By the Light of Roses by Dawn Felagund

I waited for the carriage in the silver light of morning, before the Mingling of the Lights, even, when a chilly mist still shrouded the city and made glittering halos around the lamps. Tirion slept but I--a student of lore--was accustomed to waking at such inhumane hours, and I waited in front of my father’s house with my belongings in meager bundles at my feet and the letter in my pocket: just a slip of paper but with such profound weight that my fingers constantly touched it as though fearing that by its weight it had torn through the material of my robes and would be lost.

I heard the carriage--hoofbeats and creaking wheels--before the horse manifested in slow degrees from the mist and the carriage after it, an undignified thing of graying wood and a canvas covering to keep the occasional rainshower from dampening the cargo. A small, spry Elf perched on the bench, and the carriage had barely slowed before he was leaping to the ground and sweeping up my belongings and tossing them into the back, even the parcel with the books, which was heavy, his skinny arms bunching with muscle.

“Up with you now.” He leaped back onto his high seat and offered a hand and pulled me up beside him. The carriage itself was filled with packages and parcels that would be delivered all across Aman. I suppose that was my fate too: I was a parcel to be carted and delivered for a fee, most likely, and left on the stoop of a house in Formenos to be claimed and disappear behind doors, out of awareness of the rest of the world forever.

With a clicking of the tongue and reins flicked across the horse’s neck, we were on our way again, passing through the lower circles of the city, past neat bungalows and smithies just coming to life, then through the gates and onto the plain, where the horse began tossing his head and begging for more rein, which--an impish grin upon his face and glinting eyes slanting toward me--the driver gladly gave, even cracking his whip and shouting, splitting the silent morning air, with loud joy that made me wince and watch the earth disappearing faster and faster beneath the carriage wheels.

~oOo~

“You did not look back.”

Laurelin had exploded into splendor and gone was the peace of early morning. We had been driving for some hours, fallen into an easy, rhythmic pace, passing the plain and into the forest, along the light-dappled road and past the iron gate now closed and chained: the House of Fëanáro, at the far borders of which the Valar had drawn the boundaries of Tirion, giving them excuse to drive the insolent prince from his home.

Stopping a few hours earlier, I had been permitted to retrieve one of my books, and I read it as we rode, grateful for the distraction to stave off conversation … until the driver’s voice had suddenly split my thoughts and sent the Vanyarin words I studied spilling from my mind and scattering along the road behind us. You did not look back. What was that supposed to mean?

I was tempted, of course, to ignore him: Most people believed that I did not hear; those who knew me better knew better. I heard, I simply did not reply. I grieved my mother with my “impertinence,” as she called it. My father I angered with the same. In my mind, words arrayed themselves perfectly; I spoke with composure and grace and was never at a humiliating--as they say--“loss for words.” But those words were easily forgotten when confronted with actual conversation. It seemed that other Elves replied as they wished, not as I necessarily imagined they would, and this was distressing. I feared that what I imagined would be acquiescence would turn into an argument, and I would not be prepared. And so sudden questions like those asked by the driver, I usually ignored under a pretense of being so absorbed in my work that I had not heard.

Only I’d flinched, betrayed my cover, and the driver’s small, dark eyes were intent upon me, awaiting an answer. “L-look back?” I said, a nervous smile pinching and twisting my lips. “At what?”

“At Tirion, of course. It is a beautiful place, if you have not noticed.” He grinned at me to show that he was teasing but it did not stop my heart from succumbing into a flurry of nervous patters in my chest. “Most people, upon leaving Tirion, twist around in their seats to watch it receding behind them. They wear a look like this.” While driving, holding the reins in one hand, he imitated them turning and craning their necks to view the city growing small behind them; his face fell into a sorrowful parody of woe--brows furrowed, mouth down-turned--and I choked on the surprising laughter that rose in my throat. Turning back to the road, the driver joined me in laughter and flicked the reins to make the horse go faster.

“I … I am happy to be going where I am going,” I answered when our laughter subsided. I touched the letter in my pocket, feeling parchment growing oily and smudged from too much handling, as though I could read the words upon it with my fingers. I nearly could; certainly, I remembered exactly what they said. With eyes closed and a flutter of disbelief in my stomach, I thought that the distance between Fëanáro and me was growing smaller with each passing moment--and the distance between Tirion and me was growing greater. Things were as they should be.

The driver’s shrewd eyes, I saw upon opening my own, were intent upon me, and I realized that a corner of the letter had been tugged from my pocket. Hastily, I shoved it deep inside and forced both of my hands to clutch my book. “But you are going to the House of Fëanáro,” said the driver, “and our prince has no daughters.”

He thought that I was going for love. Of course: the early-morning departure; the barely-suppressed glee; the letter in the pocket, constantly touched for comfort. A flush heated my face. “Oh … no,” I said. “No, I was accepted as an apprentice to Prince Fëanáro in the study of letters and lore.”

“Indeed.” The driver’s face had turned back to the road, and his sudden inattention and silence told me that he had much to say but he was too polite to say it.

~oOo~

I had heard stories, of course, about the House of Fëanáro, particularly his estate in Formenos. Many of the tales came from my own father, who has ever been loyal to Prince Nolofinwë and slightly scornful of Fëanáro. Not me, though. Beneath my robes, beneath my tunic--clothing of the colors chosen by my father, blue and silver--upon my skin with red ink, I would etch Stars of Fëanáro onto my skin until it looked as though my very blood had shoved to the surface and shown itself in loyalty to the dark-haired, fire-eyed prince. I had been but a small child, barely to my father’s knee, when I “met” him for the first time, when my mother had taken me into the lowest circle of Tirion one day, to the market, to buy vegetables. The place was cluttered and noisy and filled with many identical pairs of legs--women in practical dresses and practical boots dusty with use--and I’d turned to watch a farmer navigating a wheelbarrow of pomegranates through the throng of people, and when I’d turned back, I’d lost my mother.

There were many women who looked like my mother, with dark hair and tidy clothes, but none that were my mother, with her smell of dust and ink stains upon her fingers. I huddled in the dust and waited, certain that she would find me and that my worry was unnecessary, but each passing second had the weight of hours, and my heart beat faster and faster as though time was also passing faster and faster, and I imagined my mother climbing the streets home without me, her feet receding and leaving empty stairs behind; I imagined Telperion taking dominion and the streets growing dark, and I tried to remember my way home and could not. Panic burst in my chest and gut the way that a flock of birds will rise suddenly, inexplicably in clouds so thick that the light is momentarily blocked and all that is heard is beating wings; my fat little-boy’s legs pinioned me from the ground and in a panicked flight, screaming for my mother, rushing around a forest of identical legs and identical boots, toward an empty, leg-free space ahead of me, where I could circle (I hoped) and find my mother. I pushed between two women and into midday light as blinding as a mirror flashed in my eyes, squinting, tears hot against my cheeks and falling harder in the assault from the light, pushing into the emptiness with hands groping before me for the feel of familiar flesh. I did not see the horse drawing the heavy cart; I did not realize that it was upon me until I heard the rumble of wheels and smelled the hot stink of horseflesh, but it was too late by then; I would be crushed, killed, and forever separated from my mother.

But for the arms that seized me: strong, faceless arms whipping me from the road just in time, just as the horse’s cool shadow passed over me like death portended, and I was pressed to a body so warm and so full of life that I was reminded of the way the water at the surface of a fountain will become hot and excited in the direct daylight until it feels like a bath in such water can heal a person of anything: and my rescuer went from being just arms to being a figure, a person, though still faceless.

His arms around me--one cradling my back and the other supporting my bottom--were expert. My face was pressed to his throat, breathing his electric scent and looking at skin as rich as cream that fluttered with his pulse that I wanted to put my baby fingers over except that I feared it would scorch me. And at his throat, he wore a pendant: an eight-pointed star with a stone at the center of exceptional brilliance, cut into numberless facets that each seemed to reflect a slice of Laurelin’s light, each of a slightly differently hue. I had a feeling of moving, of being carried by swift, confident legs, and a breath whispered comfort into my hair, but all I saw was the pendant and the beautiful stone, shifted now and pulsing over the vein in his throat as though they--the stone and the man--shared in the same blood and the same life.

My hand wrested free of the crush between my body and his, and I was going to touch the stone and feel the movement of his blood--touch his life--but I was plunged into my mother’s cool arms then, and she was sobbing into my hair, and when I wriggled free enough from her vice-like grip of me and turned to watch the figure departing, I saw only a red cloak and satin-black hair slipping through the crowd with the ease of a ship upon water. I never saw his face.

And when I touched my cheeks, I discovered that my panicked tears had dried there, as though they’d never been.

Of course, I eventually learned the identity of my rescuer, sooner rather than later, for the ordeal made an entertaining story for my mother to tell at feasts: how her own son Eressetor had been saved by--of all people!--Prince Fëanáro. There was an air of incredulity and, yes, honor in the telling of that story, as though I’d been chosen somehow to live by Fëanáro rather than merely scooped out of the street in an action that the most depraved among us would surely even stop to do. And there was a touch of humor, too, in my mother’s telling. Of all people! And laughter. My mother was an intense woman, usually cheerful, an illustrator of books of lore and very gifted--so it was said--but mercurial, with emotions as bright and varied as the rainbow of inkpots that I had learned from a young age to never touch. I somehow felt I was a disappointment to her: that she, a bird of exotic, dazzling plumage, should be given a son like me, the plucked and helpless fledgling sitting in a useless heap in the nest. My father too--an architect of some renown (though lesser-known than my mother, I would come to learn)--was gregarious though slightly temperamental and known to indulge in the occasional diatribe against particularly disfavored lords. Prince Fëanáro, of course, was one such lord, and my father's brow was wont to furrow at my mother’s telling of the tale. As a couple, their voices filled the room: my father’s, commanding, and my mother’s a gentle counterpoint, a perfect compliment, running like the laughter of water beneath solid soil.

