rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 7: Eärwen

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Eärwen’s hands twitched and coiled with nerves not her own, clenching on the arms of her carved chair — the driftwood-gray one beneath the pearly opulence of her father’s raised, bedraped dais of a throne. Anairë could launch a feeling across the miles as though she were a javelin-thrower second only to Nessa herself: a talent useful in times of danger, soothing in peacetime, and hardly ever as much of an annoyance as now.

The last petitioner, case heard and judged in Eärwen’s wisdom, made her obeisance to it, empty as it was, and began to back out of the hall. Eärwen sat straight-backed and smooth-faced and watched the doors to the King’s House swing closed behind her, digging her fingernails into the armrests.

“Please inform my royal father that I am ready,” she told the attendant who manned the doors. “And fetch the Lady Elwing from her chambers.”

Anairë’s anxiety spiked, a twist deep behind Eärwen’s ribs. She stretched her mind out, tensing against the strain, questing for some clear word or sign from Anairë.

What is it?

Only the same cloud of tight, excited nerves answered her, the familiar contours of Anairë’s mind focused inward and away.

Sighing, she drew back over the oaklands and the low mountains, skimming along the wide southern sweep of Alqualondë’s sound, dragging the fingers of her mind through the thought-fizzing water of the outlying fishing villages readying for the evening tide to turn. The largest boats sparked into and out of focus as they swung their bows homeward. Scattered shrine priests glowing lamp-like in evening meditation serenely ignored her. Minds snapped shut in the ramshackle rookeries of the Returned by the mouth of the trickling Alpasírë, unwilling in rebirth as they were in their first lives.

Alqualondë proper warmed with its second rising as Arien plunged into the sea, the eating-houses clusters of alive! and presence!and the docks almost smarting with excitement.

Eärwen paused. Even for a fine evening and a good catch, that was a great deal of excitement. She gathered the eye of her attention, a storm cell touching down near the promenade.

He was immediately present to her, as open as the day they wed, sunny and candid. Around him was a crowd of some size — impossible to tell precisely at this distance — all in a swirl of emotion, pressing and tugging at her mind.

Distantly, Eärwen felt her fingers seize on the armrest of the chair again.

She pressed at her husband’s mind, an open-handed slap on a doorframe standing ajar, a kick at a threshold she had not passed through these six hundred years.

His surprised pleasure almost sent her running back across the miles to Anairë, preoccupied but safe. Before she could shape a question, he sent an impression to her: delight, even wonder, intrigue, a wild hope, a blackness like two thousand fathoms, shot through with silver.

It clicked together at the same instant that the attendant’s feet on the wooden floors clicked back into earshot.

Eärwen threw herself back into her body with enough force that her ears rang.

“Princess,” the runner said over the high-pitched hum, “I cannot find the Lady Elwing.”

“I misspoke,” Eärwen replied, her own voice distant to her ears. “The Lady Elwing is at the harbor with Prince Arafinwë.”

Guards to separate and retrieve Elwing were out of the question, as was permitting whatever multitude Arafinwë had gathered about himself to come to the King’s House. Whyever had she gone out? How had she found Arafinwë? What did they discuss together in such a crowd?

“Go quickly and bid them come to the Queen’s House together,” she said. She could find her father herself, and the Queen’s House was not open to the eyes of the city.

“What of the king, Princess?” asked the page.

What of him? Eärwen wanted to snap, but long practice kept the words well behind her tongue.

“I will see that he is notified of the change in plans myself,” she responded, and, rising, swept out of the hall while the page was still trapped between bowing to her and making obeisance to Olwë’s empty throne.

–

The main room of the Queen’s House, the room that had been her mother’s delight, was fitted with no Noldorin innovations. As such, Arafinwë and Elwing knelt upon the elegantly embroidered sitting cushions, too absorbed in animated conversation to notice the main door sliding open. Eärwen’s heart panged, and she bit her tongue. The page must have run like the wind for them to arrive and settle before she could corral her father across the way to the Queen’s House. Eärwen folded her hands in her sleeves and waited to be noticed.

