rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 14: Anairë

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Anairë led the way out of the dry dock, nodding perfunctorily to the Repudiators who made confused half-bows to her. Behind her, Eärwen trailed distractedly behind her, mind a muddle of emotions behind her smooth countenance.

It is her just deserts, Anairë thought. She had thought she was done with bitterness, now that she was done with the crown and the great diamond burden of Tirion. But it would take a Maia of Nienna to find celestial calm and pleasure in passing a night alone without warning in the home of one’s meleseldë, followed directly by a highly emotional visit to one’s semi-estranged combination colleague, husband-in-law, and brother-in-law where one’s own feelings as colleague, wife-in-law, and sister-in-law were more or less disregarded.

She towed Eärwen up the greenway, where the foliage provided more privacy than the streets with their pavements of curious onlookers. A bower of browning azaleas hanging languidly over a bench off the path provided yet more seclusion, and Eärwen mounted no resistance to being guided there. Anairë pressed her into the seat, then stood back and scanned the waxy leaves until she found the blossom-eyed face with its anthers and pistils all crowded with honeybees. Bending down to its height, she blew gently and felt the leaf-face rustle as it took in her breath. Then the little Maia vanished, leaving only a confused cluster of bees as witnesses.

Anairë sat beside Eärwen.

“Well,” she said. “Begin from the beginning, because I am at sea and have been exceptionally patient with you today.”

Eärwen blinked. Then she shook her head, a slight gesture that sent the ornaments in her hair to trembling. Anairë was gratified to see her look round and focus her whole attention on her.

Anairë amended her statement. “In fact, I would prefer that you start by explaining why you took Elwing — who is married — who is very young! — to bed, how she convinced you to lend some kind of unspecified aid to her cause, and what that has to do with you marching into the city to have it all out with Arafinwë.”

“Dear one,” Eärwen murmured, turning to face Anairë on the bench. “I am sorry. I have kept you in the dark, have I not?”

Anairë raised her eyebrows.

Eärwen made one of her tiny rueful expressions with her lower lip and the corner of one eye. Then, to her credit, she did explain. For what good it did: though Eärwen spoke with her accustomed poise, not all the parts of her story seemed to add up. Why not draw Elwing to her feet and hammer out a plan over the table? So she always wondered in such matters — but why send Elwing to win over proud Olwë?

“It does not seem at all right,” Anairë began slowly, “that you should send Elwing to treat with your father, whom she does not know at all, and who may be angry with her, and give yourself the people of Alqualondë, upon whom Elwing has worked so assiduously.”

It struck her as she spoke that she was angry, not merely irritated. Had she made her great leap into the unknown only to come and watch Eärwen haunt her mother’s house and miss her one opportunity to strike a blow against that which had made her bitter?

She slapped her palms against her thighs, and though Eärwen would never do something like jump, she flicked her eyes towards Anairë in surprise. Anairë huffed.

“No, it is not right! You promised Elwing aid — you gave her to understand she had somehow won it, or bought it — and yet I have not yet seen you do much. So, you visited Arafinwë: he is not doing anything now that he was not doing before.”

Eärwen’s jaw tightened as Anairë rose, but she kept her face blank and her mind tightly closed.

“Call your father to us,” Anairë ordered, just as she would have ordered a recalcitrant Findekáno long ago. “It is time and past you spoke with him on this matter.”

The heady rush of righteousness filled her as it had filled her before assembled Tirion, and she leaned on Eärwen’s mind the way Eärwen always did to others. Though she found little purchase, Eärwen pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. Anairë could almost imagine the great, cold flood of her thought making its way through the green tunnel of the parkway, the bees still buzzing about it.

Olwë did not take long to reach them. A map of Alqualondë unfurled in Anairë’s mind’s eye: the swift, uncrowded paths she had been wont to take since the Darkening and everything after. Eärwen sat stiffly beside her, but as Olwë’s swaggering sailor’s footsteps came into earshot, she stood and put her hands before her to bow a welcome.

Olwë tutted and lifted her up, shaking his head. He laid a gentle hand against her cheek, looking quizzically about the niche in the greenery.

