Numenor That Was by Himring

What She Said

Years after Tar-Ancalime's death, her elder granddaughter opens a letter from her for the first time.
Its contents change her views--both about her present situation and the past--and enable her to move on.

A slightly revisionist account of the tension between Ancalime and her granddaughters towards the end of her rule.

Sequel to "A Missed Catch"

Rating: Teens

Warning: Mature Themes: (Dysfunctional Family, Failed Marriage implied)

Work Text:

Alone, she walks through the empty house. She mounts the broad staircase in her elegant slippers, hearing her short train swish behind her on the marble steps in the silence and smiles bitterly down at the hem of her sleeve, encrusted with seed pearls, as her right hand trails along the railing. The realization has been forced on her by recent events that she is no longer young.

She reaches the haven of her own private study and sits down at her delicately carved desk. But there is nothing to write, nothing left to do. For a moment, she sits, blind and immobile. Then her hands start moving again, finger groping far towards the back of the left desk drawer.

But surely she threw away that old unread letter long ago? And even if she did change her mind and kept it, what would she want with it now? Why give her grandmother a chance to gloat at her humiliation, even from beyond the grave?

Nevertheless she continues groping until she catches the brittle envelope between her fingertips. She draws it out, studies the yellowed paper a moment, flicks away the crumbling seal with a long finger nail and—finally—begins to read:

My dear,

It has come to my ears that you are putting about that I am forbidding you to marry to punish you for declaring publicly that you will refuse the sceptre if it is offered. I did not enjoy the experience of being married so greatly myself that I would choose to inflict this particular kind of punishment. If I tried to forbid you to wed that man, it was for the most obvious reason—or so I thought: he is entirely wrong for you, child, as anyone with two eyes in their head could see.

Well, I should have known better. I hoped you would reconsider if I forced you to delay the wedding, but you are too much like me and I can see I merely put your back up. Now you will marry him, even if doubt should come creeping in, because you know I did not want you to.

I had planned, in the last years of my rule, to do for you and for your sister what I could not do for myself—push the council into revoking that foolish rule my father managed to impose on us, the one that forbids the royal heir from marrying outside the House of Elros. As if my mother’s ancestry had been the only reason that my parents’ marriage failed! My own marriage was to prove so well how entirely happiness is guaranteed on every side if one weds within the family! But I can hardly undertake to battle the council on behalf of two granddaughters who are declaring loudly they would not accept the sceptre in any case under any circumstances—only to give one of them the right to marry a man that will clearly break her heart.

Be that as it may—it seems I am slowly getting too tired to fight any more battles of any kind—and how surprised those who knew me in my youth would be to hear me say so! Soon enough the time will come to let the reins of Numenore slip through my fingers... Your grandfather has rested in peace in Noirinan for more than fifty years. But my own heart was buried long ago in fair Eldalonde. You know nothing of that; you do not need to.

And who knows? I may even be wrong about that suitor of yours. But I do not think so. I truly do not think so.

A.

She reads her grandmother’s letter over a second time. Then she lights a taper and, in an incense dish, burns it to ash. No historian needs to know that the great Tar-Ancalime ever admitted to weakness.

Ancalime’s elder granddaughter, in her elegant velvet slippers and her white dress stitched with seed pearls, walks away from the wreck of her marriage, out of the empty house and down the drive. Not all is lost. She gets on well with her brother, King Tar-Surion. There may yet be deeds to do in Armenelos.

Chapter End Notes

The reference to Eldalonde is an allusion to my OFC Faeleth, who features in an earlier Ancalime story (Loss All Around, archived here as a chapter of "Pyrrhic Wedding")

The rule about marrying within the House of Elros was introduced by Aldarion, because he blamed the failure of his marriage to Erendis on their different lifespans.
Ancalime, who clearly had her own views on the reasons of the failure of her parents's marriage, as she was right in the middle of their strife, does not show a great deal of respect for this rule--even when she was young, she declared once that if she had really wanted to marry someone else, she would not have hesitated to renounce the throne. She ended up obeying the rule and marrying a distant cousin, due to political pressures on her, and it was a very unhappy marriage indeed.

Originally written for Legendarium Ladies April 2015