rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 4: Eärwen

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The dawn reached out and wrapped Eärwen in salt and coolth. The breeze filled her lungs and tingled down her arteries; the mazy streets of Alqualondë drew her feet dancing down to the strand, where the jewels of the past had weathered — almost — to innocence.

The turning alleys offered her glimpses of Elwing following behind, light-footed and focused. Indigo became her, as did the early sun, which chipped shards of blue from the jet of her hair. In the night it had seemed tentacular, tenebrous, as though its curls had twined tendrils around the dark and held it close; now, in the morning gleam of the City of Pearls, her body confined her once more, keen and fine, a wave rather than the sea. In fact, she seemed almost girlish, and Eärwen remembered her initial impression of youth here on this very beach. In the night, she had forgotten it.

A tarrying lamp-douser could be seen leaving the seawall. All the better. Eärwen did not intend to preempt Anairë — or, indeed, herself — in announcing the presence of a visitor out of the East.

The tide was half-in, and a few pelicans fished the breakers. Eärwen jumped the last few feet from the streets and breathed deeply, running the sea air over her tongue. Elwing landed beside her after only two breaths, skirt hiked up around her knees, a smile playing around her mouth.

They started together towards the packed sand where the waves had washed an hour ago. Eärwen kept taking steady, deep breaths, preparing that fierce attentiveness to self that had permitted her to conceive when she wished, and tend to her body after birth and grief, and which let her know where the pieces of her heart wandered, far from here. Where the lacy hem of the tide brushed across the sand, she halted, and Elwing stopped beside her.

“So,” Elwing said, and preempted Eärwen’s half-planned introduction. “You say you can teach me how to change at will. What do you know of skin-changing?”

“What I know I learned from my mother’s friend, Aiwendil,” Eärwen replied. “A Maia of Yavanna. He loves the wild places and he changes his shape more than many, to burrow with the rabbits and run with the hinds. Before I married, I ran with him.”

She paused. “He loved my mother because she loves the animals too, and wished to learn all she could of their behavior, their families. But he loved me because I once half-wished to be an animal. I loved the sea-swans and how they flew and called and battled with their wings and settled down to sleep in a cloud.”

A wave rushed in unexpectedly, nipping at her toes, and Elwing startled.

Eärwen bent down and hiked her robe up, looping the skirts through her sash.

“Did he teach you to fly, then?”

Eärwen shook her head. “No — perhaps he thought he could. He is a strange creature, who perhaps did not understand that the Elvishness of an Elf is nothing to be trifled with, lest…”

“I know,” Elwing interrupted, unexpectedly. “I have seen it.”

Her voice was strange, hard and brittle, and Eärwen turned to look at her in surprise — but her face was impassive, and her hands relaxed. A kind of queen’s mask, Eärwen recognized, and one ever so finely carved.

“What do you mean?”

Elwing shook her head, still all stateliness but for her thin legs and bare feet in the sand.

“The world boasts monsters a-plenty, but none so foul as an Elf whose self is forsworn or forgotten — or stolen.” She sighed. “You are not roaming the beach putting your subjects to the sword or fading for the love of the sea-swans, though. What kept you?”

“Oh,” Eärwen began, noting Elwing’s strange phrase, “Anairë.”

The waves rushed in again, spat a halved scallop shell at her feet.

“Anairë,” she said again. “She traveled, when the world was young. It sang to her like it sings to very few, and she roamed from place to place and listened for a note gone sour, so she could make it sweet again.”

Elwing crouched to pick up the scallop. “I did not think this part of the world permitted such things.”

“Ha.” She watched Elwing rinse the sand from the shell. “We have always made our own trouble, Elves. There I was in the fens trying to learn to be a swan, half faded-away, forgetting how to speak Elvish tongues, wandering between my body and a dream, eating marsh worms. Spending every moment with a Maia who seemed to think everything was quite usual, and couldn’t imagine why Alqualondë was in fits simply because I liked birds more than being a princess.”

Elwing nodded to the shell and looked up from her crouch at Eärwen’s feet. “I was only a princess very briefly, but I did not like it much either. What did the lady Anairë do to call you back?”

“She reminded me that there was more to being an Elf than being a princess, and so more to being Eärwen,” Eärwen replied, and hesitated over all that was left unsaid — she dressed my hair every day, she sang me pictures of the great horse herds of Hyarmentir and her father baking bread, she fed me dried cherries from her own hand, she called me by my name, she stayed…

It all seemed a bit much to say, too dramatic and too prosaic at once, for all that it was the truest act of love she had ever been offered, husband and children and all. She held it in.