“No, you see, that was the issue at hand,” Elwing was explaining to a rapt Arafinwë. “The Gondolindrim had particular needs, language not least, but it was impossible that they should self-govern. There would have been fighting in the streets — and then we all would have starved. Hence the districts: of course each people would cluster together, but it was all cheek-by-jowl, and it was not as though there were enough dwellings to pass up one– going spare.”

Eärwen caught the hitch in Elwing’s voice, but Arafinwë did not seem to notice.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “And each could then select a representative who would compete for the honor, that none might say they were unfairly excluded!” He clasped his hands together before his breast, that delighted gesture Aikanáro had so loved and imitated until it became his own. Eärwen’s hands twitched.

“Yet… all accepted you as final arbiter?” A diplomatic thread of doubt winding through that musical voice.

“I do believe you consider your daughter,” Elwing said wryly. “It will not surprise you to know that she secured herself a position high in my confidence — perhaps it will surprise you that she managed it with sweet words and wise counsel.”

Arafinwë’s face could hold no interest, surely. Eärwen, still trapped in the doorway, did not find herself surprised, though a thread of unease drifted through her thoughts – how young must Elwing have been when Nerwen came to her with sweet words to gain a role as confidant and counsel? Across the low table from Arafinwë, smiling and animated as Eärwen had never yet seen her, she practically radiated youth.

“She hardly could do otherwise,” Elwing continued, “For if she wished to live with her husband, the peoples must perforce be allowed to mingle, and once blended, how might I claim that the law should address neighbors as strangers?”

“Clever,” said Arafinwë, as approving as he had ever been when one of the children had produced some astute answer to a tutor’s question, and though Eärwen had only a moment before dwelt on Elwing’s youth, she felt her hackles rise. “Though surely even my troublesome daughter could not have been the only obstacle?”

Elwing quirked a brow. Flatly, she replied, “Husbands proved useful in that respect as well.”

“Itarillë’s boy, of course! Please excuse my forgetfulness; naturally the Noldor would follow a prince of the house of Nolofinwë.”

Yet more evenly, Elwing said, “My husband is Ardamírë, son and grandson of prophets. He followed me, and his peoples chose for themselves, as was ever the way of Sirion. Had the Gondolindrim wished, they might have crossed the strait to Balar and seen what Círdan Nówë’s child aspirant might do for them. Naturally.”

Arafinwë bowed from the waist, though he remained seated. “I see I have offended, my lady,” he said. “I beg your gracious indulgence.”

The final filament of Eärwen’s patience snapped. She stepped off the threshold into the room.

“Your half-apologies remain unwelcome in this house, my lord. You dance upon my indulgence already, and I suggest that you not tread upon Queen Elwing’s as well.”

Arafinwë started violently to hear her level voice, whipping his head around to stare, while Elwing betrayed no surprise and turned to face her slowly. The last sparks of Treelight gleamed from Arafinwë’s eyes, while Elwing’s shone gray and depthless as the sea. Neither gaze settled easily upon her.

“What trouble did you spawn upon my docks?” she demanded, before either could speak.

“No trouble,” said Elwing in a voice of maddening calm to match her own. “We shared songs and debated our tastes in seafood, and caused no agitation.”

Arafinwë made an unresolved sort of gesture. “It was but a chance gathering of sailors and a group of Repudiators. My first work crew knows what behavior is expected of them— of us. Captain Nissaratë badgered her, but no worse. We spoke of many topics, but not in anger.”

“The carpenter Voranna asked me where her son was,” added Elwing, and let the ripples of her statement spread out into the night air.

Eärwen pressed her lips together. It was no good looming over them as though they were misbehaving children. Ignoring the long-ingrained habit of kneeling by Arafinwë’s side, she walked to the head of the table and knelt, arranging her sleeves about her.

