The Bird In A Cage by Himring

Part I, ch. 1: The Red Roan Palfrey

Maedhros unexpectedly meets Aredhel at a horse fair in Ard-galen.

Why didn't she say she was coming and why doesn't she want to buy that horse?

Maedhros was threading his way among the tents and open spaces of the encampment. Each year, the horse fair in the month of Narie on the plain of Ard-galen seemed to grow in size, but already the number of tents was dwindling rapidly, and the fair was almost over. Aegnor had left four days before already, after a brief visit, and, the day after, so had Maglor and Celegorm.

Maedhros had planned to leave together with them, but Celvandil, his stable master, was still involved in tricky negotiations, trying to acquire a couple of brood mares for which the owner was demanding an extortionate price. Maedhros had listened to Celvandil singing the praises of the pedigree of those mares and had decided it might be not be a good idea to leave him to his bargaining without his prince’s backing at this point, so he had stayed on longer than originally intended. The decision had left him with time on his hands. His current stroll had no other purpose than to have another look around and pick up some gossip, maybe, in order to gauge the general mood of the traders and buyers.

He rounded another group of tents and came to an exercise area. A gleam of white caught his eye, a rare and impractical colour here, where the hooves of droves of horses as well as all the elven feet passing to and fro had churned the earth to dust, which hovered in the air and seemed to settle on everything, all over the place. The weather had been calm and dry for two weeks.

As he approached, he saw there was a rider, a woman, trying out the gait of a red roan palfrey while the trader looked on hopefully. It was her clothes that gleamed white, and, as she turned the head of the palfrey toward him, he unexpectedly recognized his cousin Aredhel, competent and at ease in the saddle. That last part was no surprise; Aredhel had always looked good on a horse.

He wasn’t sure whether she had spotted him or not, although he usually was not easy to overlook. Maybe she was focussed completely on the horse she was testing. She turned the palfrey around again. Now that he was closer, he saw that the white of her clothes was liberally speckled with dust, much as anyone else’s.

In Valinor, those white garments had been the bane of her mother’s housekeeper. Anaire’s household, he was certain, had had the highest consumption of bleach in all of Tirion, as Marille had waged unending war against grass stains, lichen stains, berry stains and, worst of all, blood stains on Aredhel’s clothing. Marille had never seemed to understand that, as far as her mistress’s daughter was concerned, white represented the rejection of colour, the opposite of black, not the palest of pale pastel colours, as it were. White, before it had become Aredhel’s hallmark and signatory colour, had been a compromise, he thought. She would have worn unbleached wool and linen, if she could have got away with it. Stains bothered her not at all.

On the other hand, Maedhros reflected, perhaps Marille had understood Aredhel’s position quite well, but refused to give in to such outlandish ideas merely because Aredhel was a princess: two strong-minded women at loggerheads over conflicting definitions of whiteness…

Aredhel turned over the palfrey to the trader’s assistant and said something to the trader that caused his expectant face to fall with sudden disappointment. Then she looked around and it became evident that she must, in fact, have recognized Maedhros, earlier on. However, her expression made him wonder whether perhaps it was not a coincidence that she had arrived at the fair unannounced and at a time when she might have expected the rest of her family to have come and gone. But if she had indeed wished to avoid her cousins, it was too late for him to do anything about it, for she was coming straight towards him now.

He wiped any trace of doubt from his face before she could see it and smiled his welcome.

‘Irisse, how good to see you! A star shines on the hour of this meeting, truly! And that palfrey really suits you! May I buy her and give her to you?’

Aredhel’s brows drew together, and she looked at him warily.

‘Yet another horse?’, she asked.

He reminded himself how much time since their departure from Mithrim she had spent with Turgon in Nevrast and how suspicious Turgon had seemed to be of that first gift of horses he had given to Fingolfin and his followers. He had never quite been able to fathom what Turgon considered to be so sinister about it. Whatever else Maedhros did or did not feel, it was only logical and very much in his own interest, surely, that he should wish to see his allies well mounted?

‘Another horse,’ he answered gravely. ‘I assure you, Irisse, you can accept yet another horse from me without any danger of it corrupting your judgement.’

Aredhel lifted her chin with a jerk. Her cheeks flushed a little.

‘Well, you may not give this horse to me,’ she said. ‘No, nor another one either!’, she added firmly, before he had a chance to ask the question that was hovering on his lips.

There was a moment of uneasy silence.

‘But you can invite me to dinner’, she said, a little grudgingly, as if offering a concession.

‘You are hereby invited to dinner’, Maedhros said promptly, with a mental apology to Naurthoniel and Ceredir, to whom the unexpected task would fall to produce an impromptu meal worthy of Aredhel Ar-Feiniel, White Lady of the Noldor, at a time when provisions must be running  a little low.