Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Sovereignty

The question of sovereignty came up soon after Arafinwë’s return. He turned immediately to Indis, but she answered him with the same slow shake of her head as she’d once answered Nolofinwë. “No, my son, my heart. I will stand beside you always, but this is your duty to bear.”

I had known Arafinwë since he was a child. Nolofinwë and I began our courtship shortly after Nolofinwë’s majority, when Arafinwë was yet a young adolescent, still very childlike for his age. He had none of his older brothers’ intellectual fortitude, nor did he have the imposing physicality of his parents. He was small and golden, curious about people and inclined to benign prying. He never forgot a detail about a person he met, like when he brought me sunflowers for my begetting day that first year because I’d once mentioned enjoying them, offhand, to another young lady in attendance at a dinner where Arafinwë was permitted silent attendance. I'd scarce noticed him.

He became an accomplished horseman, I suspect to avoid studying the martial arts—devoid of purpose but practiced for the sake of history and purported pleasure—that were expected of most nobleborn boys. He was modestly skilled at music, less so at art. He had no interest in writing (although he learned it flawlessly and occasionally contributed papers on political theory, I suspected at his father’s bidding), but he could learn an oral song or story at a single hearing, having a bone-deep intuition for the complicated meters and formulas that made up this ancient and dwindling art. I once bought him, for his begetting day, a book of collected folktales that I suspect he never read.

It was impossible not to adore Arafinwë. Even Fëanáro felt—and did not bother to hide—affection for his youngest brother. When Arafinwë announced his betrothal to Eärwen, what I felt was the relief akin to the sensation of gravity, a giving over of the small exertions of daily living to some unseen, commanding force, for both so effortlessly earned the love of others that their eventual partnership surely fulfilled some natural law. Their wedding was one of those dazzling moments in our peoples’ history, for it symbolized the joining of the three kindreds and the actualization of what so many had suffered the Great Journey to achieve. The songs made for that day were less about love than triumph.

Arafinwë turned to me now. Sometime in the last few days, Indis had coaxed him into bathing and neatening his hair, but the fever-bright horror in his eyes persisted. I recalled the lambent madness in Fëanáro’s eyes after he made the Silmarils and was reminded of that: the witnessing of something our feär were not built to endure yet had.

“I would give the crown to you then, Anairë,” he said. “You are his—Nolofinwë’s—wife. He was our king; you were our queen. It is only fair that you continue in that role.”

As I shook my head, the thought flickered through my mind that this title had, just short years before, prompted strife and discord among the Finwions, even to the edge of violence. How lightly it was proffered now and how lightly cast aside! “No, Arafinwë. He took whatever claim I might have held with him when he chose to follow Fëanáro rather than stay with me. Your mother is correct: The duty is yours to bear.”

We held a brief coronation ceremony to mark the passage of authority from Nolofinwë to Arafinwë, via our brief de facto rule. Coronations were supposed to be highly scripted affairs involving multiple blessings from multiple Valar, but Máhanaxar remained silent, and the blessings upon Arafinwë’s reign were given instead by any of his people who wished to come forward and do so. Some brought small offerings—all that was left to us was small—and others spoke fumblingly of his constancy and the way forward. No one spoke of hope. The madness in his eyes was quenched in the sorrow that shimmered there. Indis spoke last, of Finwë and his aspirations for the Noldor when he chose to lead them forth on the Great Journey and of his joy at the birth of his youngest son. We all knew that Finwë had never imagined that lastborn son as king, much less crowned with the fickle light of torches the only barrier between us and the dark. But the analogy of the journey in the dark was lost on none of us. Is that where we were going now?

In the end, he knelt upon the bare earth, in a semicircle of wilting flowers and shriveling fruit—the enormous generosity of our people—and though he cast his eyes earthward, the reflection of torchlight in the tears in his lashes made his eyes seem filled with fire.

Beside me, Nerdanel had stopped trying to hide the tears she’d been surreptitiously wiping away.

It was Indis who placed the crown on his head with a kiss to his forehead.