The Kids Are All Right by grey_gazania

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Chapter 4

The next people Ereiniel confided in were Maewen and Erestor, as they ate lunch together the following day. They were her best friends, after all, and if she couldn’t trust them not to laugh at her, who could she trust? 

 

“Well, I’d vote for you,” Maewen said. “That is, if I had a vote.”

 

“It’s only three more years till you turn fifty,” Ereiniel said. “That’s not that far away.”

 

“Yeah,” Maewen conceded, “but there won’t be an election that year. I’ll have to wait till I’m fifty-seven for the next one.”

 

Erestor rolled his eyes. “Stop complaining,” he said through a mouthful of barley rusk. “I’m fifty-nine and I haven’t gotten to vote on anything yet, unless you count voting on what my father should cook for dinner.”

 

Swallowing, he nudged Ereiniel with a friendly elbow and continued, ‘You’ve got my support. I think we need some younger voices, personally. I mean, yes, everyone on the current council is very wise and venerable, but I don’t think any of them really understand what it feels like to grow up here. I feel stuck, and I know you do, too. But when I try to talk about the things that worry me, I get brushed off. It’s always, oh, you’ll understand better when you’re older, once you have some real life experience under your belt. Nobody listens.”

 

Turning to Maewen, he said, “I envy you sometimes. It’s easy for you. You’ve been weaving since we were kids. You’re good at it, and you like it. I don’t think you’ve ever considered doing anything else. But right now my dreams for my life feel as far away as the moon.”

 

Ereiniel knew that Erestor wanted to be a loremaster. He was the most intensely curious person she’d ever known, hungry for every scrap of knowledge that he could find. He’d read his way through every book in Balar’s ragbag library multiple times, memorized the sagas of both the Falathrim and the people of Mithrim, and had wheedled Madam Ithrin and Henthael into letting him join Ereiniel’s lessons – even Madam Ithrin’s private Quenya classes, the ones Lord Círdan turned a carefully blind eye to.

 

Elu Thingol was the king of the Sindar, but Círdan had always done things his own way. Thingol might have banned Quenya from being spoken in his lands, but when Fingon had asked Círdan to allow his daughter to learn the native tongue of her father’s people, Círdan hadn’t refused.

 

Ereiniel knew what Erestor meant, too, about feeling stuck. The first blow had been struck against them some twenty years ago, with the destruction of Eglarest and Brithombar. Now they were waiting for the hammer to fall a second time, as it surely would. Some days that was Ereiniel’s first thought upon waking – would today be the day that some giant winged beast came roaring across the bay and out to the island, bent on destruction? It was like living with a sword hanging over their heads, a squeezing, claustrophobic feeling that the future was shrinking ever smaller right before their eyes.

 

She hated it.

 

Erestor was now attacking his salted herring with vigor. “You’ve got broad appeal, too,” he was saying. “You’re one of the Golodhrim royal family, your mother’s people are the people of Mithrim, and you grew up at the Falas, so you’re basically a Falathron by adoption. You’ve got ties to all three cultures. That’ll help. I know I’d trust you to listen to everyone in the neighborhood, not just to the Golodhrim.”

 

That wasn’t an angle Ereiniel had considered, but Erestor made a good point. For as long as they’d lived on Balar, there had been occasional inter-Kindred squabbles among some of the council members, and from what Ereiniel had heard her grandfather, Annael, say, Lord Círdan had to work hard to keep those sorts of arguments out of the island’s High Council.

 

She hoped she could be as fair as Erestor apparently trusted her to be. It was true that she felt between peoples sometimes – not quite one thing and not quite the other. She’d always viewed it as a negative, feeling like she was too Noldorin for some of the Sindar, but not Noldorin enough for some of the Noldor. Erestor’s new, more positive spin on the situation was food for thought.

 

“Thanks,” she said. “I really love you both a lot. You know that, right?”

 

Maewen smiled, and Erestor laughed. “We sure do,” he said. “Best friends forever, remember? Didn’t we pinky swear it when we were small? Back in the days when I was an obnoxious little twerp?”

