rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 16: Eärwen

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The corridors of the Queen’s House were dark, the staff lingering at the harbor or discussing the night’s events in packed teahouses. Eärwen hurried through the dimness, though her mother had said queens should not hurry, or rather, should not be seen to hurry. Queen! It did not yet seem real, perhaps because it had been real already for so many bitter years.

Anairë knocked persistently at her mind, urging her to come quickly to Nerwen’s bedchamber. Her mother was not here to chastise her, so she hurried.

Sliding the door open, Eärwen found a familiar scene. Anairë sat on the floor, cradling a weeping young girl, while Eärwen stood flat-footed and uncertain of what to do or say. That too gnawed familiarly at her. The only difference was that the head of hair spilling over Anairë’s knees was dark and lightning-shot, not the electrum glimmer of abalone under Treelight.

Anairë caught her eye and jerked her head towards the floor, hands unceasing in their steady stroke of those midnight curls, which tangled around her fingers like the tentacles of the tidepool anemones.

It took only a few steps to reach them, but Eärwen found it too difficult to kneel beside them and add her touch to Anairë’s comfort, somehow. She shook out Elwing’s mattress instead, thinking of what she might say. For all the eventfulness of the night, she had said very little — a bitter sort of realization. The sobbing girl on the floor had made her grand speech; her father, still trailing behind her into the King’s House — would he still live in the King’s House? Was she a king, and not a queen? — had made his. Anairë had woven in and out of the crowd on the harbor promenade, touching shoulders, speaking in low tones to people who straightened beneath her attentions, before Elwing dove screeching out of the sky in osprey-form and stolen all the breath and attention of the city. As for herself, she had mutely accepted her father’s scepter, which she had teethed upon before the coming of the Darkness. Silently, she had watched her own city swear something that looked very much like fealty to the little stranger Anairë cradled in her arms. What was there to say to that?

Elwing did not cry like a child. At least, not like one of Eärwen’s children. Rather, she gasped quietly, if raggedly, then held her breath for as long as she could, shoulders shaking, before letting it out slowly and wetly through her mouth. Somewhere, she had learned to weep almost silently.

From the depths of Eärwen’s shadowed memories of the Darkening rang the Doommaker: Not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains.

These muffled, voiceless cries could not have passed over a hillock. Eärwen knelt beside Anairë, who nodded approvingly.

“Why do you weep so on this night of your great victory?” Eärwen asked, modulating her voice as much as she might. Nerwen always asked for her father when she woke in the night.

Elwing took and held another gasping breath. Softly, Eärwen placed her hand in her dark hair, which seemed almost to draw tighter against Elwing’s face. The slippery, entangling curl of it was familiar, though Eärwen thought she had never touched it so gently before, only held it fast.

Anairë murmured, “You said you had forgotten something.”

Elwing exhaled shakily and made as though to speak, but could not manage a full word before her breath caught again on a click. Anairë flicked Eärwen a glance. Tentatively — how she hated to be put on the wrong foot like this — Eärwen hummed, putting just a touch of power into it. Elwing’s body relaxed a touch, though she turned her face further into the mass of her hair.

Gently, Anairë shook her shoulder. “Speak when you can,” she said. “We cannot help you without knowing what ails you.”

In a raw voice, Elwing said, “I did not say that Elros was the explorer and led his brother into things. There was no time.”

Eärwen shared a bemused look with Anairë over Elwing’s head.

“Should you have?” Anairë asked, then winced. Elwing did not appear to notice, though it could not be said with certainty without her face visible.

“No one will remember them,” she rasped. “I should have said more — but I had to show them the rest.”

While she was distracted, Elwing’s hair had wrapped itself securely around Eärwen’s hand. She paused, disconcerted, but then decided to burrow deeper, to see if she could find Elwing beneath it. When she did, she found her face hot and damp, and Elwing made a wounded noise and caught her hand with her own.

Eärwen pulled, and, reluctantly, Elwing followed her up to a sitting position, head still bowed to hide her face.

“I do not understand you,” Eärwen said. “You did just as you had to do. We did see your children at play upon the strand.”

Elwing took another shaky breath, sniffling damply. “Just a picture, a shadow for an audience. When I am gone, no one will remember– I did not say they both snored like their father!”

Eärwen could not make it out. What did it matter if Alqualondë remembered the small particulars of her life before? If Elwing meant to leave the city, she could always return. She could write, if she pleased; her memoirs would be a sensation.

