rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 9: Elwing

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Elwing spent the next three days half in helping Anairë pack up an unspecified number of lives, half in knocking on the doors of Repudiators and having the same three conversations over and over again, and wholly in a cloud of worry over where Eärendil might be and what he might find when and if he returned.

In the mornings, Anairë still visited the nascent council to clear up confusion about property ownership, corn rotas, and the like, or to ask questions herself about what to do with High King Finwë’s second-best scepter of office or how to divide her private records between herself and various branches of Tirion’s bewilderingly complex bureaucracy. By the second day of messengers dashing from the King’s House to the university and back again, the representatives decamped to a large public audience room on the ground floor of the King’s House, so Anairë merely spent her mornings sweeping up and down stairs, rather than trudging across the Great Square to badger and be badgered.

Those mornings, Elwing slipped away from Tirion’s political bustle and walked through the stone-paved streets to the Repudiators’ Quarter. She passed between white-plastered walls and beneath dark, carven balconies in the eggshell chill that pressaged the beating heat to come, carefully hugging the sides where the traffic moved slower. Her first morning out alone, she had walked into a crossroads and almost been knocked over by a trotting horse harnessed to a wagon full of cabbages, then, jumping back into the cross street, stalled a handcart bringing grapes to the city center, which created a knot of snarled motion stretching back down the avenue. Someone had shouted to get the bumpkin off the streets.

She had bristled, then, laughing to herself, conceded the point. Sirion had boasted two horses — they did the heavy plowing until one drank untreated water from the river and died bleeding from the nostrils, and the other refused to drink until it died. Then they had eaten it; and Elwing, six months pregnant, had been given the heart. Likely that did make her a bumpkin, in a city where horses carted around cabbages.

The Repudiators’ Quarter was quieter, though not quiet. The streets wound in concentric rings around a small center plaza with a dance floor dedicated to Nessa, intersected at the cardinal directions by broader thoroughfares for riders and small wheeled vehicles. It made for confusing walking, until she grew accustomed to how houses clustered in the semicircular arcs between curved and straight roads.

When Elwing knocked on their doors, they opened onto narrow, deep rooms with tiled floors and tall, thin windows with shutters just closing against the growing heat. The faces in the doorways were variably curious, avid, and mistrustful.

Eärendil had always been the more skillful in guiding the conversations to draw out concerns and irritations and fears and wrap them into some larger aim. Her tendency was always to try to explain or convince, not to ask the leading questions that led to long exchanges of information, commiseration, solidarity. In Sirion, when Eärendil was home from sea and some task wanted hands and heads, she would send him from door to door to draw out those stores of knowledge and cooperation — finding what homes needed more food, and could lend their hands to purifying water, and who lacked community and would be happy to join the workers on the always-crumbling seawall in exchange for companions for singing old Taliska songs as they mortared. He could always elicit what was needed, and find out what someone was willing to give, and then convince them to give just a bit more. That was his talent. Elwing excelled in oration, education, pulling together the high council with hard logic, explaining why the seawall needed to be repaired, yes, again. She was better than any at putting her own hands to work and leading by example, but confronted with a tired face sick of being asked to give, she would stumble into high-minded speechifying, or let herself be backed out of the half-opened doorway.

It was harder now, too, with no concrete request to make. Should she ask this jumble of Noldor — Eldar! — to, what? Follow her to Alqualondë? To the great council of the Valar where her husband must, must, still be pleading their case before the Powers? To, at the heart of it, care about a continent they had declined to visit at the very beginning, before Elwing had even been born to darken their doorsteps?

She made herself a little script, nonetheless. Hello, she said, over and over again. I am Elwing of Beleriand. What do you know of my home?

That was key — no yes-or-no questions. Even the rudest, bluntest Noldo had trouble shutting the door in someone’s face when a question hung unanswered over the threshold. Ask what they thought was wrong, then ask what they would do to fix it. Ask them how they would implement those solutions, then ask if they would go to observe the representatives squabbling in the great hall of the King’s House, which really would need a new name soon.

Elwing decided on that request on the first morning. There truly was not much else she could ask any individual common-born Tirion-dweller to do but to watch the construction of their new lives and raise their voices up, hopefully in her favor.

Perhaps one person every hour would give her their wholehearted agreement, and those she asked to introduce her to their neighbors, their grown children living at home, the people with whom they served their workhouse rotations.