When I grew older, I read of Prince Fëanáro in the lorebooks of the library. By then, he’d made the Silmarils, and he was often the topic of discussion at tables all around Tirion. Even my father, begrudgingly, admitted a fondness for Fëanáro’s blessed gemstones. The pendant which he’d been wearing on the day of my rescue, I learned, was also of some fame, regarded as the most beautiful of his works prior to the Silmarils: Kuldamírë, it was called, designed to capture and enhance the light of Laurelin. Its only flaw was that in the hours of Telperion, it lay as ordinary as a chunk of adamant at his throat and--in the words of one craftsman--“was eclipsed by the beauty of its wearer.”

In the distance, at festivals, I would see him, although I learned not to jump to get a better view. Better to jump for Prince Nolofinwë than to risk angering my father.

It was best to find Fëanáro, I learned, in the depths of library, amid the dusty tomes collected by the Valar and generally disregarded by the Elves. Fëanáro alone, it seemed, thought the authoring of books to be a worthy pursuit, as though he expected to one day be unable to pass along his accumulated lore. So great was my joy upon finding one of his works amid the stacks one day that my legs felt as though they gone watery and lost all substance, and I nearly fainted from happiness. With great effort, I held myself up; I slipped the book beneath my tunic because I could not risk signing the ledger and knowing that my father would know what--and whom--I read.

In the street with the book still cool against my nervous, flushed skin, I ran home, ignorant of how guilty I looked, filled only with a longing to read and absorb Fëanáro’s words, to turn each phrase over and over in my mind and pretend that he was speaking directly to me. Really…wasn’t he? I wondered how he’d imagined his “audience” while writing; I saw myself sitting in the front row, upon the floor, with my prissy braids and overeager eyes, legs folded into a pretzel and leaning my elbows on my knees. His voice was a thick and heady as the syrup poured over cakes at my mother’s most extravagant feasts, clinging with the same tenacity to inside of my mind until I thought of him constantly and took to whispering my favorites of his passages to myself when alone.

This was the year that I became “hungry for books”--or that is how my mother called it. My father called it the year that I “finally found my purpose” … with the greater emphasis falling on “finally,” a wry smile twisting features a lot--too much--like mine. I began calling myself a “student of lore” that year; such a title let me read the works of Fëanáro without suspicion, so long as they were buried between the works of Rúmil and Aulë and Elemmírë. To avoid suspicion.

~oOo~

Something nudged my shoulder … no, someone. With a groan, I roused and found that we were no longer moving; we were stopped in a place I did not recognize, a place where the light was strange as though filtered through a veil of cloth. I realized that I could not see as far or as well, yet there was a peace to it also, a gentleness to the light that made me wonder if my head had ached for the duration of my life in Valinor.

“We are here,” said the driver, as though I did not already know that: here, in Formenos.

To the right of us was a gate and--beyond that--a path leading over a hill. I saw something twisting, rising from the earth: that was the House of Fëanáro, of which I had heard much. My father’s contemporaries spoke of it with scornful awe: designed by Fëanáro himself and rising as does a rock from the land around it, humble in appearance and prideful in adamancy, standing straight against the sky and casting shadows where only light should lay. But before I could wonder at this, my eyes drifted to the gate, a structure as delicate-looking and ethereal as a spiderweb, made of gold--it appeared--yet dull in the strange light, shining with a meek luster. Yet I was not deceived; I knew that it was strong. At the center of the gate was a Star of Fëanáro, and my heart and gut clenched at the same time and I blinked hard as though dispelling a dream. But the shape on the gate did not change, and my heart gave into joy and pattered briskly in my chest.

The driver had scurried around to help me to the ground, but I climbed down on my own accord, ignorant of the pain in my body from being jarred along on such a long journey, and I walked to the gate. Up close, my eyes began to take apart its design, and I saw that in the very curves that gave it delicate beauty, there lay strength and fortification; one bar could not be bent or broken without also bending or breaking another two bars in turn…and so it went. It was indestructible--or so I believed--a model of perfection. And up close, I saw that I had been mistaken: It was not made of gold after all but copper. The sharp stink of the metal reminded me of loose teeth and bitten tongues; my nose wrinkled. I wondered why Fëanáro had chosen such an unsightly metal--unsightly and weak--prone to tarnish for the construction of his otherwise-perfect gate.

The driver came up beside me--hands laden with my baggage--and pushed through the gate with some impertinence. It swung open easily, silently. I opened my mouth to protest, but he turned and grinned back at me. “You did not expect to be greeted, I hope?”

In fact, I had. It is custom to greet guests at the gate; it is custom also to respect the gate and not enter it without invitation. Stubbornly, I lingered on the other side of it, though it now stood partially open and the driver was lurching up the path under the burden of my trunk and parcels. He turned again. “Do not delude yourself, boy,” he said, his voice hard beneath the humored veneer. “Guest or not, he will not meet you. You will be standing there until I return a year from now, and you do not want that. This is not Tirion. The rains are cold and hard here.”

With a feeling of pushing against a strong current, I stepped through the gate and pressed forward up the path, head low, until I drew abreast of the driver. “There now, boy, perhaps you’ll survive here after all. You do not learn rules here so much as forget them, and you might as well start by forgetting the notion of ‘custom.’” He laughed a brittle laugh and we continued, side by side, over the crest of the hill, where the House of Fëanáro lay in a hollow.

Many times over the years had I painted the House of Fëanáro in my imagination but I did not expect the house huddled in the hollow, beneath the shadows of the mountain, every window ablaze with lamplight. It was hard, even, for me to reconcile the edifice before me with my notion of “house” for it looked like no house I had ever seen, rising from the pool of shadows to twist into dark spires against the sky with a star at the peak of each. Conflicting thoughts pervaded my mind: It is ugly--no, it is beautiful. I could not decide; I would never decide.

Like a thing of nature, its form, its beauty were derived from function, the way a leaf is shaped to cup the rain and turn from the worst heat of day, a jewel fragile against the light but made that way on purpose. Formenos was made strong: just another rock amid the hills. Its halls and rooms spawned from each other with the senselessness of a vine overtaking an arbor, yet I would never find myself lost within them for--as an arbor gives structure to the meandering vine--there was an underlying sense to Fëanáro’s home as well. What I expected around a corner was always there; where I expected a hall to lead did just as expected. In learning them, I would follow their evolution in the mind of their creator, an intimacy I’d never before dared to presume; each correct conclusion underscored my hope, the whisper in my mind: Fate. You are fated to stand beside him.

Thrilling, when the pieces fall where they are supposed to. Where you want them to.

Down the path we walked and into the hollow, into the shadow of the house. In the meager light of the north, the shadows are delicate, insidious, and it is harder to recognize when plunging into one. For some time, I stood in the shadow of the House of Fëanáro without realizing it, waiting while the driver raised his fist and knocked upon the door, waiting for the sharp sound to cease echoing and turn into a hurried patter of quick footfalls, and the door gave way before us.

I drew my body straighter; I tried to look dignified, deserving of such an appointment as the apprentice of Prince Fëanáro (the words alone still filled me with glee and dread); I felt my hands at fists at my sides, my heart beating faster. I suppose that my anticipation showed in my wide, nervous eyes, but there was nothing to be done about that. I tried not to tremble.

But I was disappointed, for the one who answered the door wasn’t Prince Fëanáro at all but one of his sons, a youthful-faced Elf with ratty red hair, barefoot, with his tunic coming untied at his chest. “Oh,” he said, looking at me, looking at my baggage at the driver’s feet. “That is today, isn’t it? Well, you should come in, I suppose.” And he held open the door for us, scratching at a spot on his neck that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a while. “You can leave those over there,” he said to the driver. “We’ll have them taken to his room. Sometime.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Do you want some water?” I wasn’t sure if he’d spoken to me or to the driver--or maybe both of us--but the driver laughed and declined: “No, I have other deliveries to make.”

“Oh, sure. Of course. Well, in a few months then?”

“Certainly.”

And he was gone without farewell, departed through the door without escort from the young red-haired Elf who was digging at his neck again and looking at my luggage with pursed lips and furrowed brow, a mixture of irritation and deliberation. But that quickly, his attention was torn away; he was pondering me and I saw that his eyes were as clear and gray as two pools of water. “You are Eressetor?”

“Yes.”

“I am Ambarussa.”

We appraised each other; he stared unabashed and so I did too: his skin as pale as cream though visibly dirty; his face like that of a porcelain doll with a smallish nose and a mouth that was somehow prim; a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose; his hair the color of rust and quite tangled. I let my gaze slide down his neck to the triangle of naked chest bared beneath his tunic and abruptly looked away. He was not so shy, and he let his eyes slide over the length of my body, smiling when he was finished as though I’d passed some sort of inspection. “Well,” he said, “since you’re here, I might as well show you to your room.” Raking his hair back from his face, he pondered my baggage again with a sigh. “Naturally, my brothers would have absconded. But we should be able to haul this up the stairs in a single trip--the two of us--don’t you think--rather than wait? You look like you might be strong.”

I was tiny with a narrow, almost sunken chest and prominent ribs; my arms were like sticks, and there was no way that I could be mistaken for “strong.” But I said nothing and took the parcels that he handed me--filled with clothes, mostly--while he took the trunk with my books piled atop it. I followed him to the stairs. He seemed content in silence but I--nervous--wanted conversation. “Your brothers?” I said. I hated how my voice squeaked like nails being ripped from metal. “Don’t you have a twin?”

“Yes. A twin and five brothers in addition. None of whom, apparently, heard the knock at the door.”

“But your twin … he is not close by?”

Ambarussa snorted. “You believe the rumors, then? That we are inseparable? Ambarussa lost interest in me when he discovered an interest in girls.” Perhaps believing his words too harsh, he quickly added in a gentler tone: “He has a betrothed in the city, and he has gone to see her tonight. Mayhap he will return before morning … or not.” He turned and winked at me and started up the stairs, leaping two at a time. He carried my trunks and books with enviable ease while I trudged behind him, trying not to miss a step and embarrass myself further. He waited at the top.