“I am surprised Nissaratë stooped to speak to you,” she said to Arafinwë. When he did not immediately respond, she faced Elwing. “I suppose you learned with whom you spoke. Noldor paying reparations — not Kinslayers, but those who were happy enough to profit from slaughter until the Valar’s threats of consequences turned them back. Perhaps I ought to be surprised that you spoke to them.”

Elwing tipped her head a precise number of degrees to the left and regarded Eärwen. It was unnervingly like the stare of the sea eagle. Eärwen fought the urge to hiss at her like a swan.

“What did you think I meant when I told you of Sirion?”

Flat-footed, irritated with the obliqueness, smooth-faced, Eärwen replied, “I do not grasp your meaning.”

“Who precisely did you think lived in Sirion? Who were the Gondolindhrim? Who were the stray Noldor who came to fish Balar?”

Eärwen kept her counsel. Elwing continued, looking easily between her and Arafinwë, as if they conversed at a dinner party.

“Your daughter lived with us a while; I told you this. She made such a fuss about working with Kinslayers. The whole continent knew she had sworn against them. She did weave for the common stores, and performed healing, and once she fought off a starving bear with a short spear. She and her husband left two days after I delivered my sons, and she took Elves with her, some two-score Sindar. Thus, she was not here, and her followers were not here, when Sirion burned.”

Elwing folded her hands very neatly in her lap, and made a funny sort of shrug, like a bird running its beak through feathers.

“Could they thatch a roof? Could they set a snare, or lay on hands to heal a rotten wound?” She tipped her head back and forth, and Eärwen saw Arafinwë stiffen from the corner of her eye, and consciously relaxed her back and jaw where they had tensed. That had been Nerwen’s gesture.

Elwing’s face remained quite smooth, and for the first time, Eärwen wondered if that was her own face, passed down across the ocean.

Arafinwë broke in.

“I believe you mean that Sirion did not turn away those who swore they meant no harm and were willing to help their neighbors put up a wall — and then I am sure you broke up many fights!”

Elwing unbent, a little, and flashed Arafinwë a small smile all out of keeping with the nasty twist it engendered in Eärwen’s belly.

“Well, not physically.”

“It is just as well,” Eärwen broke in. “I am here to introduce you to my father, as I should have done yesterday. If you have caused no trouble, then we need not speak of this to him.”

Elwing stopped smiling, but she turned the full force of her attention to Eärwen, as she had expected she would — she could feel it, and Arafinwë’s too, hot on her skin as the two-edged summer sun.

“May I speak to him about ships?” Elwing asked, leaning forward, almost rising on her knees.

Eärwen thought before she spoke. Careful to meet Elwing’s intent eyes evenly, she replied, “He is unlikely to take kindly to the question. The destruction of our Swanships was a great blow, as was– well. He will need much convincing to lend aid to Noldor. Indeed, I must yet be convinced there is any worth in your quest.”

“You have ever been difficult to sway, daughter.”

Before Elwing’s eyes could do more than flash, or anyone could startle at the sudden intrusion of another into their tableau, Eärwen rose to her feet and folded into a bow from the waist. From the rustle of clothing, she guessed that Arafinwë had thrown himself into a full obeisance, and Elwing had not. Of course not.

“Enough, daughter, up; do not be silly. You are in your own mother’s home,” Olwë said, entering the room and raising Eärwen up. Though her eyes had been trained on the floor, as her mother had drilled into her after her return with Anairë from Aiwendil and the marshes, she had noted the unsteadiness of his stride — the insecurity of many centuries rather than the lithe sailor’s swagger that had rang the floorboards of the Queen’s House when she was a child waking to another day of bliss, and which, in nights when she woke without Anairë by her side in her childhood bedchamber, she still half-expected to come down the hall to wake her from bad dreams. It was not, then, a good day.

It so rarely was. Eärwen raised her eyes to take in her father’s face, golden-tan and familiar, but somehow not the father’s face she always expected, still, even now. She turned, and saw Elwing — thank the stars — holding a shallow curtsey of antique Noldorin style, though her head was high and her gaze avid, an arrow fletched by those arcing lines at her eyes’ corners.