He waved vaguely to Anairë, eyes sliding over to his daughter in preference to his awkward houseguest, or his awkward not-quite daughter-in-law, but beckoned them both to sit beside him. Anairë graciously declined the implied invitation with a wave of her own hand, but lingered by one of the great redwoods the greenway stood to preserve, leaning her head against its bark.

Eärwen sat beside him, and though nothing she did was ever ungraceful, her motion was rather more like a plop than even Anairë usually saw. Olwë helpfully moved his sleeves aside and somehow sidled closer so that his shoulders just brushed Eärwen’s. There they sat in companionable silence, looking out at the grove. A woodpecker tapped unseen behind them.

Almost in time with its pecking, Eärwen knocked at Anairë’s mind, then withdrew just as swiftly. She had only wanted reassurance, Anairë conjectured, watching her square her shoulders and turn to address her father.

Olwë forestalled her. “I did not think I would come to see the day when you would call me to you urgently, and I would wish you only summoned me to scold me for the lateness of my reviews of the fishing reports, daughter of mine. I imagine you are here with Anairë to discuss your other houseguest.”

From behind, with the fall of her hair and her intricately tied sash in the way, any shifts in Eärwen’s posture were invisible to Anairë, but she could guess at the surprised stiffness of her shoulders.

“Atar…”

“Now, it is unlike you to not have a whole speech prepared,” Olwë teased, though his eyes were sad.

Eärwen shrugged. “Atar, do you remember when I was a swan?”

His eyebrows shot up, but he only nodded slowly in return.

“I thought I was the saddest girl in Aman,” Eärwen said. “I had responsibilities. I shirked them. I was, after all, very sad.”

Olwë passed a hand over his face.

“So is it about the reports after all? Eärwen, it was only…”

Eärwen reached out a hand and touched his robe gently. Just the sleeve, Anairë noted, but she let her hand linger on the fine fabric.

“I felt so sad, and I went away and let others take up my burdens, and when I found I preferred being a human to being a swan again, I came back. And you did not chide me, and Amil–” her voice trembled almost imperceptibly “–she did everything she could to share the burdens that remained.”

Olwë, who cried over the cradles of the strangers’ babies he was called upon to bless, kept his hand over his eyes.

“Anairë has given up Tirion,” Eärwen said, and Anairë startled to hear her own name. “I was angry at first. I still— But she is happier, Atar, already. And I have not nagged her about her reports.”

She might have told me that, Anairë sniffed to herself, but Eärwen went on, almost too quietly for even Anairë’s ears.

“I have taken up Alqualondë, these many long years. But perhaps the two of us have felt that shared burden weigh the heavier for being shared, because we are not meant to pull together the way you pulled together with Amil.”

Olwë’s breath rasped wetly, and Anairë slipped into the trees as quietly as she might. This was not the conversation she had expected; nor was it hers to hear.

In the dim, fragrant coolness of the grove, she thought furiously of where Elwing might be, if she had mentioned where she would go today…

Yes. Light-footed and swift, Anairë Nessa’s daughter ran straight through the trees, careful not to bend a single stem of delicate redwood sorrel, praying that Elwing might be where she said she would be, out on another dogged canvass near the docks. Loath though she was to interrupt the first serious conversation — to her knowledge — Eärwen had broached with Olwë about their nominally joint rule of Alqualondë since Queen Banilómë had gone away with Aiwendil, she had an idea of Eärwen’s angle. It was not merely a touching scene of reconciliation between father and daughter.

What a meddler I have become in these few short weeks, she thought. Even so, her heart raced, her breath came short. All this dashing about felt vital, exciting, useful.

By some miracle, Elwing was on the very first street she checked, making careful annotations in her scrapped-together notebook of neighborhood leaders and guild organizers. Beside her was an enthusiastic young fisherwoman who had become something of a fellow organizer, a silver-haired key to otherwise reluctant doors. Both she and Elwing looked up at Anairë’s precipitous entrance, eyes wide. They were not the only ones to stare: Alqualondim peered out their windows and eyed her from the sidewalks, surely wondering to themselves why she had promenaded down the streets to the docks with Eärwen and then come tearing back up them alone.

“Come at once!” Anairë exclaimed. “Eärwen speaks to Olwë on your behalf. Now is your chance.”

