rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 20: Anairë

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Hands on her hips, Anairë surveyed the single pack sitting on the mats of Eärwen’s chambers. Eärwen herself lounged elegantly and disapprovingly across the room from it, icy disdain on her lips and nose.

“You are a nuisance,” Anairë told her, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Outside the paper windows, the rich light of autumn’s first days tugged at her, some new wonder she had disregarded as second, lesser, poor substitute. It made her want to dance.

“You should at least take Maldanar,” Eärwen replied haughtily.

“Did I have Maldanar when I found you in a coastal swamp with mud in your ears?”

Eärwen only sniffed. “You were not a queen then.”

Anairë knelt down to tighten a strap where the pack bulged disobediently outward on the right.

“Nor am I now,” she said, bringing the pack back into true. “I rather like the thought of finding out how much of that person yet remains.”

She hefted the bag, pleased to find it, if not light, then manageable. Most of the weight was food — raisins and salted steelhead, acorn meal and dried seaweed, a single precious packet of coimas from Eärwen’s hand. Otherwise, it held plain capes and skirts, a sewing kit, a voluminous cloak spelled for warmth and dryness. Paper and ink nestled at the small of her back, wrapped in oilcloth. A single pair of white doeskin dancing slippers sat at the very top, Ninkwitāllë’s parting gift, in thanks for a remarkable upsurge in custom.

She hoisted the pack to her knee, then swung it onto her back. It settled comfortably over her shoulders, and she beckoned to Eärwen to fasten the broad hip-belt. Eärwen, who would never do something so undignified as pout, nonetheless managed to look remarkably petulant. Anairë rolled her eyes at her. Eärwen sighed, stood, and walked over. She put her hands on Anairë’s hips, but rather than reaching for the belt straps, only looked at her.

Restlessness itched in Anairë’s feet. All of Aman awaited her, as it had when she was but a tanner’s daughter sworn to Nessa, off to set the Music right where it rang sour. Even so, she stilled the dance curling in her legs, and let Eärwen look at her.

“Tell me again where you mean to go,” Eärwen said at last.

“West,” Anairë replied, envisioning the captivating path as she repeated her plan. “Through Valimar far to the north of Tirion, stopping at the goat-hamlets of the Vanyar: there will be dances enough needed where soldiers have gone to war. Eventually, I will come to Ekkaia, where the dark waters lap at the uttermost shore. Perhaps I will look upon the Walls of Night, should they reveal themselves. In the south, the sacred herds roam the Plains of Yavanna, Nessa at their head. It has been too long since I paid my respects.”

The desire to already be dancing beside the great heartsease-eyed doe rocked her. In recent days she had thought of hardly anything else. Elwing’s safe return had torn away the last remnants of lingering, clinging duty — now she only had responsibility, and that she would fulfill.

She lifted her hands to Eärwen’s shoulders, where her own hand had worked the images of antlered swans that swept across her robes.

“In between, of course,” she said, “I will come to Alqualondë.”

She broke into a grin, and, wonderingly, Eärwen smiled back at her, teeth and crinkling eyes and all. Had they smiled so since the rising of the Sun and Moon? Anairë did not think so. Perhaps they had not even done so since Fëanáro drew his blade on Nolofinwë, in the years before the darkness.

“Two centuries is a moment,” Eärwen murmured, shifting her hands from Anairë’s hips to the small of her back, beneath her pack. Anairë sighed and removed her hands from Eärwen’s shoulders, letting the bag thud gently to the floor once more. At once, Eärwen drew her closer, pressing Anairë's head — neatly braided once more by Elwing, threaded with gold — into the crook of her neck. As always, Eärwen's cool skin smelled faintly of agarwood and the incense with which her robes were stored.

Anairë hummed. Two centuries as Tirion’s ruler had felt like an Age. Two centuries surrounded by her children, deeply in love with her husband, visiting Alqualondë in the summers to see the Swan Princess, had passed like blinks of the eye.

“Go with all my blessings.” Eärwen’s breath tickled Anairë’s ear as she spoke. “Whenever the road carries you back to me, I will be here.”

Anairë pressed a kiss to the side of Eärwen’s neck, then stepped back, careful not to tread on her pack. Picking it up again, she smiled to feel the muscles in her cheeks pull.

“Before you know it, I will be back,” she promised. “Perhaps one day I will even return and find you not here, but at a white tower in the north — or here, but deposed by a similar bloodless coup of your own making and living once more with Arafinwë.”

Eärwen quirked an eyebrow at her teasing.

“Perish the thought,” she said dryly, though her heart panged to think of once more receiving Anairë with Arafinwë by her side, as if they could recapture those golden summers of the Tree Years when all was sweet.