Arafinwë kept his forehead pressed to the floor. Olwë did not look at him.

“Atar,” said Eärwen, “This is Elwing, Queen of Sirion across the sea, come to treat with the Valar as her grandmother did.”

Elwing dipped slightly lower for a moment, then rose entirely. “My uncle,” she said, in that voice a hundred furlongs deep. “My great-grandfather’s beloved brother. I regret that I meet you without good tidings of him.”

Eärwen watched Olwë’s eyes dart from Elwing’s proud nose to her gray eyes to the lightning-riven profundity of her hair. His sash had been clumsily tied.

“I see some of Elwë in you, child,” he said. “A very little. But it is more than I have seen since long and long ago, before either of us dreamed of children, much less great-grandnieces come a-questing across the ocean with sad news.”

“Shall I tell you regardless?” asked Elwing.

Olwë sighed, and gestured at the table. Eärwen stepped aside so he might sit at the head, and he took his place, the hem of his robe brushing over Arafinwë’s hand where he knelt still on the wooden floor, his breath fogging and vanishing.

“What is one more tale of woe?” he asked, not seeming to expect an answer. He settled on the cushion where Eärwen had sat, giving somehow the impression of an old gull with webs too ragged to perch comfortably on a ship’s rail. Eärwen clenched her teeth.

“I have heard the story in brief, and wish to hear it properly, so we may support — or not — our cousin’s decision informedly,” Eärwen said. Her next words floated out from some unknown place beyond her conscious mind: “Arafinwë will stay and listen as well, for we may hear of our daughter.”

She moved around the table to sit next to Arafinwë, not pausing to look for her father’s reaction. Arafinwë’s own response was merely to rise from his reverence and steal a fleeting look at Eärwen’s face before turning his eyes down to the table.

Her heart thudded hard, once, twice. With Arafinwë at her right, and her father at the head of the table, and, if she only looked at the polished wood of the table, a woman’s indistinct form reflected in its shine, she could almost be a young bride again, or a mother whose children were far away because they explored their home in all its wild safety.

She folded her hands firmly in her lap.

“Can you paint a picture for me while you tell your tale of my brother, child?” asked Olwë, breaking the thick silence.

Any indignation Elwing felt at the condescension stayed behind her eyes, and she only dipped her head in a graceful nod.

“I could, Uncle,” she said, “But I was not yet born when he was slain for the Silmaril, and my pictures would be art, not history. I shall sing you a lay that tells of it in plain speech.”

So she did. Or rather, she chanted, clearly making a rough translation on the wing, where spaces between meaning and speech clattered and echoed. Necklace wire dripped with beads and little gems with unfamiliar names, and swords scraped against a child’s vocabulary. Eärwen closed her eyes to hear Elwing’s low, ripe voice the better, and so when Elwing had finished her gloss, and shifted seamlessly to free-singing of the sort that Eärwen knew well from the docks and warehouses of Alqualondë, the first flicker of silver-gold splashed bright as dream behind her lids.

She was a child, and she looked up, less far than she might, for strong arms cradled her against a warm chest — but still, she looked up, for the vision before her stood taller than anyone she had met before, and was crowned in hair that gleamed like the torchlight gleamed on the steel of her sword. She reached out with a chubby arm, fascinated by a curling tendril, and had to decide whether to cry when the vision’s lips tightened, only for one of the voices that meant brother to chide, “Don’t frown at her! She’s only a baby,”and for the vision to sigh-laugh and reach out her arms and cradle her against her lacquered breastplate. The hair came down in a shining curtain like the waterfall where she had been born glowing at sunset, and she stared through it to her new home.

Somewhere else, someone Eärwen loved made a broken sort of noise.