Elwing snapped her book closed so quickly she almost trapped her fingers in it, and shoved it towards her companion.

“Please fill in all the new names of people willing to talk to their neighbors,” she blurted out, looking between Anairë and the fisherwoman. “And make sure you take down their addresses. And tell the person in this neighborhood who passed the petition along to keep checking up with–” but Anairë stepped in and grasped her hand.

“I am sure you know what to do,” she said, and the fisherwoman nodded rapidly.

“Then make haste!”

So saying, she towed Elwing down the street, heedless of the stares.

Elwing, who had spent three years aboard a fairly small ship, began to pant after the first quarter mile, but she kept up admirably until they reached the vine-twined opening to the greenway.

Just out of earshot and sight of the bench, Anairë grasped her hand again to halt her. Holding a finger to her lips, Anairë cast her mind out towards Eärwen.

She was firmly closed and focused on Olwë, whom Anairë could hardly detect, save for a melancholic sort of haze. Anairë felt Eärwen recognize her, followed by a pulse of restrained welcome. She nodded to Elwing, and they made their way sedately towards the bench.

Tears flowed freely down Olwë’s cheeks. Eärwen kept her head down and turned from view, but her shoulders rose and fell evenly with her calm breaths. It was Olwë who spoke first, nonetheless.

“My daughter has given me some very interesting papers,” he said, deep voice loud despite its dampness. “It did not used to be that someone could go through my city stirring up discontent without my hearing of it.”

He held out a familiar set of documents, signatures swirling beneath Elwing’s neat, large hand. Elwing made one of her antique bows, not quite fully recovered from her dash.

“It is not discontent I spoke of with the signatories of those petitions,” she said, only panting slightly. “It was hope, mainly. And grief.”

Anairë went to stand behind Eärwen, who leaned into her, though anyone looking would see only that she rested against the curved back of the bench. Under the cover of Eärwen’s sleek hair, Anairë pressed her hand against her shoulder. She had broken a sweat, running in the heat, and the illusory chill of Eärwen’s mind was soothing.

“We have only spoken once, yet it seemed to me we differed in our griefs,” Olwë mused, wiping his face quite matter-of-factly with a handkerchief pulled from his sleeves.

Elwing’s mouth twisted. She stood before the bench, looking rather alone. “I was not diplomatic when we met.”

“Hardly, Elwë’s child.” Olwë almost smiled. “My daughter has made a case for listening to you again, however. She has not tried to be so persuasive in many a year. I will lend you my ear.”

Perhaps it was the lingering excitement from the exercise, or perhaps the little Maia she had shared breath with was grateful enough to send her a small flash of inspiration. The words bubbled up in Anairë from a place of inspiration: “I believe Lady Elwing has a question for you, not a speech.”

Elwing’s eyes darted to hers so quickly it was barely perceptible as a glance, eyes yellower than they should be. Anairë held her breath.

“Yes,” Elwing said slowly. “I cannot say my position has changed. So what use a speech? I mean to listen, today.” She smiled wryly, suddenly looking very young. “It does not always come naturally. All the more reason that I must try. Please, Your Majesty: will you tell me of the Swanships?”

Anairë’s breath gusted out of her. Beneath her hand, Eärwen stiffened almost imperceptibly. Olwë, who had been folding his handkerchief, looked up, eyes suddenly piercing, the gaze of the king who had denied Fëanáro.

“Will I tell you of the Swanships?” he repeated.

Elwing stood straight and slight before him. “Yes. Will you take me, as a kindness, to the shrine on the docks, and tell me of these great works of your people’s hearts?”

A long pause, broken only by a cheery goldfinch, stretched between their strange foursome. The delight of being so perfectly understood rushed through Anairë, tempered by anxiety. At last, Olwë rose from the bench, movements jerky. Without a word, he set off down the path.

Elwing shot a nervy glance at Anairë, who nodded: it was the way to the sea. Eärwen rose, shaking free of Anairë’s hand, and, also saying nothing, followed her father. Anairë and Elwing trailed in their wake.

