rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 13: Eärwen

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Like the last time they had passed the night together, neither Eärwen nor Elwing had remembered to close the room against dawn’s exploratory fingers. The morning breeze stirred Eärwen first, blinking in disorientation — here she was in Nerwen’s room, a smaller body drowsing beneath the blue silk coverlet beside her, but what was this light? This smell of feathers?

The bird-scent brought her back to herself, and to Elwing, for although Eärwen had passed the night wandering in memories of the room washed silver by Telperion, holding baby Nerwen in her arms of recollection, Elwing slept true-sleep beside her, arms flung above her head.

Eärwen turned on her side and propped herself on her elbow, reaching out with her other hand to brush a black-and-white streak of Elwing’s hair from around her neck, where it trickled down between her breasts to finish its curl over the wings of her narrow ribcage. In the night, it had wrapped around Eärwen’s fingers like the lapping waves around pier-legs, or the vines that wound the great redwoods of the hills, something half-alive.

At her touch, Elwing’s gray eyes blinked open and focused upon hers with hardly a moment of confusion. Though mourning dove-soft, Eärwen could not plumb them. They stared at one another in mutual remoteness, until Eärwen closed her eyes and leant forward to kiss her again — for it was dawn; for she had spoken in the mind to Anairë in the night and said not to expect her until breakfast; for in this, at least, Elwing acceded to her; for it had been long and long since she had used her body for pleasure of this kind.

When Elwing made to hold her in return, Eärwen moved over her and held her arms in their winged abandon above her head by the wrists and her hips with her own hips. When Elwing opened her mouth to speak, Eärwen kissed her. When at last Elwing relaxed into her grip and the press of her lips, Eärwen squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed and let her free hand snake down the edge of Elwing’s body. Elwing stiffened when her fingers played with the crepe-crinkled remnants of stretch marks on the low moon of her stomach, relaxed when Eärwen’s hand reached lower to where black hair curled in fascinating abundance around the lips of her cunt. Eärwen held her down and pressed her voice back into her and let the deep throb of pleasure drown out thought, until Elwing’s teeth snapped together and she shook loose-limbed into the morning.

When she blinked her eyes open once more, clear and sparkling in sunlight turned honeyed with the turn of the day, they surprised Eärwen with their happiness, and something, at last, uncoiled within her so she let go Elwing’s wrists, sat up astride her hips, and let Elwing bowl her gently back, curtaining the light with her hair.

“You would have me overmastered?” Elwing asked. She lay a hand beneath the curve of Eärwen’s breast, and, breaking into a smile, jiggled it, watching in evident delight as the soft flesh rippled. “When all last night I knelt before you and kissed your hand?”

“You arise blithe and merry,” Eärwen observed, asperity mellowed slightly by breathlessness.

“I find I have carried my burden to its resting place, and so I run about like a horse untacked — ai, or I run like a horse sensing an earthquake, yet glad to be swift. I am giddy, not blithe. And you are comely.”

So saying, she leant down to lip at Eärwen’s breast, then the other, and then her curtain of curls dragged shivers down Eärwen’s body until it settled in a silky drape over her hips. Though Eärwen thought her words strange, they were muffled by pleasure, and Eärwen arched and shuddered out of her desperate mood and into calmer waters.

Elwing settled her pointy little jaw — shining-wet — above Eärwen’s pubic bone and watched her blink and swallow and reassemble an approximation of her intentions for the day.

“I expect you will go out and make more trouble,” she remarked when her mind had fallen back into place, raking her fingers through the milky white streak in Elwing’s night-black hair and pulling her once more to lie stickily beside her.

Elwing hummed. “Have I your blessing, then?”

Eärwen cast about for a cloth, then briskly wiped the shine off Elwing’s chin and mouth. “You were convincing,” was all she replied.

Something wry flickered across Elwing’s expression, but she held her peace. It was too hot, really, for closeness, the morning fog already rolling back out of the bay, and Elwing moved away from her, leaving only her hand resting gently on Eärwen’s thigh.