On the second day of this, a woman brought her into her cool, shadowy front room to put Elwing to work dehusking little grass seeds while she told them her stories. They rubbed the rough little kernels — brome, she was told — against the patterned sides of a wide, shallow basket, while Elwing explained again and again how she came to leave her home and why she thought there was hope for it, as daughters and nieces and friends came trickling in and out. A little boy only as high as Elwing’s hip ran about the room knocking into furniture and people. When the lady of the house saw her gazing after him, she let her give him a little cake of acorn flour full of blackberry jam, after which he ran faster. Every person around the table followed her back to the King’s House that day, and the next day, one of the nieces took her to meet her fellow apprentices at a workshop making percussion instruments. The woman whose house it was had been Arafinwë’s drummer on the march north, and now took personal students and never performed in public.

So she went, and sometimes was shown, up and down all the alleys of the quarter, spreading word that barricades had fallen before justice, and change was come to the world across all its lands and oceans. The doors opened and shut before her.

When the sun beat down in the afternoons, Elwing returned to the King’s House, where Anairë retired to an upstairs balcony to eat soothingly cool dishes she explained were of crunchy raw sanicle dusted in acorn yuhu, strange flavors and textures to Elwing’s tongue. The streets were eerily empty in the midday heat, and the diamond dust that piled in the corners flashed and twinkled in the corners of her eyes. On the third day, Elwing paused at a particularly large pile outside a boarded-up school and dipped her hand into it, withdrawing her fingers traced in coruscation — red, blue, yellow, blinding white. It stuck beneath her fingernails, gritty and sparkling, for days.

“Beware your eyes,” Anairë said, when she saw Elwing’s hand winking at her. “It will scratch your corneas if you rub them.”

Those meals felt real, which was more than Elwing could say for the rest of the sun-hammered, Quenya-filled days in a place where farmers climbed stairs of crystal and blue tile to market. She recognized that she clung to Anairë’s vague familiarity in this sea of strange foods, strange dialects, strange politics in which she played a key role she might already have failed to pull off. She recognized it, but she could not prevent herself from following Anairë about the King’s House like a woebegone gosling, serving her before herself, lifting chests and heavy baskets, lingering in the evenings while Anairë packed, until she shooed her off to sleep in a room furnished, it seemed, entirely in white buckskin.

In certain moments, especially when lit by fire during those late evenings, Elwing caught glimpses of Idril in the lineation of Anairë’s face, or, rarer yet, snatches of Eärendil. Mostly, she looked very different — darker complected, with a high nose and high cheekbones presiding over her smooth oval face, with a crown of hair she wore in an exuberant halo of coils far tighter than Eärendil’s, though the twins had boasted aureoles of hair just that smoky black.

Whenever Elwing found herself picking at ghosts in Anairë’s features, she sternly redirected herself to what might actually be useful, drawing Anairë out on matters of Amanyar politics, on whether she thought Elwing was doing any good. When asked, Anairë would explain guild politics and neighborhood grudges with the weary humor of long experience, or suggest new ways to describe what she wanted to the people of Tirion. This, of course, required that Elwing know what she wanted.

On the third night in Tirion, they came to the heart of it.

–

That night, the two of them supped in the East Gate neighborhood. Representative Helwarin had found a long, narrow-shouldered house on a street lined with low, heart-leafed trees Anairë called redbuds, and had, over some desultory protest, given it outright to Anairë.

“It is quite the least you can do after exiling her for two hundred years,” she had told the assembled representatives acerbically, on the very first day when Anairë asked what she should do with the contents of the King’s House that did not belong to the state and which she could not take with her wandering. The house had been abandoned, Helwarin said, and no one in Tirion would miss it.

The windows — glass windows! they still surprised Elwing every time — were boarded up when they arrived with a handcart of clothing. Though a helpful neighbor offered to pry the wood off, they declined; it was not as though anyone would live there in a week. It made for dark work, but it was not so bad from the outside, for someone had painted the boards with intricate ochre designs that made the house’s face look less forsaken.

They also offered privacy, which Elwing was glad of, for after dinner, she found herself sitting on a curve-legged chair while Anairë rested on a cushion between her knees, leaning back while Elwing plaited her hair into cornrows and blushed furiously.