The veil of gilded silver did not shift, but the surroundings beyond it did — gray-pink water and blasted trees, muddy overhangs in streambanks, running and hiding and running and hiding again. Her father’s star lit the hair curtain and proved she was safe, but it would also bring in the hunters, said Galadriel, so keep it hidden, curl around it so the light cannot get out. She slept in a tight twist so her father’s star pulsed scarlet through her hands, and over her hunched someone who wasn’t her father, or her mother, or either of her brothers, and over that person crouched the orange-stained night.

“Stop!”

Eärwen snapped back to herself, and Elwing’s note hit a funny modulation and then ceased. She hoped to the stars that Anairë, still radiating discomfort across the miles, had not felt any of that. Beside her, Arafinwë breathed unevenly.

Olwë hovered on his knees, palm flat on the table, veins in relief.

“I did not ask for that tale!” he boomed.

“You asked for the tale of your brother, my great-grandfather, and I meant to bring it to the present day,” Elwing replied, golden-eyed. “I expect it is not yet finished.”

“His tale ended when he died,” Olwë said harshly.

“It ends when I die, and all the other remnants of his people.”

Olwë pushed the table away as he rose, sending its legs into Arafinwë’s knees. “What is done is done, and I cannot grant you justice, or him — he is beyond justice, in that cruel land of yours.”

Elwing made as if to stand as well, planting her hands flat on the table surface and pushing up, pins and quills bristling along her hairline — but Eärwen grabbed her wrist and squeezed until she could feel the bones.

“This is not how a supplicant requests a boon from a king,” said Olwë, lips pale.

Elwing opened her mouth, and Eärwen squeezed even tighter and watched as Elwing visibly remembered that she needed help, not victory, and snapped and bent every pinion of rage back under her skin.

She did not apologize, but she did seat herself again, and bowed her head a very little.

“Do not come to me again tomorrow,” Olwë warned, turned on his heel, and swept from the room.

In the silence of his departure, Arafinwë passed a shaking hand over his eyes.

“You– you push too hard.”

Elwing did not respond, only removed Eärwen’s hand one finger at a time from her wrist, where a handprint stood livid against the brown skin. Eärwen stared at the mark rather than offer her own opinion.

She had not just witnessed an exercise of stunning diplomacy, but — well. It had been a long time since she had been pushed, rather than pushing.

“I’m… sorry,” Elwing said, not as insincerely as she might have. Arafinwë did not take umbrage, merely stood, took a moment to smooth out his clothing, and glanced between Elwing and Eärwen, eyes flashing quickly over Eärwen.

“I will take my leave. E– Princess–” his voice wavered slightly– “I apologize for intruding on your home, and this conversation. I did not think. It was not my intent to act like– like–”

Eärwen cut him off before he could say whatever dreadful thing hung on the end of that sentence. Family, or invader, all the same in anguish.

“This I do not hold against you,” she said quickly. She thought to thank him for his work today, but forestalled herself almost immediately. Thank him for reparations? No. Thank him for, almost certainly, stepping in when Elwing might have embroiled herself in some trouble? His presence was half the trouble. She almost reached out to the distant, tense presence that was Anairë — but no.

“I will see you when next we discuss the work of the Repudiators,” she said, after a pause she hoped was not too noticeable. She also offered a very slight bow.

Arafinwë returned it, a series of complicated emotions passing over his face too quickly for Eärwen to read, catching at the part of her that had once read him like an unrolling scroll. He bowed also to Elwing, and then departed without another word.

Eärwen turned to Elwing, who remained seated at the table, her smooth expression held back up to her face like a mask. Tiny pinfeathers still dotted her hairline, however, and a little bead of blood ran into the hair at her temple where one had broken the skin, staining the silver streak there a muddy pink. She said nothing, and Eärwen had the sensation that they were each waiting for the other to speak.

Elwing, she thought, might have the same practical experience of rule as herself, but she had not had the experience of raising adolescents. She knelt back down at the head of the table and waited.

As she had thought, Elwing broke first – though not in the way she had expected.