“The Gondolindrim I knew were all such prudes,” Elwing mused, running her hand down to Eärwen’s knee and back up. “I might have been as convincing as I liked and they would have turned their noses up at such barbarity. I never even thought to try.”

Eärwen snorted, rather than think of Elwing kissing her hand to be… convincing. “I did not consider the knock-on effects of Fëanáro’s rabble on the relative chastity of Valariandë.”

At Elwing’s cocked eyebrow, she elaborated. “All the real partisans were, shall we say, reactionaries. If they had to hate Indis, then consistency demanded they reject other such unusual combinations. Though I find it hard to believe my own children did not cut swathes across Valariandë as they did Valinor.”

She had expected a certain amused reaction from Elwing, but her face was perfectly unreadable.

“There were always rumors about Galadriel — Nerwen — and my grandmother,” she said evenly. “Yet she and her husband Celeborn are as constant as the stars.”

Eärwen closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Elwing was sitting up and turned slightly away from her, combing a hand through her curls where they spiraled in all directions like pea shoots.

“Will you allow me?” she asked, eyes fishing for the flickers of fawn-colored skin between the black waves.

Elwing shook her head. “I go to make trouble. You go to gentle my effects.”

Was it so? Yesterday, Eärwen would have said that she went to forestall her effects entirely. She was not immune to logic, however, nor charity — nor yet pretty girls on their knees before her, though it chafed her pride. And who had taught Elwing to make such bargains?

Elwing reached for one of Nerwen’s old court robes from where it lay crumpled beside the mattress, back still turned.

“I go to meet my husband, in fact,” Eärwen said, and winced internally, though she made sure her face did not shift. Elwing paused, blue silk rippling in her hand.

“Should I take offense?”

“I will not say you should thank me. I go to ask: will the Repudiators here and in their quarter in Tirion join with Anairë’s rebels?”

Elwing began to dress again. “I have been more effective than I dared hope. Though they are not rebels.”

There was something in her tone that Eärwen could not read, a state of affairs that always discomfited her. Elwing’s movements were efficient and practiced, though the robe she had chosen was too large and she swam in it slightly.

Eärwen reached across the mattress and tugged again at Elwing’s night-black curls. Startled, Elwing’s head tipped back, not quite far enough for her eyes to meet Eärwen’s. She held still in her grasp like a rabbit scruffed from above. Eärwen placed her other hand on the sweet, enchantingly furred hollow of her lower back and dipped her, admiring the curve of her spine.

“You have been other things than effective,” she murmured, and kissed Elwing, her nose bumping against her chin.

Elwing gave into gravity and fell back almost into Eärwen’s lap, crumpling Nerwen’s robe yet further. She blinked up into Eärwen’s eyes, and Eärwen felt her mouth curl into her smallest and truest smile. Elwing smiled back, eyes shimmering clear until the light failed at the last opaqueness of her bones.

–

It was not Eärwen’s custom to take a guard to venture into her own city, only attendants to provide a kind of buffer against onlookers and petitioners. The exception was the stretch of repurposed shipyard where Repudiators drifted in and out to offer what redress they could under Arafinwë’s eye. There, attendants were simply more potential arguments or snubs embodied, while a guard was both the image of political distance and bound by a degree more professionalism. It was never Eärwen’s custom to take only Anairë and none other.

This, Eärwen told herself, was surely the reason for the mutters that followed her and Anairë down the cobbled streets to the dry-docks. The morning was warm, though it did not threaten the heat or stickiness of recent days, and all Alqualondë seemed to be on its stoops, tending its gardens, playing in its parks. Beside her, Anairë kept her eyes fixed firmly but calmly forward, looking neither left nor right, gaze on the manes of Ulmo’s horses as they galloped to shore.