It had been Anairë’s idea, but the sight of Olwë standing tall and silvery before the blackened bones of the Swanships in their ghostly, shifting panoply chilled her excitement. She had not expected him to react with such stoic silence, and could not imagine what he might say. Elwing pushed forward, hand brushing against Anairë’s in her passage.

There they stood, the three of them, and Olwë facing them like a wave-tossed spar himself. A gull screamed in the distance.

Olwë put out his hand and touched the smooth, twisting curve of a beam. Out of the corner of Anairë’s eye, she could see Eärwen flinch.

“This was one of Alpuso’s fingers,” he said. “A piece of his rigging. He was one of the fastest, so he was in the dock when the hosts of the Noldor came to pillage and murder. Had he been slower, he would not have arrived hours early from Avallónë and been sunk when Fëanáro’s fools smashed him into a rock before they even left the harbor.”

He lifted his hand and reached for one of the tall, jagged timbers that showed black against the listening sky. “This is what is left of Alpaphilë. She taught Findaráto how to sail. He left with his cousins after they stole her, murdered her children on her decks, and burned her thereafter. This, her keel, floated back with the waves, turned to charcoal. Some kindness of Ossë, perhaps. A child found it on the strand, ten years after the rising of the Moon.”

Again, he lifted his hand. This time, he knelt, and touched a jagged piece of wood that stood only a foot high. “This we found in the back of Alpanelë’s own captain. She was pushed from the mast and fell onto the railing, which splintered. Alpanelë was gentle — I wonder if she welcomed the burning, after that.”

He remained kneeling for a moment, while the wind blew off the sea and the gulls cried. The knot in Anairë’s gut that twisted whenever the ships were mentioned wrung itself tight. She kept silent, watching Elwing’s hair blow in the breeze. Elwing’s eyes were fixed on Olwë. She did not yet quite understand, Anairë saw.

“I loved Alpanelë best of them all,” Olwë said. “I knew her on the Journey. She and my mother were great friends. Sisters, almost, doing everything together. My earliest memory is of her and my mother, singing to me as they fed me mashed berries, the starlight in their hair. If the Unbegotten chose siblings as well as partners, they would have chosen each other. When my mother died on the Journey, she and Elwë took turns carrying me until I was old enough to walk. And when I chose to go on without my brother, she came with me, sorrowing.”

Anairë bit her lip. Very slowly, Elwing cocked her head to one side, then the other, studying Olwë on his knees beside the ragged remnant of the ship.

“I do not understand,” she confessed.

“Do you not?” replied Olwë. His eyes remained on the monument, in its ever-shifting patterns of white and black. “I thought you were familiar with such arts, Elwing, Silmaril-Bearer.”

Olwë’s eyes traced the strained curve of a spar. “All the names I have shared, and all their kin torn from their anchors, were the oldest of the old, those who came with star-fire in their hearts to find it doused in the Tree-lit nights of Aman. The Unbegotten in the Undying Lands are not all cheerful dressmakers. None regretted that they had come, I do not think. Yet they found they could not stay.”

He rose, dusting his hands together, a few flakes of black falling to the granite pavement of the quay.

“Do your songs not wonder what use we had for ocean-going ships in our safe harbor in Valinor? Do they not puzzle over the riddle of a sea-loving swan? Aman was not for all those who awoke, unborn, under the starlight. It was too bright — too crowded, too close, too far from the sound of water and the forests of their home. But to Cuiviénen there is no returning.

“So they built ships instead, to be close to the sound of water that they had heard from the very first, and to travel out to where the stars still shone brightly upon the waves. And they poured themselves into them, aye, even as Fëanáro poured himself into his jewels. The difference is only that they faded as they drove home the last nail, sanded the last rail. They were wise enough to know they should not live on with their hearts outside their bodies.”

The white fingers of the ship-bones looked like feathers, the detritus on the ground after a hawk struck a bird out of the sky.

“Their families said they could still hear them speak, when they were out on the deep waters beyond the reach of Treelight,” Olwë continued. “They danced to their own music on the swells. They kept their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children, safe on the sea. They were with us, always.”

A white feather shivered into being among Elwing’s masses of dark hair, as though the bird in her sensed the tableau the ships made.