Anairë had washed and oiled her hair in a basin in the corner while Elwing laid out blankets and padding for a night on the tiled floor. She settled atop her makeshift bed to try to reach out to Eärendil as she had seen Eärwen and Anairë reach out to each other, but as always, the confines of her own skull remained imperceptibly solid.

“I wonder why I can use osanwë in song, but cannot reach my own husband,” she said, turning to look at Anairë parting her hair with a pin-tailed comb.

“It is strange,” Anairë responded. “I cannot imagine not being able to sense across minds, especially those of my dear ones. Are you sure it is inherent, and not a lack of training?”

Elwing sighed. “Galadriel — that is, Nerwen — tried her very hardest, as did Idril when I was young. They taught me much else,” she added absently, watching Anairë shake out her arms.

Anairë made an enquiring noise, raising her arms again to begin braiding.

“Oh, projection, images, control, boundaries,” Elwing said. “How to show only what I wanted to whom I wanted when singing, and no more. The particular styles of one people or another.”

Anairë braided to the end of a row and shook her arms out again, and a nervous presumption rose in Elwing.

“They also taught me to braid,” she said hesitantly. Anairë cast a skeptical look at her hair, loosely tied back in a single long plait.

“For Eärendil’s hair,” Elwing hastened to explain. “And the children’s. I am not as good as they were. But I can braid rows. I thought– perhaps your arms were tiring.”

Anairë crooked a smile. “That they are. I suppose I taught Eärwen to make a passable braid. I would like very simple, tight braids, straight back — they are best for traveling light. Can you do that? I shall sit at your feet.”

The blood rushed instantly to Elwing’s cheeks and neck, but she kept her voice steady as she assented. She found a chair of the right height from the jumble of furniture at the back of the room and moved the lamps closer so that she could see her fingers, keeping her blushing face away from Anairë’s eyes.

So here she was, fingers slick with Anairë’s sweet-smelling hair oil, running a tight plait down the crown of Anairë’s head while the erstwhile queen of Tirion leant against her knees. She reached the nape of her neck and kept braiding another few inches, until the hairs grew too sparse just above the wings of Anairë's shoulder blades, visible where her linen nightshirt was transparent with water.

“How do you want me to fasten the braids?” Elwing asked, abashed at having forgotten.

“Oh!” Anairë jumped up and went to rummage through one of the cases of left-behind lives stacked precariously in a decorative niche. She emerged with a handful of what Elwing almost thought was lightning — but no, it was a twisted bunch of thin gold wire with tiny hooks at one end, glinting in the firelight. Anairë held one up to her single braid, and Elwing put two and two together.

“Oh,” she said, and could not quite decide how to continue.

A look passed between them, an acknowledgement of some familiarity. Anairë handed her the handful of wires, and Elwing took them. She looked to see if any black hair still twined between the gold, but it was as clean as it must have been left in its jewelcase these many centuries ago. Anairë settled back between her legs, and Elwing steeled herself, and began to weave the thin wire into the completed plait, twisting it close about the end.

The next row would be thinner, she decided, so that Anairë could have a simple pattern of alternating thicknesses, at least. She tried to keep her hands as gentle as she would have for Elrond and Elros, who had squirmed and complained at the slightest tug. The repetitive handwork and the fire-reddened gold slipping in and out of Anairë’s dark hair like fishes lulled her.

Her walls down in the warm evening, she found herself asking: “Does Eärwen usually do your hair?”

Anairë shrugged one shoulder. “Only on occasion, when I find myself in Alqualondë for too long between appointments with my usual braider. I taught her when Findaráto was born with his father’s hair.”

Elwing tied off another braid. Another thick row next.

“Will she do it more often now? Since you are to live with her, and she is your–”

The sentence avoided being finished, and Elwing pretended absorption in creating a clean new part with the pin-ended comb.

“She is my meleseldë,” Anairë replied simply.

Elwing ran the comb down the other side of the row, and Anairë shuddered slightly against her knees.

“I do not know what that means,” Elwing said, and was startled at the roughness of her own voice.

Anairë hummed thoughtfully. “A meleseldë is… the friend who keeps with you a friendship that will last all your life and hers. The one to whom you cleave in all weathers and keep safe in a sacred hall of the heart; the one from whom naught but death shall part you.”