But Elwing smiled. A soft smile, an intimate one, quite unlike any expression Eärwen had yet seen her wear. If Elwing had not worn it so calmly, if it had not sat with such certainty on the bow of her lips, Eärwen thought she might have looked away, to give it privacy.

“Yes,” she said, and, leaving her carefully washed shell to the waves, stood. “Yes, there are those people who help one know one’s own self.”

She glanced to the west, and Eärwen remembered with a start that Elwing had a husband at large in Aman, a partner in a quest the full details to which Eärwen was not yet privy. It was unlike her to forget such a political game piece, and it was also unlike her to feel that mean little twist in her gut that she had last nursed when Anairë wed Finwë Ñolofinwë in his pomp. The tide had retreated another few feet, and she followed it, focusing on the give of fine sand under her arches and the purl of the lapping wavelets in her ears.

“So,” Elwing said, all seriousness again. “You want that I should dwell on the beauties of life and the intricacies of my own Elvishness — but I am not an Elf, and my beauties are bittersweet.”

Eärwen found it perturbing how easily Elwing was able to perturb her — to remind her of the lines around her eyes and the wrenching reality of the distant land which seemed so often a mere kind of nightmare-hell, a dreamland that vanished and robbed, but did not encroach on the solidity of the quays at Alqualondë, the quotidian rhythm of her days. She had not been fully understood, however.

“If you will,” she said. “But when I had to make an effort each day to remember that I should eat rice and cooked food and not marsh worms, I tried dwelling on word problems about Alqualondë’s wastewater system, and the intricacies of terraced crop rotations. A thorny legal question on tenancy, on occasion.”

Elwing’s eyebrows, which had been delicately arched, lowered. She frowned, but only for a moment, after which she laughed and said, “Problems for a queen, not problems for a princess. A puzzle; things of interest. Things of responsibility.”

Eärwen nodded. Elwing sighed, though she still smiled.

“Very well,” she said. “I will think on my plans and watch my feathers melt away; is that it?”

She did not wait for any response from Eärwen, but made a quick, sharp flicking motion with her right hand, which of a sudden was not a hand at all, but a broad wing, barred in white and black. Vertigo swung through Eärwen, brief but intense, and she found she could not quite understand what happened at the join of Elwing’s shoulder and her— wing. She allowed her eyes to slide away, as they wanted to do in any case, and looked at Elwing’s face.

Elwing’s eyes moved rapidly beneath their lids, a single line between her brows, though her face was otherwise calm. The feathers quivered, though the breeze was gone for the moment. A bufflehead squealed. The waves hissed. The feathers remained.

Carefully, Eärwen pressed her mind out. She knew her osanwë was blunt and forceful, a wall rather than Anairë’s clear song. Nonetheless, she knew — from council meetings, from parenthood, from experience — how to make it seem as a wind or a passing pressure, something natural. If Elwing dwelled on her plans—

At once, Elwing’s eyes snapped open. The feathers vanished. Her strange, slippery mind remained as hard to grasp as ever.

“Your daughter learned much from Melian in Doriath’s prime,” she said, “but, on occasion, she would use your tricks, too. Apparently.”

It was not in Eärwen’s nature to blush, or to stammer. Even so.

“I… apologize,” she said, with some difficulty. “I meant to help.”

Elwing shrugged one shoulder, the one that had been a wing. The feathers had grown and disappeared with such clean rapidity.

“Why had you eaten as an osprey when we found you?” Eärwen asked. If she could change only an arm; if she could change it back — but then why had she found her in her pinions at night?

“I was thirsty,” Elwing replied. “The bird knows what to do.”

Nothing more was forthcoming, it seemed. Eärwen felt the urge to seek out her mind with her own pressing like the tide at the seawall, but she had learned her lesson.

After a moment of tense silence, Elwing turned back to the sea. “I believe I shall try it all, now,” she said.

Before Eärwen could respond, Elwing was a jolting space in the world where her narrow shoulders and slim hips had been, a robe crumpled on the sand. But there: the sea eagle, emerging from the folds of indigo cloth.

Her eyes were gray and strange set in the bird’s fierce visage over that tearing beak. She freed herself from the robe and ruffled all her feathers, unfolding her wings to their full expanse. Eärwen caught her breath.

She had brought Elwing here to play the teacher, but this was a world apart from her youthful madness. There was an osprey, clear as day, with those impossible eyes muddling the sharp demarcations of black and white upon her breast and wings. Eärwen gathered herself to move, or perhaps to say she knew not what, if Elwing could even hear her — but Elwing stepped, then hopped, then beat her immense wings and heaved herself into the air, aloft in the span of a gasp.

Up she spiraled, catching invisible coils of air above the retreating waves. Against the early sky, her white belly blurred at the edges, until she banked on those secret breezes and her black wings left a cut in the morning.