In a gentler tone than Eärwen would have managed, Anairë asked more or less the same thing. Eärwen let the words wash over her without fully registering them, leaning her mind on Anairë’s to feel her intentions instead.

The look on Elwing’s blotched, tear-stained face when she finally raised her head left a far deeper impression.

In a ravaged voice, she spoke, holding Anairë’s gaze with fixed intensity. “I will never return from the Halls to tell of what I have known. When I am punished for setting foot upon this fair land, I will follow my foremother and pass beyond the ken of this world. Lúthien left her sorrows to us; I shall take mine with me. They do not deserve to be forgotten. They barely began to be known.”

Eärwen put her hand down to steady herself. A glance at Anairë showed her eyes white-rimmed.

“What can you mean?” Eärwen demanded. “Who are they and where are they who dare to importune you on Aman’s shores?”

Grimly, Anairë added, “We have kept our cities from bloodshed for lifetimes of your people; none who seek to harm you will succeed while we draw breath.”

To Eärwen’s shock, Elwing laughed. She could not even call it scornful; it seemed Elwing had genuinely found them amusing. She turned her face to Eärwen, resolute, though tears still spilled silently from the corners of her eyes.

“The Valar dare, Amanier. It was my choice to take upon myself their wrath, that my husband would not walk alone into peril, a mortal man in undying lands. We will not be sundered, but it may be that our path leads us into darkness, and all the memory of our lands and love with us.”

Eärwen shook her head. “This is rashness. You have done nothing to merit punishment.”

She looked to Anairë for support, but Anairë pressed her lips together, shadows on her brow. Eärwen reached out a strand of osanwë, but before Anairë could do more than turn her troubled face towards her, Elwing laughed again, a congested sound halfway to a retch.

“What had my fine, brave sailors of Sirion done to merit their punishment? Lost at sea, driven onto the rocks of madding isles, swallowed by fishes: all for the crime of seeking aid and safety!” She gulped and dashed angrily at her eyes. “My husband’s own mother and father, who were as a mother and a father to me, perished so, for the fault of being their parents’ children. Idril was a babe in arms when her kin took her to Beleriand from Valinor; did she merit the fate of Kinslayers? Did Tuor the prophet, favored by Ulmo? The favor of the Valar weighs heavy, and their penalties also.”

Anairë looked down. When Elwing told her of Itarillë’s fate, she had reached across the miles to Eärwen and keened. Little Itarillë, Eärwen thought. Anairë’s precious first grandchild had indeed been too young to walk when Turukáno swept her off across the Helcaraxë.

“Perhaps–” she began, then stumbled into silence. Queens should not misspeak so. But then, queens should not cry openly before others.

Elwing shook her head, a teardrop flying to splash, already cold, on Eärwen’s hand.

“It does not matter if you believe me or not,” she said. She turned to Eärwen. “If I tell you, will you remember? You are an Elf; you keep all the world’s memory. It cannot hurt to remember my children, can it?”

Eärwen closed her eyes. Aikanáro’s bright hair flickered behind her lids, teased up by Findaráto’s playful hands. But when she opened her eyes again, Elwing’s own youthful face, as tearful as Artaresto’s ever was, struck her in its skinned openness.

“It cannot hurt,” she replied.

“It will be worth it,” Anairë said.

Without a battle to fight, it seemed Elwing could no longer stem her tears. She sat straight and inhaled deeply as though to sing, then caught her breath on another sob and crumpled.

Eärwen fought the urge to send a pleading tendril of osanwë to Anairë, whose shoulders still slumped and whose lips pressed together tightly. She thought she would find memories of Itarillë as a curly-haired imp. Instead, Eärwen squared her own shoulders and held out a hand to Elwing, trying once again to make it unqueenly, simple. Only a gesture, not a command.

“You need not show us,” she said. “Only tell me — I will remember — what was it like when they were born?”

Her heart beat sideways when Elwing looked at her with cracks in her eyes.

Elwing sniffed once, then pressed the heels of her hands to her brow. “They arrived at the beginning of autumn,” she began. “Elros came first and did not cry.”

—

By the time Elwing lost her voice completely, the stars spoke of midnight. Eärwen did not sleep and did not feel sleep’s lack. She had laid her hand across the column of Elwing’s sound-wrecked throat and pressed her back into Anairë’s lap, then pressed her lips to hers, still moving soundlessly. Anairë had eased out from beneath her, then forbore to say anything when Eärwen tucked her into her bedding. The two of them went away together to Eärwen’s chambers, where, without speech, they wound Eärwen’s hair into the winged style of Banilómë, then dressed her in her finest robes.

