauretor, who kissed my neck and chest (and sometimes left marks) but only rarely my mouth; there were the other guards in the field, but the kinds of pleasure we gave each other relieved a need and was not a time for kissing. His mouth was soft and tasted of the wine he'd drunk; even before he parted his lips and touched me with his tongue, he had explored my mouth with more thoroughness than anyone had explored any part of me before.

By the time our mouths opened to each other, I was breathless.

His hand rested on my knee and then slipped upward to stroke my inner thigh. I wanted to wriggle until it was in a more pleasing place but knew that my role in this forbade it. His thumb traced along the juncture of my leg and my body, and I couldn't help but to moan into his mouth. He shushed me, but tenderly, with a hand pressing my chest, then drew away and left me wanting, squeezing my eyes shut so that sight of him alone would not drive me to climax.

"Celegorm, I would have you as my lover. Do you consent to this?" I nodded. "No. Speak. I would hear your words."

"I consent to it," I said in a whisper.

"Do you understand what that means? You saw me at the Calarnómë, but do you understand why I went there?"

I remembered the pale-haired boy. I remembered the collar at his throat. I remembered the book Caranthir had given me: the man who lay submissive to the woman and her husband, who allowed all manner of things to be done to him, whether he wished it or not. In the worst moments with Tauretor, I had remembered that book, and the pain and frustration had only seemed to fuel my desire. I wondered what Finrod's expectation would precisely be. In the book, the husband had sometimes been rough with the man who served him, and then the wife would nurse the injuries done. Tauretor hadn't done much nursing, and I had borne him for longer than I should have. But Finrod— I remembered the kiss and the gentle way he touched me. That, I thought, I could bear forever.

"I understand."

"And yet you still consent?"

"I still consent."

He rose to his knees and pulled the tunic over his head. Quickly, he unlaced his breeches and pushed them from his hips. He was magnificent.

He reached for one of the glass bottles beside the bed and began to prepare himself. "You are a border guard, so I trust you have been touched by a man before."

"Oh yes."

He smiled at that, fleetingly, before his face fell calm again. "You like it in that way, then, rough and quick?"

"I know no other way, my lord."

He flinched at the words my lord. "Sometimes we will be rough, but I generally prefer to be tender. Like now, I would kiss you again. Then I will have you prepare yourself as I watch. Then I will take you on your hands and knees."

"Yes, my lord. I understand."

He kissed me again. The kiss between us before, I understood now, was akin to stretching from the side of a ship to trail one's fingers into a warm sea. Now I was submerged utterly. The length of his body pressed mine, his oiled erection slick against mine as he thrust against me. Hips, belly, chest pressed one another; his pounding heart gave lie to the calm, slow way in which he'd spoken to and touched me and now moved his body with such delicious slowness against mine. This was not the kind of love I'd had with Tauretor. I wasn't fully certain how to respond, but he seemed to like that: He pressed harder and faster.

When neither of us could bear the torment of the other any longer, he placed the jar into my hands and said, "I will take you now." He could have put a knife to my chest and said, "I will slay you now," and I would not have protested. When he thrust into me, I shouted, but it was not a protest, and he did not shush me this time.

~oOo~

I heated water for his bath and poured it over his body stretched long inside the copper tub. As the soap foamed high around him, agitated by the action of the water, I regretted covering him as such. His head was fallen back against the towel I had rolled there for him, his eyes shut, the ends of his hair trailing against the floor, his penis small again and spent. He had exhausted himself with me, I realized with satisfaction.

The water filled to his belly, his eyes still closed, he stretched a hand out blindly toward me. "You need a bath too," he said and pulled me toward the tub. I hesitated. "Go on. Get in with me."

I stood between his steepled knees, unsure how I should sit. He solved the quandary for me, pulling me down into the tub so that my head was resting against his chest, his arms tight around me. Something rose in my chest to be held that way, as I had not since I was very small, in a time I'd allowed myself to forget rather than endure the pain of remembering.

"You are weeping." He could not keep the edge of concern from his voice.

"Not for unhappiness."

He held me for a long time—so long that I wondered if he'd drifted to sleep—before speaking again. "Either of us can end this at any time. That is the only authority allowed to you; I will command you in all else. But should you wish for this to end, then we will part, and I will continue to welcome you in my kingdom as a cousin and friend. Nothing need change."

