All Unquiet by mouse

All Unquiet

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At times Idril’s touch and voice could call her father back to himself, and other times he was as distant as the peaks of the Crissaegrim, and as unforgiving.

“Ada, will you answer one kinslaying with another?” she asked him, because she knew no one else would dare to. Her voice was strained from weeping. Aredhel’s body had just been shrouded in white linen, to hide the blistered and stained skin that drew a scream from the handmaid who had found her dead.

Idril nearly had to run to keep up with Turgon, whose long strides had already taken him from Aredhel’s chamber to the colonnaded hall at the front of the palace, where the guards would bring Eöl before him. 

The king stopped and faced her. His fine black brows came low together in the centre and winged out over eyes in which thunderheads of emotion were building. Turgon did not shout or rage in his wrath. He hardened and grew cold, like rock formed from lava. 

His voice cut her. “I gave Eöl a choice, and he chose death.”

She wanted to take her father’s hand and lay her cheek on it. But instead she drew herself up and tried to meet his regal bearing. “You welcomed him as a kinsman. Will you be the one to kill him?” 

“Am I less guilty if I order another to swing the sword?” Turgon countered. 

Idril’s gut cramped up within her. Strands of her hair were stuck in the tears on her cheeks, and she brushed them aside as four guards entered the hall from one arched doorway, with Eöl between them in bonds. The boy Maeglin stopped in another archway, his glance moving from his grim and silent father to her grim and silent father, who did not acknowledge one another, though the king beckoned the guard forward with a sharp gesture.

“Is there no other way?” Idril whispered. But Eöl had made it clear that imprisonment was no mercy to him. “Does his life not belong to a power greater than us?” she said, following in her father’s wake again as he strode through the front doors into the palace courtyard. “Atarinya, which among the Valar would ever strike down one who is in bonds?”

The king’s back was to her but she watched his head lift. As she came up beside him, Idril followed the line of his gaze to the sky overhead, where she saw, tiny and remote, the figure of one of the great eagles circling above them. She felt the change in her father, and he picked up her hand, the steadiness and strength in his grip giving her hope. Turgon’s attention turned to his guard behind them.

“Bring him to the Caragdûr,” the king ordered. “If the King of Arda wishes to intervene and save the Dark Elf’s life, then he may. No one else.”

 

Idril had seen how the eagles would fling Orcs from the cliffs and break them. She knew Eöl was dead before his body smote the rock below the northern city wall for the third time. Each time his body struck the face of the Caragdûr, she felt dread swell and fill her, and then contract again to the tightness in her gut. 

When Eol’s body lay still in the rubble at the bottom of the precipice, her father turned to her, all his features softened. The wind whipped Idril’s skirts against her legs as Turgon drew her to him, and Idril, laying her head on his chest, felt his love and grief for Aredhel resonate through her like the deep tolling of a bell. 

But then he pulled away from her. Idril, blinded by tears, blinked and wiped her eyes, to see her father extend his hand to her cousin. Maeglin stood near them, silent, expressionless, as he had stood while his father cursed him, and when they cast Eol from the wall.

“Maeglin,” the king said, resting his hand on the youth’s shoulder. “I have tried to do what is just, for both you and your father. I cannot restore what you have lost, but know that you will be as a son to me from now on.”

Maeglin bowed his head and the king kissed his brow, and Idril felt a fear slowly creep up from her feet and coil around her until it pressed her, front and back, as if it would crush her. Her knees gave out, and she saw darkness.