We started down the hall, side by side. The House of Fëanáro was a simple place, not crusted in ornamentation like the House of Nolofinwë or (I had heard) the King’s palace: the floors were plain and unadorned beneath our feet, scratched planks that might have once been buffed to a high shine but were long-neglected and bore the wear of many pairs of boots; the walls held few tapestries and paintings; illumination came from Fëanorian lamps in sconces on the walls, casting a blue pallor over the hallway, making me feel as though I was underwater. I nearly expected the air to ripple in resistance around me, yet the opposite seemed to happen, and I breathed easier here, as I never had in Tirion.

Or at least, had not in a long while.

I expected the paintings and meager ornamentation to be of unsurpassed quality but most were quite ordinary, aside from several marble statues of Elves and animals littering a windowsill in overwhelming quantities, as though their collector couldn’t get enough of them. I found myself slowing, wanting to look at each in turn. They might have danced in the palm of my hand, they were so realistic. I found myself flinching from a bobcat leaping at my face, suspended in stone. Ambarussa paused, waited. “My mother’s,” he said. “She never came back for them.” Color rose in his cheeks and he hustled down the hall. “Come. It’s not much farther now.”

The other artifacts, though, were elementary, really; things that I might even have done. A painting of a seascape with the ships suspended clumsily atop the water; a lumpy ceramic vase with a glass daisy inside. Ambarussa saw me looking at it and paused, saying with awkward pride, “I made that. Well … I made the vase. Ambarussa made the flower. Atar wouldn’t let us drop them from the top turret.” He laughed hoarsely. “As they should be.”

“Oh … no …” I said weakly. They were clumsy, yes, but if they were of a child’s hand …

“Now, if you are this ‘scholar of renown’ as Atar says you are then you’d better not disappoint him with such rubbish. He will expect you to be a far keener critic than that.” He gave me such a look that I nearly believed that he would have been happier to hear me insult his childhood masterpiece. “Come,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of my chamber. “My arms can’t hold these forever.”

But they might. His arms were ropey, hard with muscle, beneath the short sleeves of his tunic. I was trying not to stare.

But when he looked away and I allowed myself the luxury--russet hair clinging to white satin skin--my eyes returned to his face a moment later to find him watching me intensely. And he winked, as though we shared in a conspiracy.

I didn’t expect to sleep that night with my stomach twisted in nervous knots as it was, but I did. In fact, as soon as Ambarussa had left me with instructions about when to rise for breakfast, I seemed to barely possess the strength to undress and drop myself onto my bed. I didn’t bother rummaging through my baggage for nightclothes so I slept in my underpants, atop the covers that I was too lazy to turn down.

I awoke an indeterminate time later with a sour-sticky feeling in my mouth, shivering in the unfamiliar cold of early dawn, to a loud rapping at the door answered by running footsteps and laughter. The house--so silent the night before--was alive after all, it seemed. Or it gave the impression of being so, although it rather reminded me of the gardens that Noldor sometimes built with water flowing over rocks in an imitation of the rivers and streams beside which our ancestors had awakened. In reality, the water went nowhere but cycled endless, a clever mimicry of that which had been left behind but not forgotten.

I always believed, though, that it must sound different: as if it must be apparent that the water wasn’t free at all, that it wouldn’t sing with joy as it had in the Outer Lands.

So was the house: like a portrait of a man painted over with the likeness of a woman but the original shape of the paints remains, and a person with enough determination can pick away the shell and reveal what lies beneath. So that laughter was painted over the silence; even as it existed, it was running off the shining nothingness as though it had never been, and silence remained.

I dressed hurriedly in robes that I have always liked to believe dignified: dignified, perhaps, because they were just a bit too heavy for the pressing heat of Valinor, of a material a bit too scratchy to be comfortable, and just a bit too tight at the throat. Dignity was found in the ability to withstand pain and irritation without complaint, indeed, with an air of liking to suffer. I never shifted in my robes; never scratched--although they left my skin peppered with red welts--never tugged at the collar or pushed at the sleeves. I was dignified.

As such, I went down to the dining room where Ambarussa had told me that Prince Fëanáro and his sons and his sons’ wives met for breakfast together each day, if only for a minute. Those were his exact words--“if only for a minute”--his face cracking into a grin like I would laugh too if only I knew about what to be amused. I hadn’t the faintest notion of where to find the dining room, but I let my suspicions guide me. Reading his books had revealed that I shared many of the same thought processes as Fëanáro; I tried to follow them now, imagining myself the architect and asking how I would do it. I came to a fork in the hallway: but of course Fëanáro would have his dining room to the south, where the meager Light of the Trees could adorn his table.

So I stepped right and found myself--a mere half-minute later--walking into the purposeful chaos of the dining room. The table was not as splendid as I had expected--a rough-hewn thing with benches instead of individual chairs--but as I had predicted, there was a tall window at the southerly end of the room, letting the pale gold light of morning gild the room.

It seemed that nearly everyone was there: I counted six males and two females and one baby. But no Fëanáro--and one of the sons, it seemed, was missing.

Ambarussa sat at the bench with his back to me. Feeling suddenly self-conscious--for they wore the casual tunics and breeches of craftsmen and hunters, and half of them were barefoot or wearing just socks (some with holes in the toes)--and a bit silly in my dignified robes, I walked into the room and carefully stepped over the bench to sit down beside Ambarussa, the only one of them I knew. I had to hitch my robes up around my knees to accomplish the task, baring skinny white legs smattered with a few black, wiry hairs. The son seated across from me--Macalaurë, I supposed, judging by the silvery-haired woman at his arm, the “half-Telerin” wife that was often discussed at tables around Tirion--watched me with some interest and a small smile on his lips. “Hello,” I said to Ambarussa beside me, and he turned and stared at me with astounded silence.

And I knew that I had the wrong twin.

He had identical pale skin with identical freckles and identical rust-red hair … but his eyes were darker, the color of flint, and his face was hard as he let his gaze slide from my face to my robes and back to my face again. “Hello,” he replied in a cold, measured tone, and with that single word, the room seemed to fall silent. In his eyes, I heard, Answer for yourself.

“I--I am Eressetor, your father’s new student.”

At the end of the table, at Prince Fëanáro’s right hand, sat Maitimo with his eyes keen upon me. I knew him from seeing him at festivals--splendid, beautiful, even at a distance--and knew him renowned for his dignity, one of King Finwë’s most trusted advisors before the exile. But his hair was unkempt and faint bruises stained the tender skin beneath his eyes. He twisted his mouth into an ugly smile. I looked away. “Welcome to our table”--and a long pause before saying my name, as though--that quickly--he’d forgotten--“Eressetor.”

I nodded and managed to thank him, glancing around the table at the other brothers watching me. I knew golden Tyelkormo as much for his hair as for his bright eyes appraising me--his palms planted flat on the table as though ready to launch him to his feet for a fight--and waiting for reason to challenge me. Beside him was the dark brother--Carnistir, I assumed--whose antipathy was as flat and unremarkable as a stretch of stone, unrelenting, barely eroded even by the long wear of years. And Curufinwë, so like the father after whom he was named, who was watching me with guarded interest. At his arm was a woman with weary eyes and a face that might never have smiled, nursing a baby at her breast, right at the table!

But when my eyes happened upon her, some sense of propriety must have returned, for she arranged the baby’s blanket to better cover herself and would not meet my eyes. Not that I left my gaze long upon her, for Curufinwë wore a short-sleeved tunic and there was no hiding the strength of his arms used to wielding a sledge in his father’s workshop, and I imagined how quickly my face might replace the slip of metal shaped to his will if I stared too long at his wife.

And Macalaurë, of course, across from me, the only one who was smiling with any sincerity, although his smile was cynical, as though expecting entertainment even as he suspected that he would be forced to parody his delight. Vingarië, at his arm, was a woman of some beauty, although eroded, the way that statues will diminish if let too long faring against the wind.

Two things happened then: through the dining room door breezed Prince Fëanáro as another door--until then, unnoticed by me--swung open with such force that it struck the wall with a bang, giving the momentary, disorienting impression that Fëanáro’s presence had been announced by a sharp sound, much as lightning is accompanied by thunder when the storm is directly overhead.

Through the other door came Ambarussa--the one I had met last night--with his hair fastened against his neck and his face wearied and annoyed, carrying a tray of laden with dishes that he sat with some force on the table. “Well, Telvo, aren’t you going to set them out?” asked Tyelkormo with a laugh--echoed by Carnistir beside him--and earning a stormy glance from Ambarussa.

“Now, now,” said Fëanáro, coming to his seat at the head of the table. He was dressed in his forging clothes, and they looked none too clean. His tunic might have once been white but was since yellowed by sweat and grime, tied crookedly with a frayed piece of what appeared to be yarn (purple, nonetheless, though blackened slightly by soot) and leaving a triangle of his chest bare. His hair was tied back with a tattered rag; it was raked straight back from his face and in clumpy ridges as though hastily combed with just his fingers. Even as he helped Ambarussa--“Telvo,” I would learn he was called by his brothers--distribute the dishes on the tray, I saw that his nails were blackened, his hands unwashed since possibly the day before.

But my heart jerked in my chest at the sight of him, as though momentarily unmoored from the flesh that constrained it, becoming the emotional organ of proverbial wisdom, and I thought, You can fool no one! For he was beautiful, beautiful in a way that could be clad in rags and smeared with filth and still make me draw a sharp breath as my mind--ever called “overactive” by even my illustrious parents--emptied of words like a sink of water, for how to describe him? All of the metaphors--of tall, strong trees; of the surging sea; of the proud, steadfast mountains--were insufficient, seeming suddenly trite, although I’d used such metaphors in my own writing, translated them from the classic poems penned in long-lost languages derived in a distant land. The beauty of the stars, giving light to the night, stretching from the past and into the future on a continuum that recognized not even the bounds of time: It was not enough. The mingled Light of the Trees, even, which gives pause to distraction and discontent as though--for that single hour--they fail to exist, it cannot compare. For when my eyes happened upon him, I forgot that I had ever been unhappy.