That, I knew, was a lie, and by the stiff way that he caressed me as he said it, I knew he knew it too. I would speak my own lie. I would promise to relinquish authority to him even in this, so that it might never end. I would promise to love him forever, above all else. But something larger than these two rooms and this single tub ground on around us with its silent but omnipresent machinery. I felt it stirring even now. It would outlast all of us. I could not even move my tongue, not even to utter a lie.

~oOo~

"Your patrols are shorter, are they not? At least, I see you more than once or twice a moon now," Curufin asked me one night at supper. Indeed, Finrod released me with greater frequency than I'd once returned from patrols, and I slept in my own apartment and my own bed for those few days, before returning by the deep road to the two rooms that we shared.

"They are," I said. "I missed you and Celebrimbor so I requested it of our cousin." He smiled at that. I wondered if I should mention his observation to Finrod, but surely Finrod knew that spacing of his own patrols and preferred my schedule to change. No, I decided; I would say nothing.

"Our cousin," mused Curufin, and my heart squeezed fearfully for a moment, thinking he had intuited what lay between us. "I see our cousin Finrod quite a bit these days, you know. I think it is safe to say, at this point, that my aim of gaining his graces has been accomplished. He speaks with me before any other, even poor, heartsick Orodreth. And you—"

"What of me?" I asked quickly.

"You have the loyalty of the Avari and Sindar here, do you not? They love you, do they not? Maybe even more than they love him?"

"They love me," I said, "but likely not more than they love him."

He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. "You are falsely modest. I hear how you are spoken of here. My point is that we wield a lot of power here, Celegorm. You do realize that."

"I do." I lied to silence him. I busied myself with cutting my meat into small, precise squares to avoid the inevitable places that thoughts of power took me: to the apartment, to Finrod's bed, to his gentle commands and the ecstasy that obedience to him so effortlessly brought to me. Even the sound of his name, uttered at incidental moments during the day by people I didn't know, could stir me to arousal.

I had once felt crushed in Nargothrond, and the patrols liberated me to where the thought of being confined again underground would have seemed unbearable to me. Now I spent most of my days confined not just to Nargothrond but to a mere two rooms, and yet my heart and mind felt as free as though left to wander unbound amid the stars of Eä. "I will want to come to you every night," Finrod had explained, "but that often won't be possible. Stretches of days may even pass when I cannot come to you. I will neither hear nor entertain protests of this fact. There will be a servant to attend your every need. You need only to trust that my preference would be always to come to you, that I suffer when absent, and that I shall return to you as soon as possible."

He did indeed come most evenings. I ate supper while he watched and drank wine. Sometimes we made love afterward; sometimes I massaged his back and shoulders, tense from the challenges of ruling; sometimes he drank until he fell asleep. He never stayed the night. "That is impossible," he said. "I must be where I am expected at night, lest I am needed and lest talk arise."

Perhaps, I realized, that was why he released me more frequently, assuming my misery in his absence. Yet I was not miserable. I anticipated his return, yes, but I was loved. One thousand times a day I said that: I am loved. Not since my friendship with my cousins, Finrod's brothers, had I felt so securely loved, and even then, I'd had reason to doubt.

~oOo~

"We haven't seen you in weeks."

It had been weeks since I'd attended a meeting by the fountain. It was Curufin who made the remark, his voice dripping with false innocence and cheer. My cousins, on the other hand, looked legitimately pleased to see me but held their emotions in check out of deference to Curufin. When had that happened? When had my brother come to look so startlingly like my father that none questioned the easy way he assumed the same degree of authority, authority that should be unthinkable in the voice of a fifth-born son?

"My brother has been hunting a lot," Curufin told our cousins as they shuffled to create room for me at the edge of the fountain. There was a slight emphasis on hunting; he knew it was not a pursuit respectable enough to justify my long absence, or anything really. He was correct as to my pursuit but not as to its frivolity; I hadn't been hunting so much as sounding my newfound abilities. I would lay with my ear to the earth and listen to the cheerful growth of roots or mourn with those stretching in vain for water or being devoured and slowly dying. I united with the thoughts of everything from the caterpillars that inched along twigs to the eagles that looked down from above. And I began to slowly issue my own commands, simple things like willing a thornbush to bend off of the path, nothing that yet brought something that would otherwise escape into the snare of death. But to tell of anyone of these things would require a rolling back in history to tell of what preceded it, and that—even to my most trusted friends—I could not do.

"I have been exploring in the forest," I corrected him.

Curufin scoffed. "He keeps saying that, but he cannot seem to name what he is exploring, or what he hopes to discover in a land that is more a pleasure garden than a forest."