“Why–” Elwing’s voice broke off, small against the wave-sounds. She breathed deeply, her shoulders rising, and tried again. “Why did they not burn the thieves, as the Silmarils burned Morgoth? They are surely as holy, if they have souls. If they are souls.”

Olwë pressed his lips together, clearly struggling to speak the answer. Eärwen relieved him. Softly, evenly, she said, “Varda never laid her blessing upon them.”

Elwing turned to look at her, then back over her shoulder to the proud, eerie epitaph, so stark against the gentle blues and greens of sea and sky.

“Why?”

At last, tears began to sparkle in Olwë’s eyes. He drew a steadying breath in through his nose, but before he could speak, Eärwen cut in.

“The Valar did not hallow the Silmarils: Varda Elentári did, for they shone with heavenly light, which pleased her. The work of our people did not flatter anyone’s vanity so.”

Anairë laid a hand on her shoulder. Gently, she said, “Who likes to look at evidence of their own mistakes?”

Olwë shrugged. He had mastered himself, but his eyes were bright. He did not offer an explanation.

Elwing examined each of them closely, gray eyes sweeping across their faces. Anairë wondered what she hoped to find.

Perhaps she did not find it, for, after a lingering look at the memorial, she faced Olwë squarely, but with only curiosity on her face.

“Do you think the Valar made a mistake in bringing Elves to the Blessed Lands?”

Olwë’s mouth twisted. He tipped one hand from side to side. “Yes and no. No and yes. You cannot say it was a mistake for some when it was a glorious gift for others. It was not a mistake for me — I do not even think Alpanelë thought it was a mistake for herself. But do I think they have made mistakes…” His voice dissolved into the lapping waves.

Gaze intent, face fixed in an expression of gentle curiosity, Elwing prodded him. “Do you think it is better to ignore a mistake, or to address it despite the grief it unearths?”

Despite it all, Olwë had been King of the Teleri in Aman before Elwing’s grandparents were born. He did not quite smile at Elwing, but beneath the sadness, Anairë could sense the amusement that had made him the favorite grandparent for all Eärwen’s children.

“In your reckoning, who made a mistake, Lady Elwing?”

Elwing bowed her head briefly and returned a question for a question. “Do you think the Valar made the same mistake in leaving behind Middle-earth as they did when they left those outward-looking souls of your people unhallowed?”

Olwë cracked a bitter laugh. Anairë, who felt she no longer had to portray dignity as Eärwen did, looked back and forth between the two as though she were at a spring-ball match.

“Is it the role of the victim to repair the perpetrator’s mistake?”

“Is it the role of the victim to stand by while others suffer from the same mistake?” Elwing reached back and plucked the feather from her hair. It drifted softly to the ground, skimming over the flags beneath its uncanny wooden siblings. All eyes followed its path.

“My question has never been whether you would solve it all yourselves,” Elwing said softly. “I do not even know how the Valar will answer my plea for help for my — for our — family, and the lands our ancestors loved. It is only this: for the sake of mercy, will you help repair the world so wounded by that mistake, in whatever small way you can?”

There was a beat into which a seagull wailed.

“It is not so small for us,” Olwë said with finality, then turned to look out into the eastern sea, where the distant masts of the returning fishing ships showed clear against the summer sky.

To Anairë’s eyes, Elwing seemed all at once very small, with her eyes downcast before the tall, protean shapes of the ship-bones. Eärwen stood quite still beside her, silent.

Then, Elwing lifted her head, eyes blazing yellow. Before she could say anything rash, Anairë took two short, decisive steps toward her and drew her into an awkward embrace at her side.

Eärwen did not move, but Anairë felt her osanwë like winter breakers against the seawalls. Wait, it said. Patience. 

While the raptor-yellow bled slowly from Elwing’s irises, Olwë studied the horizon, back turned — though Anairë thought he was aware of what went on behind him.

After what seemed an age, he turned slowly back to their small tableau, eyes passing over Elwing in Anairë’s embrace to the memorial. He knelt again and gently touched the spar that was all that remained of Alpanelë.

Quietly enough that the waves drowned him out, Olwë murmured to the wood.

He touched his hand to his lips briefly, then rose. Eyes still fixed on the monument, he said, “I hear you. I will not gainsay you. I will not encourage my people, but I will not stop you.”