 

“You’re still an obnoxious little twerp,” Ereiniel said, flashing him a teasing grin.

 

“But we like you anyway,” Maewen added earnestly. Then she leaned over and pressed a kiss to Ereiniel’s cheek, causing Ereiniel’s face to grow warm. “You can do this,” Mawen said. “And we’ll be behind you all the way.”

 

***********

 

So, the next day, following her morning training with Gurvadhor, Ereiniel made the three-mile walk to Balar’s city hall, where she spoke to Tathar, one of the clerks, who put her name down for her neighborhood’s ballot.

 

Lord Círdan was there as well, discussing the health of the clam beds with Lînneth, but he paused to greet Ereiniel. She returned his greeting with a respectful nod; while Círdan had never insisted that anyone bow to him, saying that such things should be reserved for Elu Thingol, his king in Doriath, he had taken Ereiniel and her mother in, defended the Falas for centuries, and led the survivors to safety after Morgoth’s attack. He was deserving of the appropriate deference.

 

“What brings you here today, Ereiniel?” he asked, fixing her in his keen gaze, with his piercing grey eyes that had always reminded her of stars.

 

“I’m registering for the election,” she said. She was blushing, she knew; she could feel her face grow hot, and knew she must be turning red beneath her freckles. Like her freckles, the ease with which she blushed was a legacy from her father. But she couldn’t help it; she was, still, a little worried that people might think she was being presumptuous. As her mother had pointed out, she was quite young, only just eligible, and while Erestor might think some younger voices were needed, Ereiniel knew that there were plenty of people out there who would disagree.

 

But all Círdan did was look at her pensively and say, “Interesting. I wish you luck.” Then he turned back to Lînneth and resumed their prior discussion.

 

Oddly, Ereiniel felt as though she had passed some kind of test, but for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.

 

***********

 

It continued to snow, though the monotony was punctuated by showers of hail and, most miserable of all, sleet and freezing rain. Give me a good snowdrift to deal with any day, Ereiniel thought as she slipped and slid her way across the slick, ice-covered walkway back to the house, a basket of the eggs she’d collected from the chicken coop hanging on one arm.

 

“If these boots didn’t have such good treads, I’d have six broken eggs and probably a broken bone or two,” she told her mother, as she shed her outdoor wear in the entryway.

 

Ianneth chuckled, but said, “No broken bones, please, love. That broken arm you had when you were nineteen was more than enough.”

 

As Ianneth heated up water to boil a few of the eggs, Ereiniel resumed working on her midwinter gift for Annael – a cloth belt embroidered with a pattern of heather and gorse. Her gifts for everyone else were finished – new quills and a sheaf of thick paper for Erestor; a beeswax and lanolin balm for Maewen’s hands, scented with bergamot; new gloves for Henthael; sea salt mixed with lavender oil, for her aunt Tinneth to soak her feet; and for her mother, earrings, two pearls that Ereiniel had found in oysters that past the summer and had carefully wrapped in silver wire.

 

They had left behind everything but the clothes on their backs when they had fled Eglarest, all of her mother’s pretty things except for the necklace Ianneth had been wearing that day, the jade heart that Fingolfin and Lalwen had given her when she and Fingon had wed.  Ereiniel thought that her mother deserved something else that was pretty.

 

As her mother cooked and as she sewed, Ereiniel went over what Erestor had said to her, his views on the mingling of peoples on Balar.

 

“I never thought of it that way before,” she concluded. “That being a little bit of everything could be a good thing. I’ve always just felt like a misfit. But maybe he has a point. I don’t think I’d be biased towards the Golodhrim. We’re all Edhil, after all. And we’ve been mixing together for centuries, at least outside of Doriath.”

 

“It’s about respect,” Ianneth said. “That’s why my people were willing to ally with the Golodhrim against Elu Thingol’s wishes. You grandfather and his people respected us. They fought beside us, intermarried with us, adopted our language and even some of our ways. Thingol calls himself our king, but he’s never respected us the way Fingolfin and his people did.”

