The Family We Choose by Ilye

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Chapter 2

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Things were different when Anairë returned to the palace. Eärwen welcomed her like an old friend, but when Anairë asked if she could once again take up residence in her old suite, Eärwen’s lips tightened unhappily and her eyebrows drew together in regret.

“Of course you can," she began haltingly, "but Anairë, you know I cannot – not with Arafinwë the way he is now –”

Anairë cut her off with a wave of her hand. “I understand. I would be quite happy with your conversation, my love, whenever you should have chance to share it with me. It is just that this place feels more like home than anywhere else I have to go. And besides, I should like to know Alcarillë better, which I cannot easily do from afar at my parents'.”

Eärwen’s patent relief came in the clasp of her fingers around Anairë’s own, although Anairë found she couldn't tell what, exactly, Eãrwen was relieved about. “Now that, dearest, makes me glad. We have all lost too much of the family we were given, and I should hate to see you turn away from those who would choose to have us as their family.”

And so she stayed, and things changed. Anairë and Eärwen spoke daily as before, but now of more trivial matters instead of reminiscing about their families and guessing at unknown events in Middle-earth. There was, Anairë supposed, relevant little left on which to speculate, and reminiscence seemed too raw, too secret, these days. Only once the subject of their children came up. It flared up suddenly, like a match lit at midnight, when Anairë mentioned by-the-by that Irissë would have loved the masquerade ball being planned for Midsummer.

There was a sharp clink as Eärwen set her teacup back into its saucer with more force than was required, then sat with her hands clasped bloodlessly in her lap.

“Arafinwë should have brought Artanis home,” she said, very softly, through tight lips. Her sightless gaze was fixed somewhere between here and Námo’s halls. Finding herself at a loss for words, Anairë reached for Eärwen’s shoulder, but Eärwen flinched away, blinked at her, and then launched into an explanation of how difficult it had been to find enough green serviettes this year.

Anairë broached the subject with Alcarillë the next time they met. In the months since Anaire had moved back to the palace, they had fallen into the habit of meeting regularly to walk through the gardens. Usually they would stroll through the ornamental borders, with Alcarillë examining the the way the plants responded to the seasons. This time, though, Anairë took her elbow and steered them into the privacy of the maze.

Alcarillë looked at her with mild surprise, but remained quiet until Anairë said at length,

“I suppose Artanis never showed signs of wanting to return home with her father.”

Alcarillë’s shoulders shook in a silent huff of laughter. “My goodness, no! Middle-earth is very much her home now, in the same way that it is Ereinion’s. She married one of Elwë’s kinsmen – did you know that? Celeborn, he is called, and he named her Galadriel."

She spoke the Sindarin names, and from another Anairë would have found it strange. But it slotted seamlessly into Alacrillë’s accented Quenya and wound her further in the mysteries of a foreign, mysterious queen.

"Artanis' heart is in that country," Alcarillë went on, "and she has no intention of leaving it. Besides, her ambition is too great, and her pride. You should have seen the look of disdain on The Herald’s face when he announced that the Valar had rescinded their ban over the Ñoldor.”

“I can well imagine it,” Anairë said. She knew the stubbornness of a child determined to defy the parent. “And yet… Eärwen feels that Arafinwë should have brought her back with him.”

Alcarillë sighed. “Poor Arafinwë. He may as well have tried to coax the stars out of the sky.”

“She always was headstrong, that girl,” Anairë agreed. She thought of what she had been told of her grandson: of his profound, abiding love for the wild unpredictability of the remade continent East of Ulmo’s deeps, and his desire to know it all. She could see how that same kind of passion might bloom in the rebellious daughter of Eärwen and Arafinwë. The last time she had seen Artanis, she had been barely past her majority and filled with the cocksurety of any young adult who had yet to make a grave mistake. Her Findekáno and Arakáno had been much the same, and Anairë suspected that spending so much time in male company had done little to temper Artanis’ fire.

“She is no girl now.”

Anairë glanced across at Alcarillë and saw a glint in her eye to match the edge to her voice. Alcarillë went on,

“No, no, she has grown into an exceedingly powerful woman. I know not what she learned with Melian – Melyanna – in Doriath, but she is indeed a force to be reckoned with. But,” and she softened a little, “part of that power comes, I suppose, from knowing her own mind with utmost certainty.”

“That must be the source of yours as well, in which case.”

Anairë said it without thinking, then bit her tongue – but too late. She darted a sideways glance at Alcarillë. The other woman’s eyebrows rose and her lips quirked in amusement.

“It seems that way to you, does it?” She shook her head. “Think of the swan paddling frantically beneath the water’s still surface.”

“But you seem so at ease with the decisions you have made and all you’ve lost,” Anairë protested. She would never normally have been so forthright, but something in Alcarillë’s calm, open demeanour invited it.