What else could be done? Eärwen watched her soar.

From the ground, away from those uncanny eyes, she appeared as any other dancing seabird, circling with all the grace of one of young Artaresto’s bridges, dipping from one thermal to the next like a singer spiraling around a note. She had left the earth behind.

Despite all that awaited her in the Queen’s House upon her return, Eärwen lost herself in secondhand buoyancy. She did not know how long she gazed into the sky, following each tip of each brindled feather.

But the bird had stopped her circles. She faced the east. She had hardly to beat her wings and she shot towards the last vestiges of the sunrise. Eärwen’s heart pounded. She sent out her fëa as if it were a net and the bird some precious cargo lost to the waves, and found no purchase.

Just as she thought she might have to abandon secrecy and dignity and scream, or sing out some word of power, the bird dived.

It took Elwing only an instant to streak down to the sea’s wrinkled surface, then struggle upwards once more, her wingbeats suddenly laborious, a fish writhing in her talons.

Eärwen’s breath escaped her in something like a growl. The bird swooped in an efficient arc down to the sand once more, just out of reach of the water. She mantled over her prize, still thrashing in her grasp.

Eärwen had not uttered even the smallest oath in centuries, but she could curse, and did. She ran down to stand in front of the scene, unsettled and galled at herself and Elwing for it.

She stopped her rush before reaching the osprey, for Elwing had raised her head, and her eyes were yellow.

Oh. Perhaps she was needed after all.

But what should she do? Osanwë was useless. The bird was as tall as a toddler, with wicked claws.

Well, she thought to herself. When Nerwen could walk but could not yet speak and found that kitchen knife, I handled that by being firm and swift.

It was a strange flash of memory, one she had not thought of in what felt like an age — though of course it was as sharp as anything else she could call to mind.

She gave a tiny shake of her head, and took a last step into the reach of the osprey’s wings.
Elwing made a clacking sound, gripped the lithesome silver body tighter in her talons, and tore into it with her beak, bloodying her white-feathered throat.

“Ah ah,” Eärwen told her. She crouched on the sand before the osprey and darted her hand out to grab the fish. Elwing opened that scythed beak and screamed at her, and Eärwen wondered if she was enough herself to keep from savaging her with it.

“You will regret it if you do,” she said, and reached, quick as thought, to pinch the hinges of Elwing’s beak.

“Think,” she commanded, with all the force she could muster directed at that strange mind. A moment stretched, then she watched the yellow eyes mist into gray. Something slippery coursed around her fëa, and suddenly the scimitar beak was sharp white teeth, and she gripped Elwing’s narrow jaw in her hand while they both knelt in the sand.

Elwing breathed hard. Eärwen could feel the warm gusts on her wrist. Blood lingered on her face and smeared her neck and chest to where her small brown breasts heaved, shedding downy feathers. Those gray eyes held her own, no less sharp than the raptor’s.

Slowly, Eärwen released her grasp of Elwing’s jaw. With the back of her finger, she rubbed away a smudge of blood by the corner of Elwing’s mouth, and another on the ridge of her cheekbone, and a last on her chin.

“Close,” she said, and tapped gently on the soft space beneath Elwing’s jaw. Elwing made an expression like an Elf at last, a curling smile that Eärwen caught only in a flash, as Elwing lunged forward and snapped her teeth at Eärwen’s finger.

She did not catch it, but Eärwen startled back, and to her utter chagrin, lost her balance on the shifting sand and sat down hard.

She opened her mouth to snap, but Elwing was laughing — a laugh like strings, almost too rich to come from that narrow body with its collarbones like the prow of a ship. Eärwen was not one to grin off guard, but a smile threatened nonetheless.

“It is discourteous to bite one’s host,” she said, and hoped Elwing would see the tiny upturning of her mouth for what it was.

Perhaps she did: Elwing grinned down at her and replied, “It is discourteous to steal a guest’s breakfast.”

Before Eärwen could respond, Elwing rose to her feet, the last tiny feathers drifting down around her. From her undignified seat, Eärwen could see one catch in the fine, fascinating hairs on her calves and quiver there.

“I must wash,” Elwing said, half-turning, and the little bubble of feather and hair broke, and Eärwen could lift her gaze and see Elwing walk to the water and crouch to meet the waves, the bumps of her spine a nautilus where her wings had been.

Strangely mazed, Eärwen stood. She shook the sand from her robe, and gathered Elwing’s up from the tide line. When Elwing returned, free of fish blood, she watched her dress, and they raced the opening shutters back to the Queen’s House, where court and questions and grand pronouncements awaited.

The barbs of the feather wavered in her mind’s eye still, caught in black hair.