Dishes came to me, to be passed to the wife of Curufinwë to my right, but my hands lay impotent and useless upon the tabletop, my wide eyes upon him. And he saw me then, those bright eyes turned to me and knew me as they had known me long ago and deemed me worthy of pause, of rescuing. “Ah, Eressetor,” he said and--with a wry smile--“I presume. I am pleased to see that you have made it to us.”

As though my presence was worthy of comment but my absence--had I forsaken my agreement to serve him for five years or even died on the road--would have gone unnoticed. Still, I did not care; I heard my name in his voice, I heard him say that he was pleased to see me … pleased! Ambarussa--with a roll of his eyes, I imagine--reached across me to nudge the pile of dishes to Curufinwë’s wife on its way around the table.

But that quickly, it was over: my initiation into the family, the acknowledgement by Fëanáro, who had ceased being my prince so much as my father, not in terms of blood and bone but as my reason for existence, the fierce pounding of my blood that was loyalty, something I’d known only in the sense of irony, muttering, “Yes, father. My life unhesitatingly for you.” And the six brothers pondered me anew, with careful scrutiny. Except for Telvo: having gone back into the kitchen, he returned with a tray laden with food--slices of ham, bowls of fruit, eggs, hunks of cheese--and when he glanced at me, noting perhaps the intense silence of his brothers, a smile flickered upon his lips and, as he had the night prior, he winked.

Fëanáro had taken his seat, and as the bowls of food were passed down the table, he caught Telvo with an arm around his waist and pulled him close, father’s head against the chest of his son, ear over his heart, as though wanting to hear how the rhythm of the life he’d created matched that of his own. “Telvo, this looks wonderful,” he said, and Telvo clutched his father’s head in his arms, laughter bubbled upon his lips.

“It only took me hours.”

“Well, you shall have the day off then?”

Beside me, the other twin shifted.

“That shall suffice, I believe,” said Telvo, and Fëanáro pinched his belly, and Telvo yelped with laughter, swatting his father’s hand away and dashing back to the kitchen--hair tossed in a scarlet spray as he went--as fleeting as an apparition, the existence of which one doubts as soon as it has disappeared.

Beside me, Ambarussa leaped suddenly to his feet, upsetting a glass of water that had to be corralled by many napkins and the combined efforts of Tyelkormo and Carnistir. But Ambarussa seemed not to notice. I saw Fëanáro’s face turn to his next-to-youngest son; I saw a mixture of hurt and anger there, for the briefest moment, before his eyebrows lifted and he asked in a voice so icy that it burned, “And where are you going?”

“You said we had to stay together for ‘one minute.’ It’s been that long.”

With the force of glass breaking upon stone, so Ambarussa’s composure shattered then, and he pounded from the room and--bare moments later--the front door slammed loudly enough that the window that faced south and admitted the tender light of morning rattled in reproach.

~oOo~

I grew gradually accustomed to the way of things in Formenos in the weeks that followed, and I taught myself not to flinch--something so involuntary as moving from a source of pain--at the beauty of Fëanáro. I taught myself to speak to him with dignity and to answer his questions and to sit--shoulder pressing shoulder--beside him in the library when he explained to me my assignments. As a teacher, he was distracted, drifting from a topic to stare out the window with an expression of profound concentration upon his face, only to return to it minutes later as though he’d never forsaken it. Other days, he did not appear for lessons at all, but I would hear the bright sounds of hammerfalls in the forge, and I taught myself. More often than not, I taught myself, reading the books that he’d assigned and writing treatises on a variety of topics. My back, my hand, my eyes--my very mind--ached at the end of the day from my labors, but I felt the lust of a man called to the drink: a single sip only opened a thirst so deep that it could never be filled, and Maitimo would have to come into the library and nudge me: “Eressetor, it is an indecent hour and I am extinguishing the lamps.”

Still, sometimes, the hammerfalls came from the forge long into the night.

At times, Fëanáro would summon me to recite for him what I’d learned, naming for me a topic and telling me to “speak of it,” so casually, with nonchalant wave of his fingers as though this was a matter of course for a scholar such as myself to busy himself with blathering as might a politician.

I wanted to argue that I was here to learn of books--to write them, even--not to speak wantonly and argue as might a small child. But, self-conscious and awkward at first, I did his bidding with a tongue thick as though with inebriation, moving only with great effort, each word wrung from my thoughts. He would sit, busy at task--writing upon a parchment or feeding his grandson from a bottle or tinkering with a broken necklace--and I would become convinced that he was not listening. From the depths of my mind, frail connections between ideas were made and became significant in the effort to find something to say to fill the silence; I heard my words tumbling into the space between us with a sense of incredulity that I--Eressetor, who had wished himself stricken dumb as a child so to never have to humiliate himself again with the efforts of speech--was rambling at such eloquent length; but of course, it was like I was talking to myself only, and I fell into the careless comfort as though with my private thoughts, letting my mind dance from one idea to another that I might have entertained only in the secret fantasies to which I was prone in the uninhibited night: things of which I was told never to speak, never to think, even, for that was just as wicked. But there they were, as dazzling upon the silence as the oases reported deep in the deserts of Avathar, and I could not then recall them, not that Fëanáro gave any indication that he would wish it so.

So, truly, he must not have been listening.

Until, from the depths of distraction, a question would suddenly fall from his lips and interrupt my words like a cracking whip loudly splitting the air, and alarmed, I would realize that he’d been listening all along.

Or he’d challenge me, and meekly, my words would trickle to a standstill, momentum lost, while he pondered me with eyebrows raised in expectation. But I’d been frightened into submission, stammering apologies for my foolish, insolent talk.

He’d dismiss me then with a wave of his hand, returning to his task with a focused single-mindedness, as though I’d never been, and I would walk from his study, face burning and a sudden, keen awareness of the existence of my body in space, of the awkwardness of my long limbs and bowing spine. Reflecting upon my shame, later, in the safety of my chambers, I would recall less of what I’d said and more of the faltering apology at the end of it, a feeling like a roaring cataract being reduced suddenly to a mere trickle … then nothing.

And one word came to mind, abashedly, slithering into my thoughts: impotent.

But still, Fëanáro called me forth to “speak,” as he said, with similar disastrous results each time. It was a stifling summer day, the air laden with moisture and miserably heavy, that he interrupted my distracted reading in the library to have me follow him to his study. Tyelperinquar, his grandson, sat astride his hip, and he talked to the baby but would not acknowledge me, though I trailed him so closely that at times I trod upon his heels. Still, he said nothing. Tyelperinquar folded his hand around a lock of Fëanáro’s hair and yanked; given my misery in my heavy robes in the heat (which he never noticed) and at being interrupted at my work, I thought that I might like to do the same.

Tyelperinquar was released to play upon the floor and Fëanáro pulled two chairs around to face each other, like sparring opponents. I felt that there should be a desk between us, or maybe that I should stand like a pupil before a teacher, but he always had us sit in equally uncomfortable chairs, although his body slouched, his legs sprawled and his fingers rising to restlessly twine through his hair, as though it was not in his nature to feel uncomfortable anywhere.

“You have been reading Valaquenta, no?” he said.

“I have.”

“Then I wish for you to speak on the Valar.” He lunged from the chair to stop Tyelperinquar from chewing a wooden ornament he’d found under the desk, lifting the squalling child and looking upon me with eyebrows raised at my stunned silence: “Well?”

Obediently, I began, although my voice faltered as I spoke, listing the fourteen Valar first: the multiple names of each and their etymologies and evolution and the domains over which each Vala presided. I spoke overlong on the many names of Varda and the theories on the significance of her special reverence by the Eldar, but Fëanáro remained unimpressed and bounced Tyelperinquar on his knee without sparing me a glance, clapping the child’s hands together until I realized that my voice had developed an annoying, dull cadence, and blushing, I stammered while Tyelperinquar laughed.

Varda having been exhausted, I moved next to Oromë and spoke of his doings in the Outer Lands and his discovery of the Elves at Cuiviénen, an event far enough removed in history, I hoped, to be a safe topic of conversation. The week prior, I had memorized the three speeches of Ingwë made to Oromë on behalf of the Quendi, and I began to recite the first in a tone as ponderous and blandly undulating as the heat-laden air.

Fëanáro looked up sharply then. “Did I ask for Ingwë’s words?”

Faltering: “Nay, but you asked for discourse on the Valar and the three speeches of Ingwë--”

“Are the three speeches of Ingwë,” he interrupted, “and I would have asked Ingwë if I wanted to hear them.”

In the silence that fell between us, Tyelperinquar whimpered and squirmed in Fëanáro’s arms, and I saw that Fëanáro had him clenched tightly in both arms and appeared ignorant to the child’s discomfort. “Tyelperinquar--” I began.

“I will mind Tyelperinquar,” he snapped, and the child screamed. “I want you to tell me your thoughts and theories on the Valar. Not to recite books and speeches--for I could read that myself if I had time to waste on such frivolity--but your own thoughts. Surely you do possess your own thoughts, Eressetor?” And he looked at me then, to watch my countenance clench at the shock and hurt of such an unexpected wounding; he watched and his eyes were very bright, as though my pain had kindled the fire within him, made him hungry to burn.

“Of course I do,” I said, and it was I who looked away then. It is rude for an apprentice to look away from his teacher, but I doubt Fëanáro even noticed. Not that he cared much for etiquette and custom anyway.

“Then let’s hear them.”