When false dawn set the paper windows glowing, Anairë took Eärwen by the hand. They crossed the garden courtyard to the King’s House while the dawn chorus trilled awake. Just at the bench placed to give a view of the towering Pelóri beside the grand pagoda, Eärwen thought she saw the glint of her father’s hair — but when she turned, only the just-turning maples met her.

Anairë kept pulling her down the winding path, and then they stood at the threshold of the secret door that let onto the Swan Throne. Eärwen’s heart beat wildly, so much so that she put a hand to her chest, half thinking to press it into quiescence through her layers of silk. When had her heart last drummed so? Perhaps only when she had first seen Anairë properly, mud-robed, holding out a hand to a feral princess and chattering about crop rotations.

“Come in with me,” she told Anairë, surprised at her own voice. Anairë only shook her head and dropped her hand.

Then she was to be alone. She nodded to Anairë and slid open the door, kept greased and silent for just such secret entrances. She slid it closed behind her.

Within, all was familiar. There loomed the great main doors that opened to let the public in, tight shut; there stood her chair of driftwood below the steps of the throne. It would have to be removed, she realized, unless she were to give it to her father.

As the light grew, the rich hues of the wood and the lustrous glimmer of the pearls and shells glowed. Dawn in Alqualondë, the daily miracle.

Awkwardly, for this had been her father’s duty, unshirked even on the day of her mother’s disappearance, she knelt on the top step of the throne and looked to the east.

She clapped; she bowed; she whispered the words sacred to the light. When she rose, she had greeted the day on behalf of her people, her first true act as queen.

Settling herself on the throne, she ran her hand down her thighs, as though the flesh and bone might tell her what she felt. She only felt empty, and the shock of static from touching silk rubbed together. The prickle brought to mind Elwing’s hair, a little flash of hot eyes and midnight that filled the echoes of her mind for a moment.

The hall was empty too, not yet filled with petitioners, advisors, onlookers, and scribes. It waited. Her emptiness, too, waited. It was not the hollow she had once sought to fill with swan feathers, nor yet was it the space between her lungs where the golden-silver threads of her children’s spirits should rest. Casting her eyes about the hall, her gaze fell upon one of the sculptural vases filling the niches along the room’s sides — the work of Nerdanel of an earlier age.

Perhaps her emptiness was thus: a vessel. A ruler ought to be a vessel, she thought. If she had once sought self-abnegation in feathers, she had been mistaken in the emptiness she sought. The queens of Alqualondë had made that mistake too often.

Elwing came to mind once more, her fierce gray eyes flaring golden and her black hair sprouting white feathers where the lightning marks ran back from her temples. A trickle of heat flowed from her belly between her legs, and Eärwen closed her eyes. Behind them, Elwing’s other face waited, tear-stained, starlit, cracked open across Eärwen’s own faultlines. When Nerwen had been very young, but old enough to be trusted to be quiet for a few minutes, Eärwen would bring her to sit on the top step of the Swan Throne to hear her grandfather make pronouncements and hand down justice. She had held onto Nerwen’s wrist, padded with that special softness of children’s flesh. In the night, Elwing had spoken of doing the same, sitting on her own throne with her son’s hands in hers so they would not stray into ruling. Eärwen would remember that until the world’s ending — Elwing held between her and Anairë, speaking in her ruined, lovely voice of her children —- and never remember the soft give of Elwing’s child’s wrist in her hand.

Eärwen exhaled. Footsteps sounded in the courtyard. A page came in to open the windows and arrange plates of water and fruit. Yesterday, Eärwen would have entered herself. Today, she caught the page’s furtive glances at the new occupant of the throne. She held herself serene and straight-backed, as her mother had taught her to do.

This day, the first day of her queenship, was the fourth day of Elwing’s husband’s journey from Taniquetil. Would she see any petitioners or make any address to inquisitive city-dwellers burning with curiosity after last night’s dramatics, or would this other messenger from afar arrive and steal the city’s interest before Arien reached her zenith?

She willed herself to breathe evenly, focusing on the angle of her fingers as they rested on her lap. Regardless, it fell to her now to organize for shipbuilding.

Arafinwë’s room in the converted dry-dock swam before her mind’s eye. Shipbuilding! There had not been a great campaign of shipbuilding since Aikanáro had been too young to speak. The streets of that quarter stood quiet; its children came not infrequently to the King’s House to attend to the joinings of the roof and furniture, for the demand for skilled carpentry was not as it once had been, when Alqualondë sent its great ships as far as Hyarmentir and Araman, when all the demesnes of Aman had been as the rooms in one family’s house.

