The Bird In A Cage by Himring

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Part I; ch. 3: A Ride In Ard-Galen

...throws some light on Aredhel's motives.

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They met a little beyond the entrance of the camp in the early morning light. Aredhel was riding a temperamental young stallion, a bay, and Maedhros thought that if Aredhel had ridden this horse all the way up from Vinyamar, then she would have had her job cut out for her on the journey. She kept him well in hand, though, and they proceeded at a sedate pace such as might be considered fitting for Maedhros, Head of the House of Feanor, and his right royal cousin Aredhel of Nevrast.

However, as soon as they were out of plain sight of the camp, Aredhel threw him a challenging glance.

‘This horse wants to run’, she said and, without waiting for him to agree, she was off across the plain, allowing the bay first to fall into a canter, and then into a gallop. The bay needed little urging to do what he had plainly been itching to do all along. He raced ahead at full speed.

Maedhros hesitated a moment, stopping to scan the horizon. Then he spoke quietly to his mare and gave her free rein. At once the mare followed swiftly after Aredhel and her stallion, eager to catch up with the other horse.

Hooves pounded the earth, raising clouds of dust. The wind tugged at their hair and clothes. In front of their running horses, Ard-galen—as yet green and unburnt—stretched away, miles and miles of it, until it changed into the great plain of Lothlann and beyond…

Those wide spaces of Middle-earth! What it was just to know that you could keep on riding, on and on, never stopping, and find anyone and anything out there, things unseen and unimaginable! Even if in fact you never did, tied as you were to this corner of Endore by an Oath and a War and a Doom….

Maedhros caught up with Aredhel, and they thundered on together side by side, straight east, the mare content to remain half a head behind the stallion. When Aredhel finally pulled the stallion to a halt—he was beginning to tire, but being young and headstrong, had not quite noticed yet—she was still a little in the lead. They stopped by a shallow little stream and dismounted to rest their horses.

The White Lady of the Noldor was flushed and laughing a little. She knelt by the stream, dipped her hand in the water and took a sip from her hollowed palm. She looked up at Maedhros. Her eyes shone.

Her elation reminded him, once again, that she was Fingon’s sister. But for all that Fingon’s capacity for joy in the things of Middle-earth meant to him—and to him it was one of the cornerstones of survival in Beleriand—at that moment it was the difference between them that plucked at this heartstrings. For it seemed to him that her joy was the joy of one who has escaped, more intense even perhaps, but with an edge to it…

 ‘You let me win’, she accused him, without rancour. ‘Your horse is faster than mine—except over very short distances, perhaps.’

He had not even thought of it as a race, in truth. But now that she had brought it up, he realized there was more to it than that: in fact, the same thing that kept him instinctively watching for movement out of the corner of his eyes, while she seemed oblivious, completely focussed on what was going on immediately around her.

He frowned slightly and answered, a little hesitantly: ‘I guess it gets to be a habit, out here—not to let your horses run full tilt because you can’t risk them exhausting their reserves completely. You never know when you might need to call on their strength in an emergency…’

He made a gesture with his chin—small but precise—toward the North.

‘Life on the borders!’ she exclaimed, serious now, but by no means quenched or subdued.

‘You sound almost envious’, he remarked.

‘I am... It's not you I envy, though’, she added, as an afterthought.

He considered her, remembering that old long-running and hard-fought competition between her and his brothers to see whose skills in archery surpassed the others'. Often Celegorm had been a little ahead of the other two, but sometimes it was Curufin and sometimes Aredhel.

‘I know it would raise a storm of disapproval in certain quarters if you moved to the Marches, even if you wished to’, he said, carefully. ‘But surely there are other areas along the border you could choose? Why not Hithlum—or perhaps Dorthonion?’

She frowned and looked away.

‘I would not be permitted to take Itarille’, she said.

Silence fell between them. The horses had begun to nibble at the grass. The sun shone overhead. The water of the stream gleamed in the sunlight. There was nobody about.