 

She jabbed at the logs in the hearth with the poker – more out of irritation, Ereiniel thought, than out of an actual need to poke up the fire – and said, “Thingol used to accuse us of being thralls, because we dared to live out in the open, in the sight of Angband, instead of cowering away behind enchantments like they do in his kingdom. He calls the Golodhrim arrogant, but between the two of them, I’ve always known whom I would choose, and it isn’t Thingol. Not that I'd say a word against him in front of Lord Círdan, of course,” she added as an afterthought. “They’re kin, after all. But even Círdan doesn’t obey Thingol’s every decree.”

 

Cutting two thick slices of bread from what remained yesterday’s loaf, she said again, “Respect. That’s what it’s all about. Erestor has the right idea. He’s got a sharp mind, that lad. He’s wasted in what he’s doing now.” Ianneth sighed and added, “A lot of you young ones have talents that are going untapped, and it’s a shame. I worry about what the future will hold for you.”

 

Ereiniel nodded. “We talked about that a bit, too,” she said. “About feeling trapped here, and about how some of the older people – not you, Nana, but plenty others – don’t take us seriously when we try to talk about that. I thought maybe that could be part of my platform – you know, youth representation. I know it’s not just me and Erestor who feel like all the doors are being shut in our faces.”

 

Ianneth had been about to fish the boiled eggs from the pot, but she stopped, and then walked over to her daughter and wrapped her arms around her in an embrace.

 

“I’m sorry, love,” she murmured. “I never wanted you to have to grow up during a war. We had such dreams for you, your father and I. We thought we would have a longer time of peace. Your father was so certain that if we all worked together, we could defeat Morgoth. I wish his efforts had succeeded.”

 

“It’s okay, Nana,” Ereiniel said, closing her eyes and hugging her mother back. “You did your best. You’ve always done your best.”

 

Ianneth pressed a kiss to the top of Ereiniel’s head and said, “You’re a good girl, Ereiniel. I’m very proud of the young woman you’ve become.” Then she stepped away, collected the hard boiled eggs, and placed them on the plates with the bread before carrying them to the table. “Now eat up,” she urged. “You have a lot of your peers you need to talk to, if you want to succeed.”

 

“Speaking of peers,” Ereiniel said as she tapped her egg against the table, “I wanted to ask you. I know he’s not exactly my peer, but would it be all right if I invited Celebrimbor to celebrate midwinter with us? I mean, he doesn’t really know anyone here, except for the other people from Nargothrond, and we are cousins. I thought it might be nice for him to celebrate with family.”

 

Of course, Ereiniel realized that that would mean she would have to come up with a gift for him. Perhaps some of the same balm she’d made for Maewen; her friend always swore that it was the best thing for keeping her skin from getting chapped in the winter, and Celebrimbor’s chosen craft took just as much dexterity of hand as Maewen’s did.

 

“I think that would be very kind of you,” Ianneth said, “and I have no objections. It’s been difficult for the people from Nargothrond, making a fresh start here with nothing but each other. We know what that’s like, you and I.”

 

Ereiniel nodded. Yes, they knew what that was like. They’d come to Eglarest alone after the Dagor Bragollach, knowing no one, with no company but one another. The first few years had been difficult, before they had finally begun to settle in. And then, less than twenty years later, Eglarest had been destroyed, most of their friends and neighbors killed or taken captive. At least, through all of that, Ereiniel had had her mother with her. But Celebrimbor was alone.

 

Ereiniel, though, had no intention of letting that situation stand. Not when she could do something about it. The next time she saw Celebrimbor, she would offer her invitation.

Chapter End Notes

Ages: Maewen (47) is about the equivalent of a mortal 17-year-old. Ereiniel (50) is about 18, and Erestor (59) is around 21.

 

Edhil (S.) - Eldar

 

"He [Thingol] had small love for the Northern Sindar who had in regions near to Angband come under the dominion of Morgoth, and were accused of sometimes entering his service and providing him with spies." - J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Problem of Ros", The Peoples of Middle-earth

 

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