In that, he was woefully wrong—death came to Valinor with the same frequency and ferocity as it visited anywhere else and certainly with greater frequency than came pleasure—but I could hardly say as much. "I am not just hunting," I said, "but mastering the use of terrain in order to be a more efficient hunter." The Noldor loved efficiency. My cousins nodded, and even Curufin was left without much else to pursue.

"Nonetheless," he said, changing directions. "You have been absent for two meetings now. So you owe the Parma Ettirniva not one but threesecrets."

I blinked. I hadn't counted on this. I had brought my one dull secret about my parents making love amid the drying laundry in the courtyard and mashing one of Maedhros's good velvet cloaks; Curufin would sigh at its inadequacy, but the others would tolerate it, I knew. Otherwise, I had nothing, for I had not come often lately among my own kind. Now if he wished to know where the hummingbirds nested or where the does took their fawns for their first mouthfuls of the tenderest grass, then I could tell him. But of our people? I could say nothing.

"I have only one," I said. "I wasn't expecting—give me until next week and—"

The way a spark touched to a clump of dry grass will alight each neighboring clump in turn, a glance passed among my cousins and fell last to my brother, who watched me with a directness that was disconcerting. "We have talked," began Angrod, brave Angrod, but his words faltered into silence, and what they talked about, he didn't say. He shot a look at Curufin that begged for rescue.

"We have," Curufin said so slowly that he almost drawled his words. "Celegorm, it is obvious of late that you are not as committed as you once were to this group."

A hunter learns to study and observe the movements of animals and the shape of the terrain to where he can almost discern the future. Flush to the left there and the buck will dash between those two trees—and sure enough, it came to pass. I could see such a pattern emerging now: I am about to be kicked out of the group. So many times, this threat had floated above me, yet it had never seemed truly real. Now it did, and it was as though the bottom had dropped out of chest, leaving my stomach in freefall.

The only thing other Noldor ever found to truly praise me about was the power of my speech, but this was empty praise, for it wasn't the speech itself—not like it was with my father and certain of my brothers—the artful braiding of word and inflection, but my inability to control my emotions. That happened now. A tear sliced down my cheek. "I beg you to believe that is not true." My voice trembled; there was no art in that. "I know I have been absent, and now I am found wanting. I know, and I am sorry, and I beg your forgiveness. Send me away today, if you must, and let me return next week with my secrets, but do not forsake me. I beg you. You are as my brothers, and it would break my heart." My voice broke on heart. "My absence has had nothing to do with you. I have been … finding myself … in the forest—"

Curufin actually laughed at that.

"Celegorm, your artful speech doesn't work among those who have long profited from it."

My cousins, on the other hand, looked distressed. Angrod was scratching his cheek and avoiding my eyes. Aegnor was restlessly folding and unfolding his legs beneath himself, trying to give the appearance of seeking comfort. Orodreth looked straight into my face and, for a moment, I feared straight into my fëa. The scar on my chest itched and all the secrets I had hidden in the past months—or thought I had hidden—seemed to shimmer momentarily in the naked air between us. Then they dropped away and back into obscurity. My hand—risen to press my scar—dropped back to my side.

"You must produce your three secrets," Curufin went on, "or you must leave us and cannot return, certainly no time soon and possibly ever."

Tears dripped freely from my chin now. Suddenly, the whole of my past few months seemed ripe for the taking if I could save my place with them. I thought frantically. The Calarnómë. Caranthir. I seized them as a drowning man gropes for one still afloat, even though the action will likely drown them both. "There is something," I said.

I heard myself tell of the Calarnómë. I described its streets, its squalor, the pounding drums and smells of humanity and smoke and food. As I spoke, certain features I occluded without thinking of it: the stone arch, the dark alley, the tavern and the barkeep and his apartment, anything to do with Finrod (for my cousins, I told myself, could not bear to hear ill of the brother whom they so deeply loved and admired). My omissions made no difference; even Curufin was wide-eyed to hear tell of it. "So it is real," said Aegnor at last.

"It is real," I affirmed. "And Caranthir—"

After my first visit, I had seen or heard nothing more of Finrod, but the same could not be said of Caranthir. He commanded the kind of respect and fame in his shadowy world that we all longed to command in the world of light. "You are Caranthir's brother," more than one person had said to me, unmindful of the fact that I was the elder (and so he was my brother). "Oh, I haven't met him. Just heard of him." Although, quite a few had met him as well. "He is well-known," I said. "Infamous, almost." Infamous seemed a bit strong; I justified it in my own mind by reminding myself that anyone well-known there must naturally have a touch of infamy.