Elwing sagged against Anairë’s side, though she could not tell if it was an act of relief or dismay. Her own response was a strange sense of disappointment: was that all? Had they not already taken that much into their own hands?

But perhaps Olwë was finished making grand decisions over the fate of his people, and perhaps Eärwen—

Before Anairë could finish her thought, Eärwen lifted up her voice. “I will encourage my people. And I believe they are my people, now.”

Without looking, Olwë nodded. Anairë’s heart thudded. Gulls mewed. The waves stroked the walls of the promenade, and the fishing boats drew ever nearer. Elwing drew away from Anairë, but made no speech or other move, seemingly unsure.

Again, Anairë thought, Is this all?

Apparently so.

“Thank you,” said Elwing.

At last, Olwë turned around. “I do not wish for your thanks, child.”

Looking to Eärwen, he beckoned. “Let us go home, for we should discuss our plans further before my great-niece’s husband arrives in two days’ time.”

Eärwen nodded and took his arm, and, with a backwards glance at Anairë, she led Olwë back up the quay in the direction of the King’s House.

Elwing looked between their retreating figures and Anairë, visibly unsure what to do.

“Go finish your rounds,” Anairë told her, suddenly immensely weary and unable to muster the desire to comfort her, or plot with her, or do anything, really. “Tell them that something momentous will happen the day after tomorrow. I imagine people will come to gawk, if nothing else.”

Elwing made a small bow to her, then turned to follow Eärwen. She hesitated once, looking at the memorial, then at Anairë, but did not demur.

Alone at last, Anairë let her posture sag.

–

The harbor coruscated in the beam of sunset flowing through the Calacirya. Flame orange where the light hit the water, deep teal where the Pelóri blocked out the glory of Arien’s descent. Anairë watched, letting her eyes be dazzled, blinking at the salmon and buttercup and turquoise splotches that decorated the sails of homeward-bound fishing boats when she looked away from the water-light to observe their approach. Snatches of work songs drifted by as the boats passed her, the sound swelling and narrowing with the distance.

She sat at the end of the seawall, where some helpful Falmarin carpenter had left a bench of planed and varnished driftwood looking out into the eastering ocean. Earlier in the afternoon, some of the little wave-sprites had frisked about in the spray, launched one after the other into the air by the foaming slap of the waves against the stone, and she had danced a very simple dance of hands for them, but now she was alone.

Weariness beat at her. She could not quite understand it — she had done very little today, all told. How capricious she was, to gleefully remove herself from the board and then resent her place on the sidelines.

If she went home — well, she could not go home, for her house was now debatably the public property of Tirion, and she had not so much as removed the boards from the windows of her gift-house in Tirion, and would not for centuries. If she went to the Queen’s House — which, even after all this time, was still not as familiar and kind as the halls of the Princess’ House where her children and their cousins left sticky handprints on the walls — what might she find? More people to minister to: Eärwen to debate or reassure, Elwing to let agitate. Or perhaps they would be wrapped up in each other, in whatever odd dynamic of competition and surrogacy they had found between them, and Anairë would be left to weave a desultory basket or pick up a smooth-spined book.

How tired I am of being the stage crew to the dramas of other people, Anairë thought. The indignity of being a bit character! She had given up the crown of Tirion, which she had never sought, because she wanted rid of it all: the limelight, the attention of an unsympathetic audience. Perhaps after all, the constant intrusion of others’ business into her own had had its benefits.

Hard on the heels of this consideration came the sound of footsteps on the seawall. Anairë closed her eyes and sighed.

Evidently it was audible over the water-sounds, for behind her, Arafinwë said, “I did not think to find you here sighing — indeed, I did not think to find you here at all. Is all your plotting done now that Alqualondë buzzes with rumors of an extraordinary proclamation?”

Without turning to look at him, Anairë shrugged.

“I am moping over the predictable consequences of my own actions. I would have thought you sympathetic, Arafinwë.”

He huffed softly. “Here I am, after all.”

They looked out at the darkening sea together. A final trio of boats slipped past the seawall and into the calm of the harbor. Anairë tried to calculate how many people each could hold for how long a voyage, and could not. How much fresh water would need to be stored below? Perhaps it was fitted with a distilling apparatus.