My voice shook as I spoke of Oromë and the accounts of the Three Kings of the Eldar about Valinor and the persuasion of the Eldar to follow them across the sea. I knew what I had been taught but I knew also what Fëanáro believed, for I had read transcripts of his speeches on the subject. Such were the speeches that helped to pave the way to his arrival here, in Formenos, in exile. Such were the speeches where, once, his own wife Nerdanel had risen up and in a voice that quavered as with unshed tears--they said--renounced his words and him with them, and they had been estranged.

Tyelperinquar slipped from Fëanáro’s arms and ran, wailing, from the room.

But Fëanáro did not pursue him. His bright eyes, his intense stare, for once was mine alone, and I lifted my voice to speak of the Outer Lands and what we had left behind, but I left out the bits about the wisdom we’d learned from the Valar, and the arts, and the skills. I left out the bit about how I had always counted myself as a patron of Manwë before I’d discovered the words of Fëanáro, how I still treasured the old texts waxing about divinity and righteousness and wisdom, and Fëanáro slammed his fist into his own knee.

“If I wished to hear my own words spun into new and inferior constructions than I would have imbibed a bottle of wine and held conversation with myself!”

And it happened then: a breaking of my composure as unexpected and effortless as a careless foot snapping a twig in two. I would discover later that my fingernails had cut into my own palms and left crescents filled with my own blood; I would discover that I’d worried the cloth of my robes into disarray and that they would have to be pressed with a hot iron to rid them of it. But then, I knew only my voice--high and wavering but shouting nonetheless--rising to overtake his: “And what would you have me say? About those who chose to exile you? You would have me sing their praises ere the stars? And chance your wrath?”

“I would have you say, Eressetor, what you think, without concern for the consequences.”

And so I did: I told him that I had always counted the Valar as a blessing to the Noldor for the knowledge and wisdom they imparted to us, how--without them--we would still be lightless savages mastering the flame, how the land to which he gave his praises was the dominion of Yavanna, and so when he praised it, he praised her. How the precious things that he had wrought, even, would be naught without the teachings of Aulë and Manwë. And he laughed and said, “Then you think that those things would not have been ours to discover? You think that we are naught without our predecessors? Mayhap you believe that what you have learned of books would not have been your own to discover, given the proper motivation.”

“I believe no such thing,” I told him, “but I credit those scholars whose work has formed the foundation for mine, without whom I would still be languishing in relative innocence.”

“And for all the ages of Arda through which we shall live, you believe that haste precludes the pride and meaning that one feels for discovering something for himself?”

Back and forth we went, like this, our words ringing against each other with the bright sound of swords meeting in battle, and I believed that I hated him then--hated him--for his cunning, acerbic rhetoric that left me fumbling for retort, my heart pounding and sweat soaking my robes while he leaned forward, elbows upon knees, and tore into the debate with the rabid glee of a beast devouring its prey.

I would like to say that I had won, but I was left fumbling--my face burning with shame--and tears blurring my vision, and a thick silence fell between us. Fëanáro grinned then, at his triumph. “I knew you had it,” he said. “I knew that there was passion in you.”

Most days, Formenos remained featureless, bland. Silent. And the silence was malevolent, taking a life of its own, and I imagined that I heard whispers or footsteps in the hall and--rising from my work--would race from the library to discover nothing.

The sons of Fëanáro were eager to leave the house each morning, sitting restlessly at breakfast, waiting for their requisite minute to be over, tossing their napkins aside and hustling from the room with excuses bubbling from their lips. The wives of Macalaurë and Curufinwë went often into the town; the boys went hunting or fishing or were called to council--allegedly--in distant towns. (Fëanáro’s father, the one-time king of whom I had barely thought, so consumed was I with his son, had been away for months making such appearances.) Ambarussa the elder, called “Pityo,” had a betrothed in town, and he would go to her often. Mornings were a bustle of activity followed by silence, made deeper and thicker by the echoes of their voices still left ringing in my ears. And Fëanáro would lift his fork--eating slowly, as always--and say to me, “It is just you and I left now, Eressetor.”

Indeed, the one who remained most often--aside from me, of course--was Telvo. His brothers would call him to hunt, voices jocular and almost mocking: “Telvo? Dare we drag you away from this place? From your many ‘obligations?’” For Telvo had no obligations. Like his most of his brothers, he’d proven a disappointment in the forge; neither was his childish, simple manner suited for academia. He was gifted in natural lore--animal training, hunting, fishing--but unfocused … or so said Fëanáro.

Yet, voice equally sweet with sarcasm, he would refuse his brothers’ invitations and remain in the silent house, in his own silent pursuits, the like of which I could not discover.

Indeed, at times, he seemed to simply disappear.

Leaving silence.

In Tirion, I had appreciated the virtue of “quiet.” “Quiet, please!” I would shout at the impertinent younglings who came to the library to snicker over art texts with studies of nude paintings. The rustling of whispered conversation, of restless feet sliding across the floor was enough to drive me mad. How I wished, hoped for quiet.

But never such silence, the sort in which I feared I might become lost--like the darkness of legend in the Outer Lands--and emerge with my tongue leaden and useless in my mouth, stricken deaf and dumb, filled to bursting with silence. The large house seemed as a vessel for it; as a moth beating against the sides of a glass jar could not free itself nor explain its captivity (for were those not blue skies and dancing trees only a surge of fluttering wings away?) so I could not explain the silence of that house: I would run to the windows with my mouth opened into a scream. I could see the birds singing in the trees. I could see the wind snapping branches back and forth. I would beat my hands against the icy glass, for I feared that in another moment of silence, I would go mad.

Then it ruptured: Hammerfalls pierced the silence like silver spikes and I reeled back from the window, faced with my own delusions: for the birdsong was a jumble of noise outside the window and the wind was roaring through the trees, rustling the leaves and scraping the branches alongside the house. Each hammerfall was a painful burst of light behind my eyes.

I wondered if I had made a mistake.

On some days, I seemed to be learning little; a mind that had once attracted knowledge desired and forbidden alike like lint to a coarse fabric was suddenly subject to the same dismaying, irreversible drainage of a sink opened wide. The house was a vacuum, I decided, to many things. I wondered if I might have preferred to have a vein opened and watching my blood drain away instead. Fingernails gouging my scalp, I stared at a book that made little sense. Fëanáro had written it; it was a work of philosophy and strange. His words rattled in my head with all the sense of rocks banging together.

On other days, things made too much sense, and I broke the silence on my own accord, with the jubilance of my triumphant laughter.

The sons of Fëanáro had taken to paying me little heed, even Telvo, for whom I’d held out eager hope for friendship. Loud and boisterous, they made little worlds around themselves in the same way that a large magnet will attract small ore-rich stones and scrap metal in an eccentric and slightly hazardous penumbra. They practically jangled when they walked or spoke, and I almost wished to be made of metal and drawn into their insular universes. They argued over petty things like coordinating tunics and trousers or the proper way to cook a turkey or who had shot better on their last hunting expedition, frivolous things, as though their father wasn’t a blasphemer cast into exile--and they along with him--as though such things were worthy of care. Along the endless white stretches of days, they were bright blights like stains, almost accidental in their appearance in the silent, empty house, swaggering with a wounded masculinity: shoulders broad and eyebrows quick to knit in pain; hands fluttering to chests, to press hearts that thumped with such insistent life that I believed that I could hear them enter the house by their heartbeats sending tremors through the silence. How dare you! To me! In constant conflict with each other and their father, flouncing away, feet heavy on the stairs. The perpetual distraction of minor distresses and melodramas. As insects floundering in a spiderweb will sunder its strands, so their frivolous (and sometimes, I suspected, largely invented) struggles tore open the tension, the silence of the house and replaced it with noisy relief.

They largely ignored me. I gave them no reason to insinuate me in their lives and so they picked and worried over each other. At times, one of them would see me, and his eyes would widen as though surprised by my presence, glancing at his father to ask: Is this right? But mostly, they ignored me.

Fëanáro tried to corral them in a hopeful way that was almost sad. I’d see him catch the hands of Maitimo or Tyelkormo even as they pulled to be free; I saw their faces earnest in conversation but the son listing in the direction of the door, away from the father. And I saw him left standing alone in emptiness after the slamming door had sealed the silence upon us.

Fëanáro was always at work, but he produced little. Or little that I could see. Yet he was always busy in his workshops with the door locked--sometimes hammering and, other times, adrift in puzzling silence (for I grew brave and pressed my ear to the door)--and agitated upon emerging, his eyes reddened and swollen--he said--by the fumes from the chemicals.

We took our meals together. As the months progressed, and I grew more familiar to him, I would rap upon his workshop door at midday, and we would lunch together. Our meals were leftovers from the last supper that one of his sons had prepared; Fëanáro was rumored to be an excellent cook but claimed to be too busy for such pursuits anymore. Mostly, he said little, ate little. He stared out the window in the direction of Ezellohar, Tirion.

I memorized his face, for I wrote about it sometimes in the secrecy of night: the chiseled lips, the bright gray eyes, the eyelashes quick to fall as dark smudges against his high, pale cheekbones as he pressed his fingers together and mumbled with what be perceived--to someone who did not know him--as a prayer.

Other times, he was restless as one distressed, and I sought to soothe him as did his sons with conversation. Once, in a tumble of words too impetuous to require courage, I asked, “Master, what exactly is it on which you work these days?”

And he answered with his face cracked into a smile that was terrible to behold: “The most important work of my life.”

~oOo~

How easily, though, I fell into life there. How easily I left my life in Tirion behind.

At times--excited by my work or merely exhausted beyond the possibility of sleep--I was stricken with insomnia. My chambers were between those of Curufinwë and his wife and the dark son Carnistir. Nights in Formenos were dark, so far from the delicate light of Telperion. I had to draw my drapes against the patch of blackness beyond (for our bedrooms faced away from Ezellohar); I took comfort in the sounds of the house settling down and succumbing to sleep. Often, I heard Curufinwë or his wife pacing the length of the floor with a fussy Tyelperinquar. I would chart their progress by the creaking floorboards or their drifting voices, singing lullabies. It was difficult to imagine Curufinwë--the flint-eyed, unsmiling protégé of Fëanáro--singing a lullaby but there it was, moving as a pendulum back and forth across the room in lazy oscillations, lulling me as well as it lulled the baby.