It was not the time for such dreams, however — not this very moment, in any case. She shooed Anairë out of her room and down to the side door where, only weeks ago, they had snuck into the Queen’s House, ponying Elwing alongside Maldanar.

On the threshold, Anairë reached back and caught Eärwen’s hand again.

“I am being silly,” she said. “I am only roaming around until Tirion sees fit to allow me back — I can return to you whenever I wish! And yet…”

Eärwen’s grip tightened comfortingly. “Go on,” she said. “Be not daunted! Go dance and explore and leave all your responsibilities in the dust. When you come back, all will be different.”

“Some things will be the same,” Anairë replied, and, swiftly, kissed Eärwen once on the brow and once upon the lips. Then, hefting her pack once more onto her back, she made a priestess’ gesture of farewell and set out through the narrow back alleys of Alqualondue towards the uttermost west. There, perhaps, she might see not only the Walls of Night, but the sheer gray walls of the Halls of Mandos, where her children and her husband existed in whatever form remained to them. Then, perhaps, she could cease searching with a goal in mind, and only remember to return home when she had exercised her wings. Eärwen, regardless of any changes of heart regarding just how desirable it was to be queen, would be here, in the home of her heart.

–

Passing by Ninkwitāllë’s house, a familiar nicker arrested her stride. The deep rumble of Gondō the Circler growled in her ears, louder than its usual wont. Startled, she looked about her.

In Ninkwitāllë’s doorway stood a dark-haired woman dressed in white — but the lightning-streaked temples and gray eyes gave Elwing away. In the garden courtyard, Eärendil was just visible, vainly trying to keep Maldanar’s muzzle out of his pockets.

“Did you think you would leave without saying goodbye to this gentleman?” asked Elwing. “Leaving him in the stables as a gift with Ulofánë is not the way I would have bid farewell.”

Anairë laughed and shook her head. “He is young still! He needs someone to put him through his paces — as do you, if you ever wish to ride like an Elf and not like a sack of cattail tubers.”

Elwing snorted and straightened from her insouciant pose against the doorframe.

“I have Ulofánë to teach me that; moreover, I am given to understand that the Isle of Seabirds is no place for an exuberant young charger. You would not leave him behind, would you? He would miss you terribly, alone in a strange place.”

Anairë studied Elwing’s face, neither as solemn nor as thin as when she had first met her upon the strand and sensed the imminent, longed-for capsize of her cobbled-together life-raft.

As Eärwen with her blankness, so Elwing with her amusement, she thought.

“Maldanar will hardly have time to miss me, I will return so often,” she said. “And he is only a horse, with a horse’s lifespan. To an Elf-child, my absence will be but a slub in the basket-weave.”

“I am not a child,” Elwing said, and let the mask drop just enough for Anairë to see the anxiety in her eyes. She turned quickly, however, and beckoned Eärendil forward with Maldanar, stepping out of the way as the gelding delicately picked his way over the stones of the threshold.

“You had really better take him,” Elwing said. “One gift horse from an Elf-queen is already almost too much for the sole lonely citizen of a sea-isle.”

Anairë snorted, the wisp of worry for Elwing slipping away. Already, certain troublemakers or hero-worshippers declared their intent to go with Elwing to her isle, though they knew nothing of her quest from Eärwen: she would not be alone. Maldanar pricked his ears at Anairë, and Eärendil gave him a companionable slap on the shoulder, then shoved his hands in his pockets and grinned sheepishly at her. A pang went through her: he was the very image of Írissë with that guilty grin. Already, however, Maldanar sniffed at herpockets, whuffling through her skirt, and Elwing laughed her low, sonorous laugh to watch Anairë shove his head away.

“Very well,” Anairë said. “When we come riding back to your island, thin as rails from lack of fodder, I expect you to treat us as we treated you.”

All at once, Elwing’s face crumpled, and she flew forward, throwing her arms around Anairë. She and Maldanar both startled. Then she relaxed and embraced Elwing, who, after all, was still nearly a stranger to these shores. For all her protests, for all her skill and drive, she was very young. But she was not a child, and she would do well. It would be good for her and Eärwen to needle one another, and for her to have an anchor, in the beautiful northern waters surrounded by the seabirds.

Anairë gave her a last squeeze and withdrew, and Elwing, dashing at her eyes, pulled herself up into a queenly posture, clearly embarrassed.

“Travel safely, and may a star shine on our next meeting,” she said gravely, and Anairë echoed the words back, imbuing them with as much warmth as she could.

At last, she whistled Maldanar to her side, and turned her face again up the steep slope of the city, towards the whole of Aman, where the Music already hummed in her bones, waiting to move her. The first few fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet as she and Maldanar walked up and out of Alqualondë. She slung an arm over his tall withers, already planning the steps she would dance when she reached the lip of the valley and the road spread out wide before her.