Behind her, Arafinwë shifted his feet. Anairë sighed and moved aside on the bench.

“Sit, if you mean to stay and have your say. If I must have another fraught conversation today, I will not do it when I cannot even see you.”

Time was that Arafinwë would have teased her for her petulant sharpness. They shared a certain sense of humor that was all Tirion, though Arafinwë had been born in a palace, and Anairë in the quarters. And, of course, they shared Eärwen and Nolofinwë, who both hated to be teased, leaving a surplus of fun to poke at one another. At times, Anairë had tried to revive their jesting exchanges — but each time, as now, her words emerged barbed from her tongue.

Arafinwë sat nonetheless, pressed against the far arm of the bench. “I did not look for you here. Since the opportunity presents itself, however, I will ask you: what other fraught conversations have you endured since you left me?”

“Eärwen and Olwë,” Anairë responded, and Arafinwë nodded knowledgeably. The context was known to anyone who dealt with the Swan Throne in an official capacity; how much the more so Arafinwë.

“And the victor?”

Anairë sighed through her nose. “I was not there for all their fraught conversation. Even so: Eärwen. Though, I believe, in the end they will come to see they both emerged having gained much. Eärwen’s prize was yet another parley between Elwing and Olwë.”

“The victor?” Arafinwë asked again.

Who was to say? Anairë hummed and watched the sun-patch on the waves shrink. “Elwing, I think. I suspect she won days ago, however, when she convinced Eärwen. This was only a concession speech.”

Shaking his head, Arafinwë glanced at her, though Anairë did not return the look. The lapping waves and the strengthening wind of evening filled the space between them.

“Will you go, then?” Arafinwë inquired after a while. “As a sailor, a nurse? To fight, even? I can tell you that by far the majority of the Noldor are going.”

To her own surprise as much as Arafinwë’s, Anairë barked out a laugh.

“Nessa’s hand stay the javelin! I remained once and will again. I do not brood on that choice.”

Arafinwë turned fully to look at her, his curls catching the very last of the light, glowing almost apricot.

“I suppose it is sheer redundancy to tell you that most mean to go. You bestirred us yourself. We —as a people, I mean, not necessarily as individuals— fought wrongly once. We want to fight for the right thing.”

Arien sank beneath the high lip of the Calacirya, and the sea turned at once to blue steel, its depths covered over in the evendim.

“Valinor is not so perfect a land that the Song cannot fall into discord here, as well we know,” Anairë said.

“Perhaps I place too much of myself in my guesses. Perhaps it is rather that there are so precious few of us who have not felt some beloved estrangement, dear in its distance, ripped away at the last. Who would not want vengeance?”

Sometimes he was so much his brothers’ brother.

“You are right, I do not think that is your reason,” Anairë contended, not troubling to keep the bitterness from her voice. “I do not want vengeance, myself: it will be cold comfort. I do not think I was such a villain that I must now make myself a hero.” She scuffed her foot on the flags of the seawall, relishing the dissonant scrape of the grit. “There is nothing I love on that far shore any longer.”

To this, Arafinwë had no response. They looked at the horizon instead, where the first stars winked. Somewhere beyond that hazy line, the heavens danced in unfamiliar patterns, but perhaps Anairë’s children had mapped those skies. Perhaps a shooting star might run from one coast to the next, catching Artanis’ eye.

“Once again, I stay; you say you will, once again, come back.” The gloaming was made for softer words, Anairë thought. “But when you cross the sea with the Powers behind you, your daughter will meet you there.”

Arafinwë bowed his head. “I heard the Lady Elwing knew her,” he said, the longing naked in his voice.

It was not the time to speculate on what Elwing and Nerwen had meant to each other, though Anairë watched Elwing and Eärwen dance around gaps of similar radiant emptiness. It was not the person, either.

Placing those thoughts to the side, she asked, “What, then, will bring you back? The rule of Tirion, its regime still unsteady on its feet?”

Arafinwë scoffed outright. “You say these things to wound me only, Anairë. When have I ever wanted Tirion? It was too large for me. When, for that matter, has Artanis ever wanted Tirion? It was too small for her.”