But then, I would reckon--ear pressing the wall to hear better, eyes half-lidded with hopeful weariness--he was a father and fathers do those sorts of things for their children. I suppose that Fëanáro had done the same, when his sons were small.

My father, on the other hand: I doubted that he ever had. Something ached angrily in my chest, and I wrested my ear from against the wall and made myself sleep. Or pretend convincingly, at least.

Sometimes, Tyelkormo would visit Carnistir late at night, and I would hear their conversation ebbing gently throughout the night: the two most impetuous of Fëanáro’s sons were quite civil in private, I learned. With each other, anyway. When Laurelin made the light outside the window a watery blue color, they would still be speaking, one taking up where the other had fallen into silence so that their voices spun into a single continuous thread. I wondered how it would feel to talk to someone like that and dismissed the thought as quickly as it had occurred. Maybe I had known once … but it was too painful to now recall.

On rarer nights, the house was silent and heavy with sleep, and I would hear a cry furtive enough not to be believed, from Curufinwë’s chambers next door, and I would press my ear to the wall and hear the gently escalating rhythm of lovemaking, of his voice crying his pleasure and her voice answering: “Curufinwë, I still love you …”

I thought of it: I imagined Curufinwë’s firm body--so like his father’s!--twined with that of his wife: softer, with her delicate beauty and apple-green eyes and breasts full from nursing their son, his to caress with his large hands. I even stroked myself in rhythm to their lovemaking … but nothing. I remained unmoved, flaccid, frustrated. Bitter.

And I would not think of Curufinwë’s naked body sprawled atop hers: his firm buttocks and long thighs ropey with muscle; his sweat-dampened hair clinging to his back arched just slightly with the expectation of pleasure; his taut belly and the hollows beneath his hipbones and the shadow of dark hair at his groin--

I would not think of it.

My father had caught me just before my coming of age, guilty and furtive behind a screen at the bathhouse, peering around with fire in my pallid cheeks, dark eyes wide. “Are you watching the men?” he’d asked, but of course, I was not. Of course. Not in any serious way. It was a bad habit to be unlearned like any other, like a taste for rich food or spitting upon the flagstones, and he was determined to have me unlearn it.

My parents were estranged by then, my mother having moved to the light side of the city, facing Ezellohar, in an artists’ community. My things were packed to move with her, but my father had his servants unpack them, one by one, while I silently wept and flicked away the tears before he saw. “Send message to his mother. He is staying here. At least, until we solve this.” An adamant gesture like I remember being made the time I’d binged on too much candy as a small child and had vomited on my bedroom floor. Only the gesture was made at me this time. I was the mistake to be wiped away.

Well, not all of me. Just the part given to lewd, filthy habits.

But I did not think of those times, of his punishments and decrees. I had come of age and taken the necessary steps to assure my freedom. He had not even known of the letter I’d written nor had he assumed that I’d possessed any such motivation until a reply had been delivered, and he’d torn it half-open before recognizing the astounding seal, his eyes widening at my name scribed beneath it. “Oh. It is for you, it seems.” And here I was: in the house of Fëanáro.

Still, if Fëanáro knew of my habits … I shivered. And pulled my ear from the wall just as Curufinwë gave a strangled cry of ecstasy. But I did not think of it. I let silence fill it instead, and I pretended to sleep. Well enough to convince myself.

~oOo~

When autumn came, two important things happened.

Fëanáro practically disappeared and would not even answer my midday summons to dine. Pressing my ear to his workshop door, I heard nothing. Silence. And so I ate alone. In silence.

Somewhere, amid the solitude and silence, I decided to be in love with the wife of Curufinwë. Terentaulë. That was how I thought of her, not as another man’s wife, but as a woman. And I loved her.

Autumn came in a blaze of color, as had oft been rumored in Tirion. But I had never believed: Trees were meant to be green. Fascinated and repulsed, I could not look away. The land was bleeding, I thought, in little, whirling droplets. Yet it was beautiful. Terrifying and beautiful. I had taken to bringing my studies to the windowseat in the library that looked in the direction of Ezellohar, my bare feet crumbling parchments spread beneath them, the book lying opened and unread across my knees. I stared out at the trees aflame with color.

There was much to be done in the garden to bring in the autumn harvest before the first frost, and Vingarië and Terentaulë took to staying home rather than spending their days in town, instead picking vegetables and preserving them for the long winter ahead. My spot on the windowseat looked over the vegetable garden, and I would watch them bend to their task, their lips moving soundlessly. I wondered of what they spoke. Their foolish husbands? Their father-in-law? Or--turning to glance at the house and seeing me at the window, Vingarië lifted a hand in greeting--me?

Vingarië would sometimes travel still with Macalaurë, but Terentaulë always remained. Because of the baby, she said, although Tyelperinquar had grown fat and was beginning run on his own accord around the house and could certainly travel safely. Terentaulë, though, fit naturally in the house, moving beneath the silence like a dark fish in dark waters. Preparing my lunch in the kitchen, I would sense her before I heard her and turned to see her standing behind me. “I will join you?” A frantic nod: Yes; I am in love with you. She wore stiff linen frocks that fell just below her knees; she wore boots that laced to mid-calf. Her pale brown hair was wispy and easily torn asunder; her eyes were a strange, bestial green. Her heavy breasts were always straining against the material of her dress, being mashed into submission, the cloth damp at her nipples where she leaked milk every time Tyelperinquar whimpered, even as we ate our lunch and he sat beside us in the baby chair his father had made for him. “Soon,” she would whisper to him. “Soon.” Stroking the dark curls growing upon his round head that I’d touched once--on a whim--and found to feel like silk. If I caught her nursing him, she would pull the blanket to her throat and would not look at me. I remembered my first breakfast at the house of Fëanáro--my shock at seeing her nursing at the table--and realized that I should feel regretful now for her modesty. “Kick myself,” as the sons of Fëanáro were fond of saying.

Vingarië dined with us sometimes too, but things were different then. Then, it was I usually being summoned to lunch--for Vingarië would make it, proud of knowing how to cook since her husband (she said) was so disastrous at it--and she would chatter brightly to Terentaulë and me. We would answer, of course, and I would sometimes think, “Why, this must be conversation!” but it made my head ache, trying to anticipate what would be expected of me and conjuring witty retorts or clever replies to her many questions before they were asked. I became convinced that my best answers were left unspoken, the questions preceding them never asked, but Vingarië laughed at those I did give nonetheless.

(Of course, I had entertained the notion of being in love with Vingarië. It came to me, actually, before the brilliant thought that I loved Terentaulë stabbed my brain with such illogical force that it couldn’t be anything but true. Vingarië, indeed, was the prettier of the two and the sweeter--being as Terentaulë was prone to acerbic retorts far crueler than what even her tempestuous husband could muster--and, reading love poetry, it seemed that any one of them could have been penned with Vingarië chief in the writer’s thoughts. But to watch her slip into Macalaurë’s arms upon their reuniting, before either of them spoke--her head fitted perfectly to the nook beneath his chin--made my love for her useless. Worse than that, it felt cliché, like something as easily destroyed as the parchments upon which love poems were written or fading over time. So I loved Terentaulë, who did not deserve it, and so the love must be true.)

Amid the fiery autumn and Fëanáro’s sudden desertion, amid a swirl of emotions, my love for Terentaulë was a welcome diversion. I devoted a good portion of my thoughts to her each day in lieu of completing my work, not that Fëanáro ever checked my work anymore to notice.

The sons were off with the lords of Formenos on a hunting expedition one day, and I’d gone to my windowseat in the library with a book of Vanyarin legends that I was supposed to be translating. Only the book was closed--clasped shut even by my hands--and the parchment on which I was writing my translation was abandoned on the table. The vegetable garden was barren and winter was nigh but the day was unexpectedly warm, the golden sort of day as thick and lazy as honey. Vingarië was turning the garden in preparation for winter and Terentaulë sat upon the ground with her back to me, having taken down the top of her dress completely to nurse Tyelperinquar. But Tyelperinquar was growing bored of his mother’s attempts at nurturance and preferred to eat the thoroughly mashed food his father and grandfather liked to proffer him lately; he’d pulled away from Terentaulë after only a few restive minutes of nursing and had taken to testing his skill at jumping in the soft turned soil that didn’t hurt to fall upon. Terentaulë, though, hadn’t replaced the top of her dress and leaned back on her arms to offer her naked chest and shoulders to Laurelin’s light, her soft brown hair tossed back, the ends mingling with the dirt.

I love her, I thought.

Telvo slid into the windowseat beside me. “Hallo,” he said, then--turning to follow my gaze, “Ah, my brothers’ wives. Lovely aren’t they? Pity Vingarië isn’t joining Terentaulë.” Grinning wickedly: “Pity Terentaulë doesn’t turn to give her back a chance at the light!”

His foot slipped and nudged my thigh. He was wearing gray socks that were filthy on the bottoms, as though he’d been running about outside in them.

“Should I withhold telling my brother that you sit in the window and stare at his wife’s breasts under the guise of study?” Telvo asked, laughing breathlessly to show that he only meant to banter. But I bristled: “I am hardly staring at Terentaulë’s breasts! I can’t even see her breasts!”

“Ai, I jest, Eressetor! What reason would I have to tell Curufinwë such things anyway?” He rolled his eyes, as though it should be obvious that he felt nothing so banal as loyalty for his brother.

“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked, not completely assuaged. “Isn’t today the day for the big hunt with the lords of Formenos? Bring food for the winter and all that tripe?”