“My husband is better at pushing the right amount,” she said, and to Eärwen’s surprise, she could detect shame in her voice. “Agitation, you might call it. Angering people enough that they work together for a goal, with you. I have never been nearly so effective.”

“You are too angry,” Eärwen observed.

Elwing visibly bit her cheek to keep back her last response. “I am exactly as angry as I should be,” she said, in a voice more level than the planed floorboards on which she knelt. “It is only that I fail to communicate it as I ought.”

What was there to say to that? What good had Eärwen’s own anger, so richly merited, done her? On Elwing’s temple, the drop of blood had found its way through the forest of hairs and slid slowly down her cheek.

“Your husband is not here,” she said, and reached out to brush it away. Elwing caught her wrist before she could touch her face and hold her still as she had in the morning, which felt as though it had been days ago, months. There they knelt, Elwing’s hand as tight around her wrist as her own had been around Elwing’s just minutes ago.

“He goes to agitate those whose complacency does most harm,” Elwing said, and tightened her grip.

“He is not here,” Eärwen repeated, and twisted her hand so she grasped Elwing’s hand, and drew them together to their feet.

She did not let go.

“Yours is.”

Another long silence, while Eärwen’s pulse pounded in her wrist. If she still held Elwing’s, would she feel her heart racing alongside her own?

Elwing looked up at her. She was small, Eärwen noticed, smaller than she had realized; her presence that of a hunting bird which drew the eye and seemed enormous despite its perch on the falconer’s forearm. Yet, she looked up into Eärwen’s eyes.

“This morning you spoke to me of responsibilities,” Elwing said softly. “That which makes you a person, and not a bird in a flock pecking at the marsh.”

It could not be denied. Yellow no longer lingered about Elwing’s irises, but the gray was fathomless.

Elwing continued. “My responsibilities are not yet discharged. I have decided to be a person. Yet I do not find that I can bring about my responsibilities without help — so what manner of person am I?”

Not one whose like Aman has seen in decades, Eärwen thought. Aloud, she said, “I have not foreclosed the chance of help.”

“Nor have you offered it honestly and freely!” Elwing snapped. “In merely introducing me to the boat captains this afternoon, your Kinslayer husband has done more to aid Beleriand-- to aid the world, for it should not be thought that Morgoth will be content to stop at your children, or mine!”

“Then hie you to Tirion,” replied Eärwen, feeling each word fall from her tongue as though they froze to hail at its tip. “It will take you two days only — the relays are at your disposal.”

She tried to wrench her hand from Elwing’s, but she failed to break her grasp and did not struggle beyond the limits of her dignity. Her heart continued its breakneck pounding.

“You will not keep me?” Elwing asked. She had once again submerged her rage, and her voice was quieter than the brightly lit room seemed able to hold. The room was too bright, but Eärwen had no eyes for it, except as it cast the strange lines of Elwing’s face into high relief, limning each small expression, none of which she had ever learned how to read in any other life.

“Not against your will.”

“You will let me go?”

When had it been Eärwen’s choice when people left?

“If you will it, how may I prevent you?”

“You may offer me what I need.”

Eärwen dropped her hand and stepped back, two strides as long as the tight column of her robe would permit. This time, Elwing let her go easily enough.

“I am not Queen here,” she said. “It is my father whom you must convince, and through your own actions he will not see you tomorrow, and I expect not the next day. There will be a horse waiting for you in the morning. Anairë, I am sure, will show you to the Repudiators’ Quarter.”

Elwing made no response. She only stood there, small and regal, dressed in Nerwen’s castoffs, and followed Eärwen with her eyes as she turned and left the front room.

Eärwen flexed her hand as she walked down the corridor, and while the night-steward took her orders regarding a horse for Lady Elwing, and while she changed out of court dress and into her sleeping clothes. Only when she unrolled and lay down on her empty mattress did she stop feeling out the absent shape of Elwing’s hand – but the incipient bruise around her wrist throbbed in time with her heart until she fell into an uneasy sleep.