The Bird In A Cage by Himring

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Part I, ch. 2: Aredhel Comes to Dinner

Some things don't get said, but a great deal is remembered.

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Fortunately, Naurthoniel and Ceredir decided to view it as a challenge. Maedhros didn’t quite know how they had done it, but they managed to produce a veritable banquet. Of course, Aredhel had always been a rewarding woman to cook for. No false modesty or irritating daintiness—if Aredhel liked a dish, she showed it plainly and dug right in. Maedhros watched her carefully scraping the last traces of syllabub out of the bowl. She licked the spoon clean and leaned back with a contented sigh.

‘Wonderful!’, she said.

‘Thank you, Ceredir will be pleased when I tell him’, he said and added, answering the question that perhaps it had not crossed her mind to ask: ‘I do very little cooking, nowadays.’

She nodded. A little silence fell, but a more comfortable one, as she sat relaxed and replete, glass of wine in hand. When he had asked careful, polite questions about the well-being of the family and others of her associates in Vinyamar, she had been very reticent. The only subject she seemed prepared to enlarge on was Idril. Now, with the plates cleared away and the wine in easy reach, he decided to try a slightly more direct approach.

‘There have been rumours of disappearances’, he remarked casually, ‘people vanishing from Nevrast without a trace…’

Aredhel sat up straight, galvanized.

‘That was Tyelperinquar!’ she exclaimed.

Maedhros looked at her enquiringly.

‘Turukano is convinced you’re sending him to spy on us’, said Aredhel uneasily, almost guiltily.

‘Tyelpo goes to Nevrast to visit his friend Enerdhil’, said Maedhros. ‘He wouldn’t be Tyelpo if I had to tell him to keep his eyes and ears open. And, yes, he does talk to me when he comes back. But if you mean to tell me that anyone has seen my nephew slink about the back alleys of Vinyamar in disguise, heavily cloaked and with a dagger in his hand, I would be very surprised.’

‘Of course they haven’t’, said Aredhel. ‘It’s just…’

‘Besides’, added Maedhros, ‘he isn’t by any means the only one who has reported those rumours…’

‘Oh, rumours,’ said Aredhel carelessly and shrugged.

That earlier air of satisfaction, induced by good food and good wine, had completely dissipated, Maedhros noted with regret. Either he had misjudged the matter completely, or she was just not ready to talk about it. He poured more wine and nudged her toward the subject of Idril again. Let her talk about things she seemed to be comfortable with.

He himself had hardly seen Idril at all since leaving Mithrim, indeed so rarely that in his mind he had not managed completely to discard the image of the little girl she had been then. He had been to Nevrast only once, for that one quickly aborted visit, which had seemed to begin so promisingly…  Idril had grown a great deal since Mithrim, obviously, but she still must be very young.

Aredhel found much to talk about regarding Idril. She boasted of her niece’s accomplishments, sighed fondly over her faults and flaws—of which Idril seemed to have no more than her fair share, compared to other members of the House of Finwe—and recounted the more acute and amusing of her pronouncements at length. It might have been enjoyable to meet this older version of Idril. By the sound of it, she was a person it would have been good to get to know. Maedhros poured more wine and made all the right noises, allowing Aredhel to ramble on.

***

The evening grew late. A small chill air seeped through the tent walls. Aredhel shivered suddenly.

‘You’re cold,’ said Maedhros. ‘Even in summer, the temperature drops noticeably at night, out here on the plain. Nights are milder by the sea, aren’t they? Let me fetch you a blanket.’

He leaned over her and draped the blanket around her shoulders. She pulled it more tightly around herself.

‘Hmm’, she said appreciatively. It was woven in a distinctive style, from a particular kind of cream-coloured wool that she thought she had not encountered before. ‘Warm and soft! You can give me that, too.’

He did not answer immediately, and abruptly she lost what confidence she had assumed in dealing with him.

‘If you want to’, she added uncertainly and glanced up at his face.

But all she saw was an answering gleam of amusement.

‘Of course I do.’

She recalled the time when she had first joined the sons of Feanor—there had not been seven of them yet—in their exploits. Maitimo, she felt at the time, had been quite unduly impressed by the fact that she was not only the youngest member of the group, but also a girl and had given in to the temptation to try and coddle her, assisting her over stiles and showering her with little gifts and favours.

Given the fact that he had chiefly been blessed with male siblings and cousins, except for herself and Artanis, she now supposed he could hardly help it, perhaps. But at the time it filled her with indignation and disgust. Fortunately it turned out that, unlike some others of her family and acquaintance, Maitimo responded to training.

‘What is wrong with it?’, he asked her, when she held the frilly pink scarf he had just given her gingerly by a corner, with the same kind of expression with which her mother might have held up a rat by its tail.

‘It’s pink,’ she said in profound gloom.

