rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 2: Anairë

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Breakfast in the Queen’s House of Alqualondë was an austere affair, but Elwing fell upon the simple fare as one starving. She had nice manners, Anairë noted, beneath the obvious ravenous hunger, the kind of almost-innate neatness and conformity to etiquette that only came from centuries of practice -- or hard training from an early age. She ate her seaweed soup quickly, but neatly, the spoon skimming the broth in the right direction, and sipped her tea rather than gulping it, and polished the bowl of rice with salmon roe in an elegant trice.

Anairë did not push her to speak before she had filled her belly, and trod on Eärwen’s toes when it seemed she might ask the sort of questions unconducive to smooth digestion.

She took the opportunity to catalog each of Elwing’s features and discard them as proceeding from strangers. Those high cheekbones did not belong on the broad, catlike Vanyarin faces of her children; nor did the loose-curled nullity of her hair, tied back in a green ribbon, share texture with Nolofinwë’s coils. That light-brown skin with its yellow undertones did not come from Anairë, and some features were simply a mystery. What might cause those hairs at her temples to grow silver as Eärwen’s? How had such a young person -- for Anairë was sure she was young -- gained mariner’s creases around her eyes, like the sailors who spent centuries out to sea, until their hröar took on their spirits’ farsighted squints of their own accord?

No, she looked like no member of Anairë’s family. And why should she, after all, when there was an entire world across the sea to swallow them? She might as well wonder if the girl was a relative of long-lost Elwë.

She paused.

She had not seen the maiden Lúthien when she came to Valinor on the quick, light road of the fëa.

And yet.

What news had trickled into Tirion from the slopes of Taniquetil spoke of a woman with short-cropped, curling hair like the night itself, who sang like a nightingale -- sweet and impenetrable -- and scattered winged shadows about her even at high noon. Anairë had had to sort through each and every report, so she could stand before her assembled people of widows and orphans and tell them that their loves would not be released, and their dead would remain so, for such was the lot of the Queen of the Noldor-in-Aman.

Anairë looked again at each feature on the face of the stranger Elwing, and was caught by those gray eyes. Elwing had finished eating and gazed evenly at her.

“For whom do you search in my face?” she asked.

Anairë did not cringe, for queens in the inverse of exile did not flinch when asked for the truth.

“I look for the maid Lúthien, and I look for the family of Elwë Singollo through her,” she replied. “She came with a familiar sorrow and left with a joy still unknown to Aman, and none know whence she departed.”

Eärwen’s fëa pressed against her own like the ocean seeking to overwhelm a seawall. Anairë did not let her in.

Elwing, meanwhile, gave her a look, almost, of approval. Who had last looked at Anairë so?

“‘Long ago they passed away, in the forest singing sorrowless,’” Elwing said, falling into a ballad rhythm, that forest-tide voice stirring the little air currents. Her mouth quirked humorlessly. “She left her sorrows to us.”

“And who comprises ‘us,’ bird-guest, black-haired girl? Her heirs to privilege?” Eärwen’s voice was cold, and Anairë chanced a glance at her face, even knowing it would be still as pearl. “Do not speak in riddles to a queen.”

Anairë slammed her heel down as hard as she could -- but Eärwen had moved her feet. Something in her felt frozen, the same kind of congelation that stilled her heart in court, or when facing yet another cool meeting with Olwë and Ingwë, the sense that she was a chunk of ice in the midst of a whirlpool, being carried by currents she should be able to master, but which she hardly wished to.

Elwing, however, laughed.

“Not my queen,” she said. “I am Elwing Dioriel, daughter of Nimloth, granddaughter of Lúthien, great-granddaughter of Melian and Thingol Greycloak. This lineage grants me no privilege, Lady Eärwen, for who else am I? A refugee dispossessed, a mother reaved of her children, a queen usurped, a bird blown off-course in a storm so that I might beg before the same gods as my grandmother, whose plight and power earned her only her own rightful life on a dying continent. I do not cow easily.”

Anairë wondered what was expected of the least at a table of three rulers — for she could not have -- had not! -- claimed dispossession and power at once with such dignity. And once she had not cowed easily, but that was when she had nothing to repent for.

She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, and decided that, if she were so outmatched, she would not pretend to queenliness.

“May I help you?”

She asked as if she spoke to Irissë, her little proud one. A smile tucked into the corner of her mouth, a tone like she wished to be invited into some adventure, not like she was a mother swooping in to fix some small disaster. It hurt -- but there. Elwing darted her a little glance with just her eyes, and visibly — at least to her — decided that she could be trusted more.

Eärwen was palpably peeved — again, at least to her — but she would never stoop so low as to show it to a stranger. Anairë kept her smile on, and slowly, Elwing turned away from Eärwen to face her.

“You have much to tell us,” Anairë said. “I must return to Tirion, for their time of worship will soon be over, and it is known that something came to these shores from Endórë. I would like to be able to tell your story, or such parts of it as you vouchsafe us, well. I would like to be able to help you, for I have at least been a mother. And, if you are Eärwen’s family, you are mine.”

Elwing nodded.

“I need--” she paused, looked, perhaps, embarrassed -- “Shelter. I have no place to stay and many of the plants and animals here are strange to me. My husband goes to speak with the Valar. He will tell our tale to them, but I would tell our tale to the people of Valinor.”