They spoke mind-to-mind, where none might hear them, except that even in the wordless non-space of the fëa, which throbbed in Eärwen’s stomach and soughed in her lungs, which expanded and contracted just out of rhythm with Anairë’s own, Eärwen found she had nothing to say. Or, at least, nothing to say that she could make coherent. Anairë, who had smelled Elwing on her in the morning, veiled her innermost thoughts, and the outermost, though kind, were oblique.

Passing by the point where the streets ceased to be cobbled with local stone and began to be flagged in inland granite, to stand up to the great traffic of carts and lumber and shipbuilders and fishers, Anairë stopped pressing in her gentle way at the seawalls of Eärwen’s mind, where no helpful spray topped the stones. Instead, she reached out and took her hand.

She might have slid Eärwen’s arm through hers, as friends would. Instead, Eärwen walked down towards the sea hand-in-hand with the erstwhile Queen of the Noldor in Aman, focusing all her will on keeping her fingers relaxed. Talk drifted behind them like foam in the wake of a ship.

It ran ahead of them, too, for Arafinwë stood empty-handed at the bronze-bossed gate of the old compound and watched them in their impromptu procession, still dressed in work clothes. Which would be worse, Eärwen wondered: to keep hold of Anairë’s hand or to let go? In the end, she allowed her hand to stay in Anairë’s, which was warm, and soft, and held her to her purpose like an anchor.

Arafinwë bowed. A coil of his golden hair fell forward over his face as he did so, and Eärwen noticed without conscious volition that even his work clothes boasted little embroideries on the collar and cuffs. Bubbles, cleverly done in satin stitch for shine. Her fingers itched.

He straightened without speaking, caught, surely, in the same awkwardness that always filled Eärwen when they met at unawares, outside the tightly scheduled public meetings where he reported on the work of his people in Alqualondë, and Eärwen spoke ritual words of repair and redress from behind a porcelain face. Anairë spoke with him more frequently, Eärwen knew — or had, as most of their conversations and correspondence dealt with the governance of the Repudiators’ Quarter of Tirion — but she forebore to help in this instance.

Instead, she squeezed Eärwen’s hand, then drifted to the shrine to the wave sprites embedded in the wall, running her fingertips over the rippling gold-and-blue mosaic. It was a relic of the compound’s former use. The Noldor had no use for a little sanctum dedicated to the foam-flecked Maiar of the breakers, minor by anyone’s standard — yet Eärwen noticed that someone had left a dusty purple plum in the niche for offerings.

She had been silent too long. Arafinwë opened his mouth.

“Ingoldo!”

Arafinwë closed his mouth. Almost, Eärwen put her own fingers to her lips, which had spoken his beloved amilessë — the name he preferred, for it came from the mother who had never done aught but adore him in the most uncomplicated way — the one Eärwen had not spoken since Arafinwë had led his host back to Alqualondë, the image of a prince. It was the very name she had given their son, their firstborn, because it was a name of love, golden and untarnished.

So, she had preempted him. She had preempted herself. Some hopeful flame kindled in Arafinwë’s eyes.

“Would you like to come in?” he asked. The stilted formality demanded an answer, and Eärwen found herself replying automatically, “You are too kind.”

She mulled that one over while Arafinwë pulled the gate open in courtly fashion and let them into the Repudiators’ courtyard.

There were no ships, because no ship could replace the Swanships. Instead, there were piles of nets woven through with delicate steel chains to stymie the teeth of the harbor seals. There was a drafting table littered with drawings of bilge systems, intricate enough for a headache at thirty paces. On all sides, Noldor made things: pulleys, ropes, sailcloth, planking. The little stuffs of life, weregild tossed into a hole with no bottom.

Arafinwë led them through the space, nimbly avoiding the runners — filled in now with the dirt of decades — where a ship would have trundled from its dry-dock to the embrace of the harbor. Eyes followed them, though some Noldor at least had learned subtlety.