After all, it might be a great thing to see the ribcages of boats once again rising beside the shore and new sails amongst the fishing fleet.

The small bustles in the courtyard grew louder. Eärwen found herself clasping her hands together tightly enough that the color had bled out of her nails and forced herself to relax. Yesterday she had answered the same petitions from the same cast of characters. The only change was in her seat.

But the commotion outside did not draw nearer, nor resolve into the familiar hum of policy arguments, confused questions, and smooth courtierish courtesies. It only swelled, and when Eärwen cast her mind’s nets over the palace compound, it beat in a racing pulse.

Before another page came careening into the hall, skidding on the polished floors, Eärwen stood, wiping her face smooth of all expression.

“The Man is here! He is here with bright Eönwë!”

The page’s exultant, bewildered face set something twinging in Eärwen’s chest — half warning and half yearning. Would Elwing, crying over her boys’ preference for stories over lullabies, have struck such wonder into a young Falmari child?

In order to seem at least half as magnificent as whatever vision of the Secondborn Elwing had seen fit to take as the father of her children, Eärwen swept to her full height and glided, just as her mother had taught her, and just as she had taught Nerwen, through the hall. The page fell in behind her, and Eärwen felt a prick of pride to see the wide-eyed deference she could produce, even in the face of a visitor from another world.

So she swept through the hall — her hall — and paused before the doors for the page to open them. As the leaves slid gracefully in their tracks, Eärwen closed her eyes to prepare for the brilliance that always accompanied the banner-bearer of Manwë.

Opening them, there he stood, softly aglow in borrowed luster.

He was short, Eärwen noticed first, surprised. His head with its crown of short golden locs would reach her shoulder, perhaps — Elwing likely overtopped him by a handspan. Short, and firm like a tall mast that had seen storms, and grubby beneath the radiant garb Eönwë had surely bestowed upon him, threads of pearl shot through sapphire silk sleeves falling over his broken-nailed, weather-beaten hands. Maiar were like that.

She supposed her eyes and mind seized upon these trivialities to avoid the whole: she almost could not comprehend this rough-edged noon to Elwing’s sleek midnight. Against his strangeness, even Eönwë, to whom one never quite grew accustomed, faded into the background.

But he turned to face her, wariness in the set of his shoulders, and Eärwen stiffened, for he was smiling, and though he was lighter-complected by far, and his nose had clearly been broken and set awry, when he smiled, he was a picture of Anairë.

Behind her, two someones gasped. Eärwen turned, grateful for the stateliness drilled into her, to see Anairë and Elwing standing in the doorway of the throne-hall. Anairë stared at Eärendil Ardamírë as though receiving a vision, while Elwing — puffy-eyed, hair in a pitch-black tangle — took one step forward, then another, then broke into a run.

Eärwen let her go, conscious that, despite the overwhelming presence of the Man and the chief of the Maiar, there was a crowd present to watch this meeting. She took care to smile indulgently, as though she thought anyone might be watching. It was more difficult than it might have been, even had she been used to smiling much these last five hundred years.

Elwing and Eärendil came together as two swans in their reed-biers, or two trees grown together so their branches waved as one. Eärendil’s godly collar crumpled in Elwing’s fist, clenched at the nape of his neck. She was indeed taller than him, Eärwen noticed distantly, watching as Eärendil turned his head to bury his face in Elwing’s neck.

“Where did all Turukáno's height go?” Anairë whispered. Eärwen turned away from the vision of these two child-heroes embracing as though nothing in the world could part them and looked into Anairë’s stricken face.

Without responding, and with only an edge of her mind at work upon the problem of the great crowd filling up the courtyard with romantical sighs and dazzlement, she reached out to take Anairë’s hand.

Anairë squeezed it hard. Stepping forward, she stood beside Eärwen and gazed out at the courtyard, where Eärendil, face still hidden, had pulled back just enough to tug at a fine chain and draw out the very crux of light.

It was an almost physical blow. Eärwen rocked ever so slightly on her heels, and Anairë gasped again.

Without letting go, Elwing wrapped her hand around Eärendil’s fist so the Silmaril shone out between the red-lit living flesh of their fingers in coruscating rays that put even bright Eönwë’s gleaming wings to shame, hallowing their embrace.

In the face of it, Eärwen only kept hold of Anairë’s hand, warm and smooth in hers, just as she used to when she was a wayward swan-girl and Anairë only a dancer, and this same inconceivable light had shone on their own caresses.