The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Attack

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(One Year Later. Or Thereabouts)

Arafinwë throws the absolutely most interminably boring, unbearable parties in the history of Eä. Nelyo would argue with me that Eä doesn’t have a history because history requires writing and blah blah blah, but whatever. My point is that Arafinwë’s parties are awful.

I wouldn’t have even considered coming except 1) my mother and Nelyo tag-teamed to force the issue and 2) I have two friends in the history of Eä, and they are both supposed to be here. To a loner like myself, the opportunity to finally perform the virtue of loyalty toward a friend (not a father, not a brother) is irresistible. The occasion is Findaráto’s election to the House of Scholars for the district right outside the Calcirya. Not like it was a surprise; he’s been leading in the polls for months, since his challenger decided to disappear halfway through the last Congressional session to sail on a wine cruise along the Avatharian isles. And Findaráto’s Telerin constituency like both his Telerin blood and his lack of participation in the first kinslaying. And his Noldorin constituency like both his bona fides in scholarship and craft and his participation in the exile.

Findaráto’s election was no surprise, but my appearance at his party is. The eyebrows popping up when I walk in look like a legion of inchworms humping down a branch, and it seems to me that the crowd—because, naturally, Findaráto draws a crowd—takes on a susurrating undertone—something you hear until you listen for it—as they whisper about me. Or maybe they don’t. I don’t hear it when I listen for it. Once upon a time, I would have known for certain: their thoughts would have plagued around me with the impertinence of poking fingers, prodding at me until I couldn’t take it and fled ignominiously. Not any longer. My mind is clenched closed, unable to be pried open by even the most insistent of fingers. I walk through the crowd—I’ll admit I hold my head just a little high—and people melt away from me as I pass.

My triumph is short-lived, however. Prodding emotions or not, the place is noisy, and close, and hot. There are people everywhere whom I do not know and have no interest in knowing. This one wears too much scent and smells like a beaver’s ass; this one seems oblivious to his elbow nudging into my back as he gestures. I step forward to scan the crowd; here comes the elbow again. That one over there laughs like a hungry donkey; that one there has a hat that looks like a squirrel’s nest, so awful that I cannot look away and sincerely question the judgment of the brain underneath it. This experience embodies the terrible thing about friendship, I have learned. This is why, I have convinced myself, I did not have friends when I was younger, just my brothers and lovers. Friendship confers obligation.

I find Amarië quickly, in the receiving line beside Findaráto. Like it or not—wife or not—Amarië has been thrust into the role of a political wife. She is clearly miserable, and I join the sluggish river of people waiting for a handshake, wanting to make some cutting remark that will make her smile, but when I am five people away, I still haven’t thought of anything, so I slip out of the line. It will only make her more miserable if she is forced to watch me offer insincere congratulations to my cousin.

I might have avoided this party if it was just Amarië I had to answer to—she is never one for niceties for niceties’ sake—but there is Artaher too, and he will expect me at his father’s party in honor of his brother. I look for him next. “That little fucker,” I mumble under my breath while squeezing between two clusters of people deep in conversation and apparently oblivious of my need to pass through. One of them gives me a startled look. Artaher should be easy to find, one of the few golden heads among all the silver and black, but I see my uncle, my cousin Findaráto—no Artaher.

Believe me when I tell you that I didn’t intend this to happen. Certainly not my attendance at this party but even more so the bigger accident of my friendship with Artaher. That lunch a year ago, when he expressed that he wanted to be my friend, I nodded (I didn’t accept, not with words) because I assumed it was what he was supposed to say and what I was supposed to do, and then we’d fade back to our separate existences. But he worked at it—at our friendship—and at me. No one has ever pursued me before. Taryindë and I were a force of habit that we eventually formalized into marriage—a loving, passionate marriage, yes, but no one even proposed it, and neither of us had to work for the other—and the only other people who cared about me were family and therefore obligated to do so. But Artaher? He brought me things, he asked me to go places with him, he remembered my preferences and complaints and shaped his own behavior around them. And I found myself telling him things: about my wife and daughters, my father, the exile, the war; about death; about my mind I could never shut and the fury of constant thoughts and emotions of others, of what he and his brothers had done to me.

It was all the things I imagine my therapist wished I would say to her instead of spending our hour each week answering in monosyllables while playing myself in Connect 4.

“Ulmo’s water, get me a drink and out of here.” Amarië’s voice at my elbow startles me. I grab two drinks from a passing tray—I doubt they were intended for me to take—as she pulls me by the arm outside, letting the door shut on the roar of the party.

One of the drinks is pink and frothy, and one is whiskey. I try to give her the pink, frothy one, but she says, “Fuck you. You know I don’t drink that shit,” and downs the whiskey in one shot, even licking the remnants from the ice. I sip at the pink frothy thing. It’s actually not that bad.

“I only have a minute,” she says. “I got away because I told him I had to pee.”

“Take five and tell him you were wrong and you actually had to poop.”

She laughs uproariously. “This is why I grabbed you, Carnistir, even though there’s several dozen Congressfolk in there whose ear I would love to have for a minute … or five!” She leans against the wall and presses the cold, empty glass to her forehead.

“You’re not his wife,” I say. “Do you have to stand with him?”

“I’m afraid,” she answered, “that I have to stand with him. Wife or not, there are some expectations that, if left unmet, a relationship won’t weather.”

“I’m leaving then if I don’t have you to talk to. And Artaher isn’t here, I guess.”

Amarië gives me a strange look. She has encouraged our friendship, Artaher and me. When I feel disappointed with myself for succumbing so easily to a sympathetic ear and gifts of soup, I convince myself that most of my friendship with Artaher is actually Amarië’s doing, and she’s good at getting people to do things. Look at this republic. She even got Uncle Arafinwë off his ass. But anyway, when I told her about Artaher and his wanting to be friends, she said, “Well, you are a lot alike,” and when I became annoyed with her—that is exactly what Artaher said, and it might be the stupidest idea I’ve heard—she dismissed me with simply, “Really??”

Now, she is giving me a similarly quizzical look. “He’s definitely not here, Carnistir.”

“Okay? Was I supposed to know that?”

She stares at me and starts to laugh but cuts it off so that it sounds more like a cough. “Really??”

“Stop that. I hate it, when I ask a question and you just say, ‘Really??’ and don’t actually answer.”

“Varda’s sprinkles, Carnistir, I would have assumed you’d be the first to know.”

“Why? I didn’t even want to be his friend. You’re the one who made me.”

“Fuck off. You adore him, and you know it. I had nothing to do with it. You’ve actually come to peace with something in your life. Isn’t it nice? Not just wallowing forever in your own misery? But everything considered—”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

After a long pause during which her mouth hangs open just slightly, she replies, “Artaher is ill, Carnistir. He’s having one of his attacks.”

“Attacks?”

Watching her face is like when you pull out a brick from a child’s block tower and watch it lean, then crumple. For a moment, I think it will hold, and then slack-faced dismay makes her almost ugly. “Go up to his room,” she says finally, plucking the remnants of the pink frothy drink from my hand. “Just go.”