rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 3: Elwing

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Elwing ran her hands over the silk bedspread, catching her rope-roughened fingers on the satin weave. It was a very vivid blue, clearly dyed in the thread. Idril had often worn a woolen gown of a similar shade, which became a mantle, which became a vest, which became handkerchiefs, which became a set of button coverings, and finally became a memory of when people could spare the time and effort to do things like grow dye instead of grain. Sirion had been an earth-colored, homespun place.

Everything in Alqualondë was green, blue, deep brown, or white, and smooth as nacre. Elwing closed her eyes against the gleaming pearl wall of the chamber Eärwen’s seneschal had given her, and collapsed backwards onto the unrolled mattress. It was strange to lie upon a bed that did not rise up to embrace her as had her hammock aboard Vingilot.

Did she have time to sleep? Her eyes itched. She had wandered for days along the beach, and she was unsure how long she had spent as an osprey, flying through time in portions more discrete yet more endless than her human days. Eärwen had told her in no uncertain terms that she expected to see her at sunset, when her court adjourned. Unsaid but no less clear was her expectation that Elwing stay in her chamber until then, like a naughty child or a restless bird. A protest had risen to her lips, but died upon them, for she had been called upon to be a queen in a way she had not in three years, and her soul felt as weary as her body.

She swung her aching legs onto the mattress, and though her mind was full of swirling thoughts half in Quenya and half in Sindarin, she slept.

The click of her latch threw her into wakefulness. Moonbeams chased each other through the hair of the tall figure in the doorway, and she relaxed.

“Galadriel,” she mumbled. “Is it the boys?”

Her own hair tangled in her mouth, and she reached up to remove it, and froze, staring at the feathers blooming from her palm. At once, the room snapped into relief: pale as the inside of an oyster shell, and empty. In her doorway stood Eärwen.

“I do not understand you,” Eärwen said.

Elwing supposed she had spoken in Sindarin. She forebore to respond, swiped her unfeathered hand across her eyes, and focused on what it felt like to have fingers that could feel silk slubs and dry cheeks.

When she had two hands again, she sat up and looked at Eärwen. The courteous thing would be to apologize for sleeping through her appointed meeting.

“I thought you were your daughter,” she said.

The room was not fully dark, so Elwing could see Eärwen stiffen, though her features were obscured in the gloom.

“So you did know her.”

Elwing nodded, then realized Eärwen might not be able to see her.

“At times, I believed I knew her well. She delivered my babies.”

“My Nerwen? She always scorned such tasks.”

“I did not claim she performed admirably,” Elwing replied, wry. “She was there when my father was born, that was all. She was the only one who knew how a half-Elvish birth might proceed. In the end, she mostly handed me things to bite.”

Eärwen did not exactly laugh, but the air in the room thawed appreciably. Had Elwing known casting aspersions on her daughter’s prowess as midwife would appeal so, she might have begun there.

“Is biting in birth some custom of the Secondborn?”

Eärendil’s absence panged through her -- so had she felt while laboring with him far afield, yet not even the stuffiest ex-nobles of Gondolin-that-was had never seen a human before. Even they would have understood.

“Ah. No. It hurts. It hurts us terribly. I did not want to scream.”

There was a silence. Elwing judged herself a connoisseur of silences, yet could not decipher this one. She breathed in through her nose, slowly, and waited. Eärwen made a sharp, jerky sort of motion with her hands, the first ungraceful gesture Elwing had yet seen her make. She thought perhaps she had moved to hug herself.

“It seems right that it should hurt,” Eärwen said. “I never imagined it so. Yet I think it meet that the bearing should presage the loss.”

“Your daughter yet lives,” Elwing said in haste. No queenly persona outranked the need to reassure a parent of their child’s survival. “As far as I know, she is safe. She traveled east with her husband when -- when I had heirs. The journey is long, but she is its match.”

“I know she lives,” Eärwen said. “The Shadow is not so great that it can break my bonds with her. Not even she could do that.”

“You… feel her? From across the sea?”

The column of shadow in her doorway cocked her head slightly.

“Of course. And I felt her siblings die. I would know, were she returned to Mandos.”

A horrible snarl clotted Elwing’s throat. Many times she had spoken and hated her words, but never yet ones so hateful as the question she had not dared ask even Eärendil. She breathed in the darkness and held it. It was safe in the darkness, like the forests, like the floor of the sea.

“Do you sense your children?”

And darkness was the sweet knife, that permitted wounds that daylight would burn out from the edges, like embers on paper.

“I sense nothing,” Elwing said, and then said what she had not once dared to say, in three years since leaving Sirion, so this haughty stranger with no reason to care would hear them. “They said I would feel it if they died, but they also said I would feel it when I conceived. They must be dead.”

Then, as she had when Elros had finally slipped from her, with home and Eärendil as far away as they ever had been, she began to cry.

She turned her face from Eärwen and bit her cheek savagely, but to no avail. Immediately, her nose stuffed and forced her to open her mouth with an inelegant sniff in order to breathe. As quietly as she could, she inhaled, resisted the urge to hold the air, and exhaled shakily. One forgot how tears did not really taste like the sea, she thought, desperate for distraction. The sea had other notes — it was saltier, for one — and it could do things, while tears did nothing.