“‘Tripe?’ Does Eressetor see through my brothers’ facades of self-importance then?” he asked, eyes wide with false innocence. He batted his eyelashes at me and grinned. “Their need to create peril in the Blessed Realm?”

“I said no such thing,” I muttered, for the realization had struck me suddenly that the “need for winter stores” had been said by Fëanáro, not any of his sons.

“All the same, Eressetor, I could ask you the same question: Why are you not with them? One would think that you’d be eager to prove your manhood, even if just in the ritual sense of having attended such a hunt.”

“Your father doesn’t go.”

Telvo snorted. “My father has seven sons. I hardly think he needs to prove his manhood. Besides,” he shifted so that his filthy feet were resting against my thigh. I wondered what I had done to deserve such companionable regard all of the sudden; Telvo hadn’t even spoken to me in days, “he used to go. Before my mother left.”

My mouth was hanging open with a retort (a stinging retort, I hoped) ready to drop from my tongue, but his works startled me into silence. His mother. Fëanáro’s wife. In my months here, I hadn’t heard her mentioned but once, when I had noticed the littering of her statues in the upstairs hallway. Yet she was undeniable for Fëanáro certainly hadn’t fathered seven sons on his own, and there was a softness to all of their features in places--less the chiseled perfection of their father; “flaws,” I knew some would say--that made her presence in them unmistakable.

But she was not here. And no one spoke of her.

Even my father spoke of my mother, following their separation. I spoke of her more. Over supper: “Recently your mother …” or “According to your mother …” She injected herself into the most innocuous of conversations, in all contexts, and no one found that strange.

I looked up at Telvo, hoping that he would elaborate, but--feet still pressing warmly against my leg--he had returned to gazing at his brothers’ wives in the garden. Terentaulë was replacing the top of her dress, I saw, forcing myself to feel disappointment.

“I do not go with them,” said Telvo, in answer to my original question, “because I also do not need to prove my manhood with such chases. I bring home food for my father’s table; I needn’t do it in packs in order to prove my strength or prowess. Also, there are better things that I have to do here than hunt.”

“Oh?” I asked, but Telvo slipped his legs off the windowseat then and was scurrying for the library door at such a velocity that he slid on the hardwood floor as he rounded the corner, as though he was answering the summons of someone far more important than me.

Carnistir’s begetting day was in the beginning of autumn and Fëanáro returned with a startling ferocity one day: no longer a listless man staring into the light of Ezellohar at breakfast, he’d arrived at the meal and slammed his fist into the table, startling us all to attentive silence, and said, “Carnistir’s begetting day is a fortnight away and I want to hold a feast.”

We were all assigned tasks, even me. Even Carnistir, the guest of honor. I was given the task of polishing the silver with Macalaurë and Pityo, who were so assigned because their cooking was--in the words of Fëanáro--atrocious. Huddled at the end of the long dining room table, we squinted at tarnish and polished for hours, for Fëanáro’s silver had fallen into misuse.

“This is ridiculous,” Pityo declared loudly. “Since when does he celebrate our begetting days?”

“Likely,” replied Macalaurë in a delicately humored tone, “he intends to send an invitation to Amil and make her feel guilty when she does not come.” He laughed and Pityo sniffed humorlessly.

(I would learn, in that fortnight spent in the company of the brothers, that Nerdanel was discussed … but always out of earshot of Fëanáro. Her presence was insidious, nurturing, like an underground creek accounting for a bloom of lush vegetation in an otherwise arid place.)

“Or,” said Macalaurë, “maybe she will come.”

“And ruin all his months of planning?” He glanced at me then as though I was a foe in their midst. Cleverly, he reversed subjects. “Still, when was the last feast we had? He had one for Telvo last year--”

And from behind us, Telvo spoke. He’d been charged with unpacking the good porcelain still packed in straw in crates and had entered the room unheard with one. “He had a feast for Ambarussa,” Telvo said, “but Pityo did not come because he was not speaking to Atar.”

“He had it for you and you know it!” Pityo snapped, but Telvo had evaporated through the door as though he never was. Pityo threw down the knife he was polishing. “He frustrates me!” he growled.

Mildly, Macalaurë asked, “Telvo or Atar?” and Pityo glanced up at him with wide, surprised eyes and said, “Why, both of them, actually.”

There was a theory among the brothers that Fëanáro’s youngest son was his favorite. Certainly, he was the most often caught by his father and held by the hand or around the waist while Fëanáro spoke. The other brothers pulled quickly away. Telvo pushed his face into his father’s shoulder and allowed the fawning … and ignored the look of anger that passed on some of his brothers’ faces, particularly his twin. He was the most often excused from labor, and his midday disappearances--and occasional absences from breakfast as though midnight disappearances were also in order--were never questioned.

Indeed, Telvo gave an impression of being much younger than he actually was. Though identical in face and physique to Pityo, there was no mistaking one twin for the other. Telvo had the sporadic impishness of a young child; his freckles and his tiny, curved nose lent to the impression. On Pityo, his flashing eyes overtook his face.

Fëanáro, it seemed, was eager to indulge his youngest son’s whim.

We sat in the parlor, discussing menus. Maitimo--mature, competent Maitimo--had been put in charge of the menu, and he’d arrived at the meeting with his ideas written neatly upon parchments to be passed around. Telvo curled in the circle of his father’s arm with his head on Fëanáro’s chest. He was barefoot and wearing a tunic that was laced crookedly and of an absurd violet color. He said nothing, but whenever I’d glance at him, he was already watching me, only he didn’t have the decency to even pretend otherwise. He smiled, as though he knew something about me that even I did not.

Which, of course, he did not.

Tyelkormo--who, despite his sharp tongue and quick temper, possessed a certain endearing naïveté--asked his father, “Who is to be invited?” for Fëanáro, naturally, had been left in charge of invitations. And Fëanáro ticked off on his fingers the names of lords and persons of importance in Formenos, and of course his father--their grandfather--would be notified (if the messenger could find him amid the mountain towns he was visiting) and several local craftspeople who’d been long friends of the family. And a messenger had been sent to Tirion.

Fëanáro paused to take a drink of wine from the goblet at his feet. The brothers exchanged worried glances while he was distracted, except Telvo, who nuzzled his father’s chest and linked his fingers into his own.

“And if she does not come?” asked Tyelkormo, who’d been unable to fully banish the wide-eyed worry upon his face when his father’s attention had returned.

“Then I shall have to intensify my efforts, shall I not?” asked Fëanáro. Telvo, nearly curled into his lap by then, winked at me and grinned.

~oOo~

The brothers were forbidden from leaving the house on long excursions until the feast was over. Messengers clattered up the path all day, delivering responses that Fëanáro had taken to filing in a small basket on his desk. (This I knew because I’d been called to recite for him again in the evenings, and he riffled through the replies while barking questions at me and nodding vaguely at the answers.) The messengers wore the colors and heraldry of various area families--important and not--but none of them red and gold, none of them the colors of Nerdanel, wife of Fëanáro.

Once the silver was polished, I had been released to return to my studies, which I feared might cause some resentment. But … nothing. I mentioned it to Maitimo as he knelt upon the dining room floor and scrubbed it clean. “Well, you’re not his son, are you?” he asked in an uncharacteristically impatient voice, and I hadn’t asked again.

Telvo was also excused. Or--if not formally excused--often disappeared.

With all of the sons in the house, the silence was momentarily banished, although I imagined that I could see it hanging heavy and dark in the corners, around the eaves, rustling the cobwebs into inexplicable motion, huddling in tiny dark balls to escape the commotion. The air of the house almost swaggered with the voices of Fëanáro’s sons; it took on a musky scent of masculinity so thick that I could taste it, bitter upon my tongue. Cleaning efforts in one room or another often drove the displaced sons elsewhere, sometimes to the library: Tyelkormo seated backward upon a chair, Pityo sprawled across the tabletop, Curufinwë restively fingering the lines of books, and Macalaurë sitting with knees folded between the table and chair, drumming intricate patterns with his fingers upon the tabletop. Somehow, I was among them; they'd clustered around me like whizzing particles around a nucleus. I dared not complain.

Pityo had been telling a tale of his betrothed in Formenos. He’d been reprimanded by Fëanáro, allegedly, for staying out until the small hours of morning; his brothers, naturally, wanted to know why. “And she has her legs wrapped around my waist and I’m going at her--” He thrashed upon the tabletop, convulsive, fingers raking the polished wood. “Ai, I’m going at her so fucking hard, and her fingers are in my hair--” his fingers raked through his hair--“and she’s biting my neck--” Grinning, he looked up to make sure that he had his brothers’ rapt attention. Tyelkormo’s mouth was hanging open a little bit; Macalaurë and Curufinwë--being married and doubtlessly so used to having a woman’s legs around their waists and being bitten upon the neck that it had become utterly dull--were feigning nonchalance betrayed by the glittering, eager eyes. Pityo pulled down the collar of his tunic and bared his throat and the bruise upon it as proof of his honesty; so close, I could see his pulse fluttering, quickened, as though aroused once more. I could feel the heat pouring off of his flesh and leaned away from it as one might lean away from an open oven and the foolish fear of tumbling in. “She’s biting my neck and screaming my name--”

“Probably the only time a woman’s ever screamed ‘Pityo!’ in bed,” said Macalaurë with a wicked gleam in his eye and Pityo laughed.

“Perhaps. But she’s screaming against my skin and then I hear it--” An expectant pause. Tyelkormo’s eyes widened; Macalaurë smirked; Curufinwë folded his arms across his chest. “I hear it: the door. Her father is home early from the forge but I’m thinking, Valar, I’m about to give this girl an orgasm like none she’s ever had before--sweet Eru in Eä, I’m about to have an orgasm like none I’ve ever had before--and I can hear her father rattling around in the cabinets downstairs and she’s moaning into my mouth now and doesn’t hear a thing, and I wonder: should I stop her? Should I tell her?”