‘Do you know what I am ashamed of?’ asked Aredhel suddenly.

‘What?’, said Maedhros, startled.

‘Out there on the Ice, during the Crossing—you know—a lot of us died, there were many I tried to save and failed, the hardships were great, but I—for the first time in my life I felt alive. I felt truly free. But ever since then, ever since we arrived in Beleriand…’

She shrugged. Her voice trailed away. The look she gave him was both sombre and—somehow—provoking.

‘Is that not a great irony, Maitimo? That freedom your Father promised us—that I should have gained it only through his betrayal—and at so much cost to others?’

‘Yes’, he said, deeply troubled, and went on, with a great effort: ‘Irisse, I too sometimes felt free on Thangorodrim, but…’

‘That is not the same thing!’ she interrupted him at once.

‘But’, he continued doggedly, having once begun, ‘it is not a freedom you can keep or share.’

‘It is not the same thing at all’, she said fiercely. ‘And I ought not to have come complaining to you. It’s unforgivable of me.’

‘You used to come complaining to me all the time’, he said, shaking his head. ‘Do you remember? You would come and find me in my cubicle in the library in Tirion, when you were really angry about something. I never needed to say much. You would just stride back and forth in front of my desk, arguing with yourself in a loud voice, until you had argued yourself into a good mood again.’ He smiled at the memory. Then the smile faded. ‘You stopped coming, after a while. I guess I stopped being a good listener?’

‘Oh, Maitimo,’ she said, half remorsefully, half impatiently. ‘I started having problems one could not just argue oneself out of. We all did.’

She paused, remembering.

‘What a brat I was!’ she said. ‘You were working, there in the library. I must have interrupted your train of thought. But I never asked your leave or apologized—and you never said anything.’

He looked at her in astonishment.

‘But… Irisse, we had so much time then!’

She started to say something; then she changed her mind. Instead, she reached out and gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder.

They spoke no more of the past after that—or of the future. They mounted again, beginning to circle back at a quieter pace, and he showed her a few things that he thought she might not have encountered yet—a flowering shrub native to Ard-galen, a small dun bird that nested low to the ground—and told her an anecdote or two about life in the Marches.

By the time they returned to the camp, it was late afternoon, and his stable-master Celvandil awaited them, bursting with pride. He had finally managed to secure the broodmares he had been bargaining for, and nothing could stop him from giving them both a blow-by-blow account of what he had said to the owner and what the owner had said to him and how cleverly he had played his cards to bring down the price to a reasonable level. He also assumed as a matter of course that they would now be leaving, for after all those mares were all they had been waiting for, hadn't they?

Maedhros gave him all the praise that was his due and congratulated him on his success. But when Celvandil had departed in triumph to check over his prizes once again and make sure they were well taken care of, Maedhros eyed Aredhel uncertainly. She interpreted his glance correctly.

‘Don’t worry’, she said. ‘I’ll be leaving, too, tomorrow.’

‘You’re leaving so soon? You’ve only just arrived!’

‘I shouldn’t be here at all’, she confessed. ‘They weren’t expecting me to go beyond the borders of Nevrast. Only, on the road, I happened to meet those traders who were going to Ard-galen and whose journey had been delayed by bad weather and a broken axle…’

She smiled, ruefully.

‘I’ll be taking my leave, tomorrow morning’, she concluded.

Late that evening, he sat writing letters. To Fingon, Lord of Dor-lomin, this letter be delivered, he wrote. Then he paused.

‘Well, I’ve made my bid, Findekano, such as it was, and it failed, as it probably ought to have. May it turn out for the best—if only I even knew what the best is, under these circumstances’, he thought. Then he went on writing:

Dear cousin,

Such a pleasant surprise! Unexpectedly, I encountered Irisse here at the fair and, not having seen her for so long, I was delighted to be able to spend a few hours in her company and hear a little news about Itarille…