She cast about the room for some other distraction, as much as she could with her head tilted as if to hide from Eärwen’s gaze under a wing she did not currently possess. The gleam of the walls in the starlight reminded her of fishes in the river Sirion. How strange that the window did not face the full moon despite being on the proper side of the building for it. Had Eärendil yet reached Tirion?

There came a rustle from the doorway. If Elwing turned her head, surely Eärwen would see her blotchy face in the moonlight, and the undignified dampness of her collar where her tears had run down her throat. Almost soundlessly — or perhaps soundlessly in truth, except that the dark had always whispered to Elwing — Eärwen walked towards her. Elwing clamped her mouth shut and tried in vain to breathe through her nose. It was not necessary, in the end. Eärwen did not venture to catch Elwing’s eye, nor to face her.

Instead, she simply folded downwards with surprising speed and looseness to sit on the floor beside the mattress, her back resting against the wall. Elwing blinked.

Eärwen’s hair sheened in the faint starlight, barely visible from the corner of Elwing’s left eye. Tucked up on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, she seemed very much like Galadriel indeed -- except Galadriel would never have been so undignified before a near-stranger. Indeed, from Elwing’s limited experience, it did not seem much like Eärwen, either.

“Has my shame overcome you?” she asked, with a horrible croak in her voice.

“My own,” Eärwen replied. “How should I resent you for having known my daughter? We suffer the same hurt of spirit.”

She lapsed into silence.

Elwing let it spin out. The unfamiliar stars danced outside her window. Her tears slowed, then stopped.

“Their names were Elros,” she said eventually. “And Elrond.” The darkness held them gently.

“Strange names,” Eärwen replied. “Like yours.”

“They are like mine, of both our kindreds. Elros, Elwing — we are star foam. And Elrond was my vault of stars.”

Eärwen nodded. “What was it you called my daughter?”

Elwing finally looked at her, still curled around her knees like a child.

“Galadriel. She who is crowned in radiant light.”

“She always dreamed of a crown,” Eärwen said, and they shared silence again while the stars shone cold in the distance.

--

Elwing woke again before dawn, the sky through the window an almost featureless square against the pearlescent walls. Neither she nor Eärwen had remembered to close the sliding paper shutters against the light.

The bedchamber was once again empty but for her. Though Eärwen must have left sometime in the night, Elwing had no recollection of it. The whole interlude felt vaguely dreamlike, though when Elwing touched her fingers to her sandy eyes, she felt the froggish bags to which she had always been prone after crying. At least this morning she did indeed have fingers.

“Ugh,” she muttered, and rose to find a way to wash her face.

She retraced her steps to the bathing-room she had used after being rescued from the beach with minimal trouble. It still struck her as the most luxurious living space she had ever seen, with its gleaming tiles and smooth wood, and running water both hot and cold, and stacks of drying cloths simply waiting to be used.

Doriath had boasted similar amenities — she could just remember it — and Sirion had taken the safety of its water and drainage seriously. Even so, memories from the edge of her conscious life and the efficient but plain plumbing of her own beleaguered city simply could not compare to the gloriously hot water already pouring from the tap into the basin.

The soap smelled of violets. She hoped Eärendil had found clean water.

Refreshed, she found her way back to her room, where an attendant had been in to leave a steaming tray of seaweed soup and rice and hang a belted, square-cut robe like Eärwen’s on a stand. She felt relieved that the household had decided she be left alone to dress.

She fingered the collar thoughtfully. The cotton thread was finely spun and the weave excellent, if plain. It had been colored with indigo, squeeze-dyed in the bolt, or perhaps as a finished garment, in a simple, precise pattern. It did not strike her as fit for the court, even in Sirion, where all was scraps and rags of former finery. She shrugged and put it on.

Just as she was tying the sash in one of the simple configurations Galadriel had liked to use when she wore the costume of her mother’s people, someone rapped on the door. Elwing wrapped her braid into a low knot, went into the parlor, and opened the door.

Eärwen stood alone on the threshold, looking none the worse for wear for her late night. Her own dress was simple, though of fine material, and her face was smooth as a pearl. Elwing wondered what she might be thinking.

“Come,” she said, and made as if to walk off down the corridor.

Elwing, who had noticed Anairë treading on Eärwen’s feet beneath the table the morning prior, crossed her arms and leant against the doorway. Evidently, she had kept some awareness of Elwing about her, for when Elwing forbore to follow, she stopped and turned around, raising one eyebrow just slightly.

“May a humble queen and kinswoman beg leave to know where it is we go?” she inquired.

Something that might be a smile tugged at the corners of Eärwen’s mouth.

“Do you frequently awaken with feathers in place of fingers?”

Elwing shrugged. In truth, unplanned pinions seemed all of a piece with the unlooked-for wings that had borne her away from her chosen doom. Non sequitur questions had a similar air about them.

“They come when they choose.”

Eärwen’s expression did not noticeably change, but something in her bearing struck Elwing as surprised, or perhaps angry.

“We go down to the shore,” Eärwen said, sternly, in a tone Elwing recognized in a wave of disorientation as one she had heard often from her daughter. “I can teach you how to choose.”

She turned and walked down the corridor, and this time, she did not pause to see if Elwing followed. Elwing crossed her arms tighter.

After a moment, she followed Eärwen down to the solitary sea.