"There are places there called drinking clubs," I said. "They meet underground, literally. The doorways are little iron gates between buildings that you could miss if you didn't know to look. He is a member in the most prestigious one."

The drinking clubs, Tauretor explained to me, heard unusual poetry, listened to esoteric music, and debated heretical ideas. Members of these clubs were known for their sexual precocity, exchanging erotic books and manuals on the arts of love, and Caranthir certainly fit that stereotype, having been found suitably learned in the amorous arts (these all Tauretor 's words, although I naturally didn't tell Curufin and my cousins that) by several distinguished women.

"The book!" Curufin interjected there, and I agreed, "Yes, the book."

Unlike most in the drinking clubs, he didn't favor casual dalliances but had had several brief but intense affairs that he would have certainly described (from his side anyway) as love. One woman he nearly married, but she was accepted into the university in Valmar—of all places!—and would make no marital commitment until she completed her term. And, like any untended fire, without proximity and frequent contact, their romance quickly withered to ash.

"Caranthir is not a virgin," Curufin interrupted, "is what you are telling us."

"Yes."

"Caranthir?"

"Yes."

"Caranthir!"

"Yes. I have heard he is currently unattached, though not for lack of interest from the women who know him there."

All were wide-eyed, and only a second of silence passed before they were all asking me questions at once. I answered them and basked in my return to their good graces and my momentary fame. I spared a thought for Caranthir, who had never done anything wrong to me and had in fact shown me his version of kindness, but the guilt at what I had just done was too immense to acknowledge without a penance of walking away now, before the startling knowledge of my brother—declared an enemy for no better reason than his preference for the company of others over us—metamorphosed into some type of plan against him. And I could not bring myself to walk away. I swallowed hard and forgot his kindness. Under my brother's command and at my cousins' sides, I began to plot.

~oOo~

I jerked awake from a dream. I was in the wide bed in the apartment. Through the open door separating the two rooms, I could see night beyond the small window, or the pale blue light that signaled night. Finrod hadn't come. I wondered, as I always did, what kept him.

My face was wet with tears, my body damp with sweat. I felt more exhausted than when I'd lain upon the bed to sleep, as though I'd been enduring some agonizing torment. I even patted my body through my clothes but found no mark. I rose gingerly, expecting pain; none came. The dream—I tried to recall the dream I'd been having when I'd awakened. It felt like it had spooled out over the course of hours, though certainly that could not be true. That was what had left me feeling wrung out.

I'd been apologizing. To a line of people. As each stepped forward, his or her face became clear; behind each were the faceless gray shadow-figures of those who still awaited my words. First my mother, for choosing my father over her. Then my father, for being such a disappointment.

Grandfather Finwë: for fleeing the Dark, for who knew if I had ridden with haste to Formenos if I could have saved him.

Grandfather Mahtan and Grandmother Istarnië: for leaving Tirion without saying goodbye.

The Telerin mariners I'd slain took a while. I thought King Olwë would follow last, but it was his wife, and I had to apologize for the death of her sons.

My cousins, for abandoning them to cross the Helcaraxë. One by one, with Turgon next-to-last, his daughter in his arms, and Orodreth last of all, for he'd been the best of all of them to me. Maedhros, for casting my vote to leave him to torment in Angband. Amras for striking his face when he challenged me about that with words that I could not refute.

By the time Caranthir came to me, there was only one shadow left behind him. "I loved you best of all when we were children," he said. "Even more than Atar." There was no accusation in his voice, only fact. I knew this, although I had forgotten. "Even once we were grown, I preferred you to the others and treated you accordingly."

There was a silver band upon his finger. He wrenched it off with great difficulty, presented it upon an outstretched palm. "Take it." "No." "Take it." "No." He tipped his hand and let it fall to the floor. He stepped upon it, and it was shattered beneath his foot with a scream of broken glass.

"Caranthir." I was weeping now, taking his naked hand and holding it to my face. "Caranthir, I am sorry, I am sorry."

"Yours was not the first but it was the betrayal that hurt me worst of all."

"I know, I know, I beg your—"

But he walked away. The shadow behind him began to come forward. Features began to arrange themselves into light and shadows, done in shades of gray. Oromë, I thought. It will be Oromë. I didn't think I could bear it. He would be holding my lost pendant in his fist, and I would know that its loss was deliberate and not an accident painfully coincident with my exile. I would know that I had long been found unworthy of him. I began to scramble for an escape—coward—but stone enclosed me on all sides, like Nargothrond but not, the work of a king but not—

Finrod.