‘Pink is not good?’, he asked.

She drew herself up to her full height and looked up at him.

‘Girls do not like pink’, she pronounced with an air of absolute finality.

‘Really?’, Maitimo asked her anxiously. ‘Do you know that there are a couple of girls that have told me that they do like pink? Do you suppose they were lying to me?’

For the sake of truthfulness, she felt obliged partly to retract her statement.

‘Well, some girls do like pink’, she said grudgingly. ‘I don’t.’

He plucked the offending item from her grasp.

‘All right’, he said apologetically. ‘No more pink.’

‘Maitimo’, she called after him.

‘Yes?’

‘No frills either. And no lace.’

‘Understood’, he promised solemnly.

She figured out afterwards that he had been pulling her leg a bit, of course, especially when Nerdanel’s latest apprentice gushingly thanked her for the gift of the scarf:  Maitimo said you had noticed I like pink. So kind of you to notice that it is my favourite colour!

But there had been no more pink or frills or lace.

After a while, she had decided that she could put up with being coddled a bit, as long as gifts took the forms of perfectly balanced hunting knives. It would have been rather heartless to discourage him completely, after all.

***

‘Thank you,’ said Aredhel. ‘Thank you very much for the blanket and for the wine and for dinner—and for your company tonight.’

‘You’re very welcome, Irisse,’ said Maedhros. ‘Does that mean you’re about to go already? It is not so very late yet.’

‘I think I better had,’ said Aredhel.

He followed her outside to wish her a good night and remained standing for a while in thought, remembering that single attempt of his to visit Turgon, Aredhel and Idril in Vinyamar. He had had plenty of misgivings, of course, before he went, but that very first afternoon, he had thought that maybe Turgon was beginning to relent a little, his resentment over Losgar beginning to soften just a bit. And perhaps that impression was not wholly wrong and even partly explained what had followed.

In the middle of the night, the door flew open and Turgon rushed into his room, dressing-gown untidily thrown on over what clearly were his night garments.

‘Must you make me quote it at you!’ he began shouting. ‘To evil shall turn all things they begin well. Maitimo, I beg you, just, just stay away from me and mine!’

Maedhros had sat up in bed and blinked at the sight of Turgon, usually so dignified, now distraught in his splendid turquoise dressing gown embroidered with golden leaves and blossoms of silver, pleading with him to leave Vinyamar—and Idril as well as Irisse—alone with tears in his eyes.

‘I’m not sure the Curse works that way, Turukano’, he had said. ‘But’, he added hastily, as Turgon opened his mouth to start shouting again, ‘I don’t know how it works. I’ll leave tomorrow morning.’

And he had arranged to get an urgent message that called him away in the early light of dawn. Since then, he had not set foot in Vinyamar and only seen Turgon at general council meetings when all the princes of the Noldor were assembled.

Here in Ard-galen, the sun had just set over the Ered Wethrin, a late midsummer sunset. Beyond the mountain range, there lay Hithlum and Dor-lomin. Somewhere over there Fingon rested this night—and who knew what he thought of all this. Maedhros’s gaze rested broodingly on those peaks at the same time as he recalled how the sea breeze had kept stirring the curtains that night in his room in the palace in Vinyamar and remembered the taste of salt on his lips.

‘Irisse is your sister, too, not only Turukano’s’, he thought. ‘What would you have me do, cousin? Is there anything you would have me say or do?’

That night, in his dreams, he slipped into a memory of the day they had been playing hide-and-seek in the pine grove near his father’s house and he had shown young Fingon, still a recent enough arrival to count as a guest, his favourite old hiding-place, a hollow in the ground concealed beneath a dense thicket of brambles. It had just been a children’s game, a suggestion he had come up with to get the younger ones out of his mother’s hair, but in his dream something went badly wrong and he found himself crouching in the hollow, clutching young Fingon to his chest in panic, his heart hammering in his throat, incongruously aware of the familiar and beloved scent of pine resin, while outside THEY circled, searching, searching…

Young Fingon stirred in his arms, put a steadying hand on his wrist and said quietly—in a very grown-up voice that knew far too much about things that were not supposed to have happened yet: ‘THEY will find us eventually, you know.’

Maedhros started awake and lay staring at the tent wall. He had had dreams that were far worse, but he hated it when the shadows of Angband invaded his early memories, insidiously eroding the past as if he had never been free of them. Did the dream signify anything, apart from that? It might be a warning, perhaps, but if so, against what—putting too much trust in his own ability to protect anyone or putting too much trust in hiding places however well concealed they might seem? More probably, the dream just unhelpfully reflected his fears and offered no guidance at all.

He recalled that he was going out riding with Aredhel in the morning. He had made the suggestion without much confidence of it being accepted and had been surprised how eagerly she took it up.