Tirion made its choice; it would not have you any longer in any case, Anairë thought spitefully, but caught the words and stifled them.

“It is just as well,” she answered instead. “The time of kings in Aman has seen its little glory.”

“I am sure watching Eärwen chafe did not help Artanis’ ambitions. But what could we have done?”

What a question! Anairë opened her mouth, but, again, she caught the self-righteous words before they could escape. What she had done in Tirion, she could not have done in the Treelight. She shook her head.

“No, do not ask me. Rather, tell me truly: what will bring you back, if the last of your children will not come with you?”

A strange half-laugh escaped Arafinwë, almost gull-like. For the first time since his approach, Anairë turned to look at him, startled. His broad-cheeked face, so like the faces of Anairë’s children, was drawn, the skin tight over the bones.

“Did I not say so today, in the first of your fraught conversations?”

A tear escaped his eye, the easy weeping that always flustered Eärwen. Turukáno had been just the same.

He spoke through it, as he always did. “You know why. She is our reason, though our choices were different — are different. I should instead ask you something I have never had the courage to ask. What if Nolofinwë still ruled alive and well in Endórë? With Artanis and Ingoldo at his left hand, and Findekáno at his right? I have dreamed of it. What if?"

The image stung familiarly. Anairë let herself gasp, a small rough sip of the cooling air. The salt rose in the darkness, or perhaps it was her own tears, which she had never been able to give as easily.

Of course she had imagined it. In anger, in longing, in bitterness, in desperation, in grief, in moments of forgetfulness upon waking in the night when Eärwen put orange oil in her hair. That was the afterimage of love, a hall of ghostly portraits iterated into infinity. Arafinwë could not understand, for he had walked farther down that hall, and that, she felt, must erase the remembrance of being left.

Slowly, she breathed out. She could not look at Arafinwë, so she looked again to the stars, which shone above the sea haze and the rising mist in her eyes.

“You are asking me if I love your brother enough. Or, in truth, you are asking how much one must love someone in order to stay with them, or go with them.”

Arafinwë did not perceptibly react. The stars went on shining. Anairë went on musing.

“I think, after all this time, that I understand how it all went so wrong. The idea was always that one is meant to feel love in the right ways, and that will lead to right action. Was it not?”

It was not a real question, and Arafinwë did not seek to answer. Anairë’s thoughts wandered to Nolofinwë with Fëanáro’s sword on his breast, Nolofinwë staring icily at her across the bed in which their children had been born in the flame-tinged Darkness, the twin portraits of Indis and Míriel forever staring at one another in the King’s House of Tirion.

She continued. “I thought about it constantly, you know. Tirion went in quite the opposite direction, after the Exile. It was equally instructive. That one went: one should stop loving when the object of that love stops being lovable.”

The tightness in her throat forced her to pause, but she was practiced in speaking through tears. “But who ever stops being lovable, once loved?”

The pamphlets and rageful ballads made it sound as simple as dousing a candle. Anairë had not found it so, and thought the authors had not either.

“I love my husband, your brother; and I love my children, your niece and nephews; and they have been unlovable. They have done terrible things, unlovable things, and I still love them. I love Eärwen your wife, too. When love stands upon both sides of a sea with ropes around your heart, are its tugs a guide to right action?”

She dashed a hand across her face. “It is simply the wrong question, Arafinwë.”

Sniffing, she glared out into the newly settled night. Very slowly, Arafinwë reached out a hand and laid it flat on the bench beside her. He did not seek to touch her, for which she felt only gladness. When they had been great friends, they had held hands often. Anairë placed her hand beside his, palm down.

“At this moment,” she said, “I suppose I am trying to love them enough to live beyond them.”

They watched the sky together. Anairë traced shapes in the blackness between the milky washes of stars. An oak tree, an acorn, a figure in profile.

Eventually, Arafinwë murmured one of the phrases petitioners offered in thanks to the dancers of Nessa.

Anairë’ twisted her mouth, but she did not say anything she might have said. Instead, she stood and turned back towards Alqualondë, where the yellow lamps glowed through the walls and windows.

Looking back at Arafinwë, still seated on the bench, draped in night, she said, “Only— please hold your daughter when you find her, Arafinwë. That can only be right.”