Elwing kept her hands very gentle. “A lover, then, or a wife.”

“I have a husband,” Anairë pointed out. “Eärwen and I have not borne one another children, nor lain together. But we swore faith and friendship undying in our youths in the Tree-lit marshes of Alqualondë, and our oath has endured where the oaths of lovers and spouses raveled away. We know each other well, Eärwen and I, and love dearly what we know.”

Elwing’s fingers continued the careful process of adding new hair to the braid strands, while she watched half-unseeing. A friend to last all one’s life — Eärendil was that to her. Yet he had also given her children, and she dearly loved their play of bodies. Had Galadriel been such to her, an intimate friend, a pillar of her small family? Eärendil sought careful, discreet affection elsewhere when he was away at sea, and she had thought, perhaps one day—

But she had not known her so well, in the end, and Galadriel swore no oaths to her, even in her leaving.

“It sounds a fine thing,” she murmured. Another row done. Next, a thin braid. She hooked in the wire and began to braid, thinking still.

“Since you know Eärwen well,” she began, and found she was afraid to go on, until Anairë hummed again, and rested her warm, dry hand against her ankle in a reassuring squeeze.

“If you know her so well,” she continued, “Why does she resist? Why will she not help me rescue whatever souls are left in my home, where her own daughter yet fights against evil?”

An effort kept her fingers gentle. “She knows I am in the right. She knows the Amanyar must send aid if anything at all is to be left of the peoples of Beleriand, for I am not sure the Valar are inclined to save as well as to vanquish. I do not even ask that they fight.”

Anairë sighed. Her grip on Elwing’s ankle tightened comfortingly, and she leaned back until her warmth loosened the muscles of Elwing’s thighs. Elwing found she could still blush, despite the tenor of the conversation.

Again, Anairë sighed. “It is likely that you demanded the ships. Eärwen may know it is right to send aid in the fight against great evil, to rescue, at the least, those who are kin to her own people – but think.” She pulled against Elwing’s hands a little, as though to emphasize her point. “Think of the last time a stranger came to Alqualondë to demand the ships of the Teleri.”

Elwing had to still her hands a moment, while she pressed her eyelids closed and clenched her teeth against the hissed retort that sprang instantly to her lips – no Fëanorian was she!

“I am thinking,” she said instead. “I think that, if she refuses to help, she ensures that more people die. You do not – you cannot know, you cannot know what it is like. Ashes in the sky, poison in the rivers and breezes. The Valar may squash Morgoth like swatting a mosquito – perhaps! – but if they do nothing more, we will simply starve under no shadow, for the land and air and beasts are sick unto death. We are all the Children of Eru. We have so little more that we can lose.”

“Eärwen has had losses too,” Anairë said. “Her mother, her brother… Her brother died in the Kinslaying, run through on a Fëanorion’s sword.”

Elwing bit an angry enumeration of her losses to Fëanorian blades. It was no contest. She braided the full length of Anairë’s scalp again, tied off the row, reached again for the comb to make a clean part. This next braid had to curve to follow Anairë’s hairline above her ear, a sharper point than Eärendil’s, or Elros’, or Elrond’s.

“What happened to her mother?” she asked, when she thought she had full control over her voice once more.

Anairë hesitated, then said, “You ought to ask Eärwen to tell you. Regardless, she is not there to help her. You may also have noticed that her father has almost stopped ruling – Eärwen has managed a great deal with precious little support. Nor much recognition,” she added, darkly. Then, sighing once more: “I imagine she is afraid. Eärwen hates to be afraid. She will avoid it if she can.”

Elwing tied off the final row on the right side of Anairë’s head. Carefully, tentatively, she rested her hands on Anairë’s shoulders. Anairë leaned back into her touch almost imperceptibly.

“I have been afraid all my life,” Elwing said into the fire-red, flickering bubble of space around them. “My fears have never waited for me to be ready to face them.”

Anairë reached up to cover one of Elwing’s hands on her shoulder, slipping just slightly in the remnants of her hair oil clinging to Elwing’s fingers.

“We travel to Alqualondë tomorrow,” she said. “I believe you will find her more ready than you imagine.”

Elwing turned her palm up, and with infinite kindness, Anairë let her grasp her hand for long minutes before she returned to braiding rows into Anairë’s hair.