It was Finrod who stepped forward.

His robes were as blue as the midnight sky, inlaid with jewels that winked and flashed crimson and gold like stars. At his throat sat the Nauglamír; upon his head, he wore his crown. Upon his hand—the right finger where a wedding band should rest—was his father's ring: the twined serpents and the crown of gold. His hair was unbound, still waved from his braids and damp at the ends from his bath. There was neither anger nor sadness upon his face, as there had been upon the others. He was almost beatific in his resignation.

"Of what? Of what do I have to apologize to you for? The Helcaraxë? For starting the rift between our families?"

"You know I love you more than those things matter."

"Then what?"

With my scream, I awoke.

~oOo~

My sleep was restless that night. Not for the first time, I wished for Finrod beside me, although I knew it was impossible and that I was forbidden to even suggest it. I tossed and grew too warm beneath the blankets, threw them aside, and then awoke too cold. Dreams marched through my restive thoughts as flashes of the impossible and inexplicable: seemingly meaningless or even innocent things that seemed to carry a sudden weight. Once, I rose to check the light, certain that morning must be near, but the lamps still flared bright and the stars had just begun to move: The night was, at most, only a few hours old.

I poured a glass of wine, hoping it would soothe my thoughts and allow me to sleep, and when I returned to the bedroom with it in my hand, Finrod was there.

There was a secret stair, I had since learned, that he used. He was perched upon the edge of the bed with a rigidity that suggested nervousness—impossible, I knew—and was, disturbingly, dressed almost as he'd been in my dream: in dark blue robes picked through with silver thread and an ornate necklace (but not the Nauglamír) at his throat. My eyes darted to his hands—I do not know why—but they were bare of rings. The ring of his house, I realized not for the first time, that he'd brought over the Ice upon his hand, I had yet to see upon his hand in Nargothrond. His hair was still braided. Wherever he'd been before here, it was in his capacity as king.

My surprise must have shown on my face to find him in the apartment so suddenly and so late because he gave me a rare explanation for his behavior. "I have something very important to ask of you tonight. I was detained, but I would not wait. Please bring me a glass of wine."

When I returned, he was removing his robes. There were laces in the lower part of the back, and I loosened them for him. (Who, I wondered, tightened them?) He drank his wine as I undid his braids. "More please." That was quick. "Bring the bottle this time so that you don't have to leave the room again." I did as instructed. "I would have a bath." By the time I had set the water to warm, his second glass of wine was gone too.

Under the guise of bathing him, I could touch him intimately, but he didn't become aroused tonight when I did, nor did he kiss me as I leaned over him, nor did he say much to me at all. He turned his attention primarily to his wine. I was beginning to fear that he was going to invoke his right to end our relationship—my heart quailed at the mere thought—and I was steeling myself to respond with a measure of self-respect when he held out his hand to me, his familiar gesture that indicated that he wanted me to join him.

I undressed and lowered myself into the water between his knees, in our usual way of reclining in the tub with my back against his chest, but he caught my wrist and said, "No, not tonight. I'd have you face me. I wish to speak to you."

He was on his fifth glass of wine, and by the looseness in his voice, I knew it was beginning to addle him a bit. "You have been loyal to me and done everything that I've asked, Celegorm," he said. "This time with you has been like a dream I don't want to end."

How fiercely I wished I could tell him that I didn't want it to end either! I held my tongue, yet he smiled at me like he knew.

"Our initial agreement obligated you to obey me and submit to me, asserting your own will only if you wished to end our relationship. I would deepen our commitment." He was watching me carefully. He took another deep drink of wine. "I would regard you as my own, as an extension of my person, and treat you as such."

"My lord?"

"Do you remember how I claimed Arda at the festival? I would likewise claim you, and have you wear the emblem of that claim. Going forth, we would think of each other as the same as ourselves." He drained his glass and stood. His legs, I saw, trembled. "I will let you think on it. I must return to my rooms."

"My lord, I—" I began to rise from the tub, but he was already toweling himself dry.

"If you decide you want to go forth with it, we will have the ceremony when next we meet. I have much on my mind these days." He let the towel fall to the floor and began to dress with his back to me. "I do not know when I will be able to return next. You will likely have several days to make your decision."

"My lord, I answer yes."

"Think on it, Celegorm. I do not ask for your answer now, and it is not to be embarked upon lightly." He turned to me. "What comes to me will come to you. You will feel my joy and suffering both, and I yours." He shrugged into his robes but didn't bother to lace them. "Think on it."