The small offices along the walls of the courtyard, old haunts of accountants and engineers who needed tables or books of reference, were now bedrooms, or rather dormitories. Their glass windows – of course the Noldor had glassed them in – showed two or three beds to a room, some bunked, some in neat rows, some with portraits or loose socks or hot water bottles scattered around them. It all had an air of the camps in the high foothills of the Pelóri where they had sent the children to swim and bow-hunt and learn candle-making while they enjoyed the empty house, until the emptiness grew too large.

Arafinwë paused before one of the rooms, tucked into the corner. He put his hand on the knob, said, “Be welcome in my home,” and held it courteously open for Eärwen and Anairë to tramp through in some parody of a social call.

Someone had knocked out the wall between this corner office and the next, so the room made a sharp right-angled turn. There was one Noldorin-style bed with legs and a feather mattress, a pretty black-figured clay ewer and basin, a sturdy desk with a roster that took up half its surface. The windows to the street had been boarded up, but light shone generously in from the courtyard, picking out spangles from the beaded hangings on the wall.

Eärwen took it in. Here he had passed half his time since he had returned to Alqualondë under threat of Doom, which threat he had listened to when the cries of Eärwen’s kin, the inhabitants of his own home, had not unbent his neck. Would it be better if he slept on a cot, or a pile of rags? If he wore sackcloth and sheared his golden hair to stubble? If all the windows were boarded and he sat sorrowing forever in the murk?

He offered tea, chairs. Anairë drifted off into the other wing of the room, studying the tapestries on the wall, which were unfamiliar, for Eärwen had permitted him nothing from the chambers they had shared, which stood shuttered in the dark-windowed Princess’ House, visited only by cleaners.

At last the thin breeze of propriety blew out and left them becalmed, seated across from one another at the desk. Upside-down, Eärwen read the roster which organized the rotations of Repudiators from Tirion and its hinterlands to Alqualondë and back. Arafinwë’s eyes burned on her brow.

It was not a queenly thing to avoid them. Eärwen raised her head and said, “I will not ask my people to fight. I do not think it is right.”

Arafinwë sat back in his chair. She had not startled him, she saw, perhaps because the shock of seeing her at the dry-docks was too much for anything lesser. His brows — the left just slightly longer than the right, as it had ever been — remained level. He spoke.

“Many of my people wish to go. In fact, almost all of them. Anairë sent me messages from Tirion, then Intyallë did the same, and even Ingwë Ingwion down from the slopes of Taniquetil with unforeseen tidings of a Secondborn messenger at the Ring of Doom. So: I am to lead an army.”

“Again.”

He nodded. “Again. May I prove a truer leader this time.”

The corners of his mouth twitched rapidly. Eärwen, who knew every expression of his face, had once loved that one — the face of Arafinwë making a mistake in conversation and preparing to fix it. Once, it had filled her with affection, even a sort of pride, that her son of Finwë knew when he had done wrong and strove to make amends. It was a lifetime since she had felt so.

Yet Arafinwë, perhaps, had not changed in that particular, not so much as he might have, for he put his shoulders back and said: “I mean that I was true until the moment it did not serve me, until I had to make a choice. I was true to you until I chose to be true to my brothers instead, and then I cast aside all I knew of you to follow them. Why should I stay, or make amends — for Alqualondë is unforgivable. So I thought.”

His lips twitched again. “Hark at me! I say ‘Alqualondë’ as though I am not here, in Alqualondë, where I have pledged to be true again, to heal and earn forgiveness. But then my troth to my brothers lasted only as long as it took for Mandos Námo to echo his judgment against the mountains, and back I came.”

Every expression that crossed his face, Eärwen knew. She could predict them, almost. How different it was to sit across from Arafinwë, whose soul had mingled with hers, and discuss blood on swords, than it was to look down at Elwing’s bent head, a shimmering sheet of black-and-white enigma. So she had taken her to bed, had listened — surely she had not felt more deeply then than now, with her own husband explaining to her that he was to go to Middle-earth, and fight the evil that had seen both his brothers, who had never thought they had made a mistake at all, dead.