Alcarillë shrugged. "They cannot be unmade," she said baldly. "You cannot unring a bell. That does not mean I wish I had chosen differently, but I try not to be overly decadent in my grief and indulge my what ifs. There is no practical use in it, after all."

"But you still grieve," Anairë said, as though she had only just realised this fact. "You still regret." She sat down on the stone bench beneath the topiary eagle and patted the seat next to her.

Alcarillë sat beside her. For a long time it seemed as though she would uphold her refusal to indulge her grief, but at last she said,

“We sent Ereinion away, you know, to live in safety with Círdan in the Havens.” She tilted her head up to the sky that was the same watery blue as her eyes. Her voice was perfectly calm, but her jaw clenched and she swallowed down some emotion before she went on, “He was only eight.”

Anairë lightly touched her shoulder. “That must have been a very hard thing to do,” she replied evenly, though she wondered how it hadn't proved merely hard, but impossible. Alcarillë nodded, still staring skywards.

“The hardest. And now I have abandoned him again although, like the last time, I know it is the right place for him.”

“He is not a boy now, though. He is a king." Here, Anairë felt in more comfortable territory. Sorrow and death were alien to her, but she did know a thing or two about kings. "You raised him to make wise decisions and this was merely one in a long line of them. You didn’t leave him, my dear. He chose not to come with you."

Alcarillë turned to her, and though the ghost of her grief was still in her eyes, her clever smile winged its shadow across her lips.

“I would say the same of you: your family did not leave you. You chose not to go with them.”

Anairë caught her breath. Why had she stayed? She had tormented herself with that question over and over, and never found an answer that completely satisfied her. She had not gone because it was not a woman’s place – yet Artanis and Elenwë and Irissë and Alcarillë next to her were proof otherwise. She had not gone because Aman was her home, but here she was abiding in the palace residence with no place to call her own. She had not gone because she loved Earwen; poor, conflicted Earwen, who in tending to her husband’s traumatised soul kindled her own anger’s embers and welded her own heart shut to love.

Anairë could have sunk headlong into the tragedy of it all, but instead she found Alcarillë’s ringing pragmatism in her ears. The reason she had made her decision no longer mattered. It could not be unmade – neither her decision, nor theirs.

“I did choose not to, you are correct,” she said with the steady voice of someone at last finding peace in their heart. “But each one of them was fully grown; old enough to make their own choices as I did mine.” She smiled to herself, though it hurt to do so. “I let them make their own mistakes.”

Alcarillë glanced at her sidelong and lent her a knowing, humourless half-smile of her own. “That never stops you from wanting to protect them, though, does it?”

“Never,” Anairë agreed, then added ruefully, “Besides, swearing a child to the parent’s side never helped anything. Look at Fëanáro and his sons.”

The air between her and Alcarillë chilled. “Fëanáro’s sons would have been the first to tell you that they took their Oath as adults, of their own volition,” she said stiffly. “And they bore the responsibility of that decision, even though it broke them one by one. Your children were no less loyal to Ñolofinwë; the difference is that he had the good sense not to go swearing Oaths before the Valar.”

It was the first time in their many months of a slow-budding friendship that Anairë had seen Alcarillë come to anger, and it was an awe-inspiring thing. Her face had paled and her eyes darkened and flashed, but even though deeply stirred by the subject, she spoke with composure and admirable self-mastery. Unbidden, Anairë found herself thinking that she would have made the perfect foil for Findekáno; the ice to his flashbang temper and the measures to his impulse. And the curious voice of pragmatism wondered how, when all Findekáno had ever wanted in the way of love was –

“You know,” said Alcarillë, snatching Anairë’s thoughts back to the shade beneath the eagle, “Once he became High King I spent decades trying to talk Ereinion into brokering a treaty with Russandol and Makalaurë, but he would not have it. It was eminently sensible of him, if I am honest, but still, I hoped they might somehow unmake their own decision…” She looked as though she wanted to say more, but stopped herself before thoughts became words and instead gave a canny tilt of her head. “I suppose it is my own fault for seeing that he was raised to make the just decisions that any true king should.”

“He is like his grandfather in more than appearance, then,” Anairë said, and was surprised to find herself for the first time smiling as she remembered her late husband. “Ñolvo always acted like a good leader, even before he became one.”

“There, at least, Russandol did make a sensible decision by handing over the crown,” Alcarillë said, her voice softer now and her anger well anchored. “Ñolofinwë was an excellent king.” She paused for a moment as though if in thought, then said abruptly, “I don’t suppose you know it was only because of him that Ereinion was born?”

Anairë hesitated. She did not know… and did she want to? Her indecision must have been plain on her face, for Alcarillë then stood and held out her hand.

“Perhaps that is a conversation for another day. Come, let’s walk again, for I would love to see how the yellow roses responded to last night’s rain shower.”