Anairë carefully did not react to the idea of a husband roaming loose in Aman. It was a privilege to take chaos one problem at a time.

“Shelter we have, and plenty. But let us decide together where you shall stay. You may come to Tirion, city of the Noldor, where I rule, or we could seek to rejoin you with your husband. Or,” and she wished Eärwen’s feet were in range, “You may stay here, with Eärwen, among family.”

She snuck a glance at Eärwen, silent and impassive at the head of the table. Mentally, she dared her to protest or contradict Anairë’s claim of kin-right for Elwing. Tirion was no place for someone from over the sea. She would be mobbed instantly, asked to bear each grief, even each blame -- no. Alqualondë would be better by far. She folded her hands beneath the table and waited.

Elwing did not visibly waver or hesitate, and Anairë thought, Irissë would be chewing her lip now. But, of course, Elwing was not a child, and Irissë was not either, anymore.

“I would stay here,” Elwing said. “I sought out this city a-purpose, for an ever I had family, I knew to search for it here — and I do not wish to be far from the sea.” She tried to catch Eärwen’s gaze.

Anairë, for the first time in the conversation, nudged Eärwen’s mind. Please, she thought, and sent a little sense memory of the press of her first descent into Tirion after — everything — the bodies and the clutching at her hem and the fevered hum of questions.

Eärwen did not respond in osanwë, but she pursed her lips slightly enough that Anairë wondered if anyone else could have caught it, and unbent.

“Stay and be welcome, cousin,” she said. “You are no guest in Alqualondë; you are kin. My home and table are yours.”

Anairë caught the sigh of relief before it could escape.

“We must see you settled, then,” she said. “Afterwards, I will take my leave, for it is a long way to Tirion, and I mean to travel faster than the news. First, however, you must tell me: what is it you wish the news to be? What is your story?”

--

Anairë sat on a haybale in her traveling clothes, waiting for the first horse in her relay to be saddled. There were three more horses before Tirion, two more before she would have to dress, one more before she would reclaim her attendants from the wayhouse where she had left them on her journey northeast to Eärwen.

She did have to go, she reminded herself. There were reassurances she must provide, information she must disseminate, fears she must lay to rest. No one needed her here.

She thought of Elwing, who had looked small and birdlike in her white robe, speaking of Men and of Elves, of her children slain, of a transformation three years in the making, of a quest. Eärwen had burned beside her the whole time, something like a ship alight with Ossë’s Candles, cold to the touch and luminescent.

Anairë had not seen the docks of Alqualondë sluiced with blood, nor the swanships burning, anymore than she had seen the wharves of Sirion splintered or the reed-thatched homes torched. Flames seemed to flicker before her eyes all the same. Her own nephews had done that, she thought, and wondered at her own surprise. As they had begun, so had they carried on.

Bitterly, she nudged at the clotted silence where her children’s minds had once nestled against hers, and twisted her mouth in a smile. How dare she be glad for the absence? How dare she grieve, that at least her own children had perished before they could slaughter the children of someone who sat across from her at table?

Nerwen had remained unspoken. Cowardice on her part, perhaps, but also her hard-won sense of politics. Elwing had not said what she wished of the Teleri beyond refuge, but her desperate quest belied a mere interest in family and her own shelter. Eärwen, meanwhile, had hardly spoken a word.

Anairë may have become a flotsam queen, these many years after the destruction of her world, but Eärwen had become like sea ice, a jagged rime over a bitter ocean.

A groom led her horse towards her — a compact chestnut gelding with a dished face — and she stood, brushing straw from her skirts.

Perhaps she was no one’s first choice as ruler, perhaps she was no one’s first choice as a parent, but the world had sung to her, once, and still she could hear its echoes, when she had the time and the will to listen. If she could not shape it as she had once wished, giving of her body and her dancing and her joy, still, she could shape it. She mounted the horse.

There was one final task before she returned to Tirion. The city rejoiced in festival, and their queen, supposedly, paid her respects to the powers that governed their lives. Anairë… had. She had danced on the shore each morning for the foam-cap painters and the sand grinders, and watered the grandmother trees, and sung to the cloud-spinners and the little straw-thatched sprites who helped the horses birth, and given little garnet drops of her blood to the emerald-eyed wolves who approached her in the forest and held her wrists gently in their mouths. Every stone and stream with its own soul had shared a part of her, this last week, as she had shared as a young girl before she had dreamed of kings and princes.

Before the next relay station was the temple where she should have been all this time, and on her saddle were the offerings it was her duty to present. From Alqualondë, it took only a handful of hours to reach on horseback.

Anairë tethered the gelding to a tree, slipping on a halter for extra insurance that headstrong Sungold would not wader. She unfastened the bundle from her saddle and stepped into the circle of monoliths — the star, the bear, the tree, the eagle, the shuttle — and neither sang nor danced nor bled. She walked to the circle’s center. Undoing the ties of the bag, she let fall the hunting horn of chased silver, the telescope of bright copper, the dancing shoes of finest silk, and all the rest. The objects clanged into a shining heap, crushing a spire of lupin — white-hearted, unfertilized. Anairë dropped the bag atop of the pile, and turned to leave. The stones watched in silence. She hesitated. Chewed her lip. Sucked the droplet of blood back into her mouth.

She kicked the pile once, then turned to go back to her husband’s city.