Arafinwë’s voice was level, his eyes bright but dry. His speech had the sense of words long-practiced. Surely Eärwen had another speech to give him, even many, polished in the dark nights with Anairë far away, in the echoing Queen’s House surrounded by her mother’s things. She could offer the one that began, “I must never have known you at all,” or the one that ended, “I respect your efforts at repair and, though they will never suffice, your time of repentance is through; go back to Tirion and we will live our lives apart.”

But Elwing had knelt before her and spoken all-unthinking, and from her lips had fallen mercy. And she knew the expressions Arafinwë would make, if she made any of those speeches to him.

Eärwen closed her eyes and wiped the centuries of careful words from the slate of her mind.

“I do not forgive you,” she said, from she knew not what source within her. “But— I have not forgotten you.”

She opened her mind towards Arafinwë just the smallest bit. There he was: summer wheat, clover honey, topaz, rich spring butter.

“I–” Arafinwë began, and Eärwen thrust a hand out.

“No,” she said, and knew Arafinwë would know that, in another, it would have been an exclamation. “You say, ‘unforgivable.’ Perhaps! I never knew what forgiveness meant, until you walked away with the spoils of your brothers’ murders and did not turn back until threatened by Fate. So I find I am unforgiving; still, I do not forget you.”

She opened her eyes. Perhaps she did not know all Arafinwë’s expressions yet.

“I have not forgotten that you did come back, against all good sense. Back to an empty house, where your wife bars the door against you. And you have labored long in a city that despises you — I see it! If I have not encouraged it, neither have I discouraged it! — to be worthy of forgiveness. Can I do less than you?”

She found that her shoulders heaved with harsh breaths. Arafinwë, yellow and warm in the space next to her spirit that had never yet sealed its gates, looked as though he wanted to spring across the table.

“I have received a lesson recently on the value of grace as principle,” Eärwen said. “I cannot do less than you. How much the more so, if I cannot forgive?”

Behind her, Anairë came up and put her hand on her shoulder. Arafinwë’s eyes never wavered from her face.

“What I mean is: I do not know how to forgive. But perhaps I must cease to behave as though forgiveness must come before any other action. Last night I gave Elwing leave to convince my father to lend the aid of the Falmari, and promised I would not stand in her way. Do you promise —” her voice cracked. “Do you promise your people will be true, this time?”

The chair clattered. Arafinwë leapt to his feet, hesitated, made an abortive attempt to sit back down, and in the end paced behind the desk, as though it was a chasm without a bridge. It was something like looking at Arien in her new glory, if Arien paced. Eärwen leaned hard into Anairë’s supporting hand.

Arafinwë stopped, balanced on the balls of his toes. Eärwen thought she knew the expression, from a memory that might have belonged to another Elf: Arafinwë with a ring of his own crafting, muddy to the waist in the marshes of the Alpasírë.

“I swear I shall be true,” he said, hand to his heart. “I will be true, and my people only truer.”

She noticed a brightness in his eyes that was not the last relic of the Trees.

Arafinwë paused, then burst out: “And when I return, will you look upon my face as you did when we were young and watched the children from our balcony? Whether from the shores of Endórë or the Halls of Mandos, when I return, will we three ride through the oaklands to Tirion and back to Alqualondë as we did when the Trees shone on our meetings?”

Eärwen had not cried since she had felt Findaráto’s death across the miles of empty ocean. Yet she fought to push her words out over the swelling in her throat. “I do not know. But, Ingoldo! I want you to return.”

She forced a steady breath. “Anairë can decide for herself whether she wishes to ride with you.”

Anairë squeezed her shoulder, and Arafinwë passed a hand over his eyes, dashing away the gathered wetness.

“It is about time that someone remembered I make my own decisions,” Anairë remarked, not without a touch of asperity.

Arafinwë paused with his hand still half-covering his face. Even so, Eärwen knew — those eyes went with one of his charming, crooked smiles.

“I will have to return, then, in order to hear what you decide,” he said.