Lying on his back upon the table, hair snaking in scarlet waves across the tabletop, he grinned at his brothers. Macalaurë snorted. Tyelkormo leaned forward and said, “Well, did you?”

Pityo laughed and rolled onto his belly. “No. She came then, and I thought, oh Valar, she’s going to scream, but her eyes just rolled back into her head and it was like it was too good to scream--I actually thought that she was going to faint for a minute--and that was all that it took for me … and it was all over. I had time enough to hide under her bed, and though I had to stay there for half the night before sneaking home to endure Atar’s wrath, Eru, was it worth it!”

Curufinwë laughed derisively. “I can remember when Terentaulë responded with such … abandon. Back before I had to share her tits with Tyelperinquar.”

I prickled at the mention of Terentaulë: I love her! (Although I had to increasingly remind myself of my obsession.) I didn’t want to picture her legs wrapped around Curufinwë in the way that Pityo had described with his betrothed, and I relished in my squeamishness at the thought. Proof! I thought.

Telvo came in then with the brusque gait of one with a purpose, disappearing amid the bookshelves. Tyelkormo nudged Curufinwë and suppressed a smile. “What about you, Telvo?” he called. “Do your lovers respond with ‘abandon,’ as Curufinwë calls it?”

Telvo emerged from behind a shelf of books with a single volume clutched in his hand, probably having been sent to retrieve it for his father. “Oh yes. I’ve been called a magnificent lover.”

“I’m sure you have, Telvo,” said Pityo, and there was a cold edge to his voice belying his cruelty. “But your hand on your own cock doesn’t count.”

“No, I would agree, it does not,” Telvo retorted amiably, “although I am practiced with that too, to my lovers’ delight.”

“So tell us of your ‘lovers,’ then, if they are not freckled little gits with red hair.”

“Ah, Ambarussa, all that I can tell you of my ‘lovers’ is that I like them big. And hard.” And he smirked and turned on his heel then and was out of the room in an instant.

Pityo’s face, meanwhile, had flushed scarlet, and he’d lifted himself to a sitting position. Tyelkormo and Curufinwë had grown uncomfortable; Macalaurë picked at his cuticles as though he’d never heard a word of the exchange. “He shames us,” said Pityo through clenched teeth, but Macalaurë hushed him with a flitting glance in my direction. “He is our brother. We love him, regardless.”

“Of course,” said Pityo in a strangled voice, but when he turned his flinty-cold eyes on me, it certainly wasn’t love that I saw there.

~oOo~

That same night, I was called to recite for Fëanáro.

Even though the days remained deceptively warm, nightfall brought cold as painful and sudden as a whiplash upon naked skin. Fëanáro’s sons had taken to lighting fires in all of the fireplaces and we all piled extra blankets on the beds. My fingers and toes became numb. All I wanted to do was to sleep.

But Fëanáro had called me.

Recently, his topics for recitation had become strange, abstract, nothing that could be bound by what I had learned of books. “Persuasion,” he’d said last time, “tell me of persuasion. Of convincing someone that she wishes something that she in fact does not.” His eyes had been as wild as the center of a flame; he’d leaned forward on elbows as though hoping to learn of me, not the other way around, as it was supposed to be.

In the noisy bustle of a house preparing for a feast, in my persistent insistence of my obsession with Terentaulë, thoughts of Fëanáro fled my mind. My waking mind. At night, I dreamt of him. At night, I lay upon my back on the floor of his study and recited, and as my words became faster and more inane, he placed his foot upon my chest and pressed me to the floor. He could kill me! But his eyes were not those of a killer, and when I gasped, it was not with fear.

And I awoke.

I would not think of such dreams while reciting before him, sitting opposite each other on straight-backed chairs. I thought of his sons, of Terentaulë. I thought of my studies and my father far away in Tirion. I let Fëanáro fade into the background.

Strange, I thought, because Fëanáro had once been an escape from those very things in which I now took solace: my father, Tirion, duty. Interest in women … or lack thereof.

That night, he was agitated, pacing the floor and raking his hands through his unbound hair. The feast was three days away; the basket on his desk was overflowing with acceptance letters from everyone from small-town craftsmen to illustrious lords, but I glanced out of the window whenever I heard a messenger on the path, and I had yet to see Nerdanel’s colors. And I fervently denied the pinch of joy I felt whenever the rider who appeared was sent by someone else than the wife of Fëanáro.

For why would I wish such sadness upon my lord? He who had never been less than generous to me?

I wondered if he could tell it from my face. As I did not like to think of Terentaulë as another man’s wife, I thought, mayhap I did not like to think of Fëanáro as so cleanly bound by the terms “a woman’s husband.” As though he--in his great beauty, in the fire in his eyes--could be possessed by a single person, as though that person could sweep fire into her hand and hold it there. Impossible.

It is sensible, then, that they were estranged: any attempt to contain Fëanáro within bounds, and he would immediately spill outside of them. Such is the nature of fire.

But he was a woman’s husband. He had sketches of each of his seven sons as babies, small children, and he had not produced these children alone. Between them were square patches of wall that were darker, as though other drawings had once shielded the wall from the bleaching effects of light. I knew that pictures of Nerdanel had once hung there. I did not look at those guilty places.

Fëanáro offered me a chair, but he would not sit. He spoke of the feast, of his purported “joy” in having his sons in the house again. “Their voices, their very presences--it is like lifting my face from cold water and breathing again.” He made animated gestures as he spoke. He spoke to me of letters that he’d received from Tirion. “Arafinwë still writes,” he said with an incredulous, delighted laugh, “long, prattling letters.” He offered one to me, but I dared not read the private correspondence of princes, and so I took it and held it in my lap, face burning.

After listening to him speak for an hour, there was a lull as he sipped from a glass of wine, and I said, delicately, “Did you want me to recite on anything in particular, my lord?”

Fëanáro’s head snapped up to look at me. His brow rumpled. “Is that requisite? Mayhap I only wanted to talk with you?”

Abashed by my apparent misinterpretation of his intent, I ducked my head and muttered, “Ah, well …”

“You have been here a half-year, Eressetor,” he said. He stopped in front of me, lifted my chin in his hand. His gray eyes were as bright as light darting upon silver steel. “And yet I know almost nothing about you.”

His hand upon my flesh: it burned. I wondered how Nerdanel had borne it, had borne penetration, from the same.

My heart hammered at the thought. Fëanáro could see the vein quivering at my throat; his eyes were fixed upon it. He smiled.

“I wonder,” he said, taking his hand from my face and resuming his pacing, “how one from a family never loyal to me--far from it, actually--had come to seek me. I wonder: What does he want so badly to choose, essentially, exile? With his father’s foe?”

He turned again to face me. I cowed under his gaze, shrunk from him--although he was across the room--as guilty and scared as a disciplined child. “I wish to learn of you, my lord. I wish to become a competent loremaster and who better to teach me--”

“There are far better than me to teach you.” He ticked off several on his fingers: “Rúmil, Elemmírë, even your father’s own beloved Nolofinwë will occasionally give his time to students of lore, certainly with greater frequency than I do. Surely you know that I have not given my attention to lore for years? That my aim has been creation?” He swept a paperweight from his desk: a pale stone filled with wan light, tossed it, the slap of stone against his palm proof of tangibility. “The tangible … or rather, that which makes the intangible something to be captured in hand.” His voice had grown loud; I trembled with the force of it. But as abruptly as a flame doused in water, he became gentle again. “Mayhap the better question, then, is why I accepted you to my tutelage? I have not taken students since my exile, Eressetor, even in craft; surely your father made that more than plain to you in effort to keep you from me.” He laughed, as though there was no mystery for him in the ways of fathers, particularly in their subtle cruelty to their sons, designed to shape--they tell themselves--rather than hurt. “So, perhaps, you should be asking why? And what I want from you?”

Blinking up at him, I gave it my thought, for in my naïveté, I had thought, Why, he respects my work! He knows that my name will compliment his! Is that not the reason why masters take students?

In my naïveté, I’d forgotten the seven sons, at least two of whom were counted as masters of lore already (with the potential, Fëanáro often alluded with a wry, whimsical smile, that the others should follow their brothers’ motivations); I had neglected to consider that a person with a reputation like Fëanáro’s did not need the glory of students to magnify what he had himself achieved. For there was nothing that I could do, that I could discover, that he could not achieve himself, given the proper incentive. As it was, I was a burden, a toll on his time--and perhaps, I should have realized this sooner, given his nonchalance with regards to my instruction--and “another mouth to feed,” as my father had once wearily remarked of the daughter that my mother wished to have and he did not.

So: Why was I here?

“Maybe … maybe, I should leave?” Those weren’t tears in my eyes, but yes, Fëanáro’s face had become blurry and my eyes stung at the reproach I’d suffered. A firm hand pressed a shoulder already starting to rise back to the chair, and I thought of the dream: of lying on my back, with his boot on my chest, my heart leaping to meet it. No! Do not think of that! Not here! “I do nothing without a purpose, Eressetor,” he said. “I have brought you here for a reason. You will learn of me … and I will learn of you.

“Your parents,” he said in a whisper, bated and hopeful, “they are separated, no? Estranged?”

Estranged …

There is no greater pain than burning, my mother had once said, snatching my hand away from a hot stove. You will learn this, child, whether by my words or your error. I lifted my chin to meet the eyes of Fëanáro, as blistering upon my own as the white-hot center of a flame. It was his natural state to burn, it was often said. And so, I reckoned, he should feel no pain.

But his eyes--they said differently.

Separation.

It could not be pinned to a single moment, as one might think--an instance, a realization: I am not happy. I must leave--but was a gradual weakening and pulling apart, so insidious that it was already well underway before anyone had noticed.

Rather like the way a pair of favorite breeches will wear and grow thin at the knees--weak--and the fibers will break one by one until there is a tear in the cloth. It seems like something that should have drawn one’s attention long ago, but until one feels that first nip of air on exposed skin, life continues oblivious, content, and uninterrupted.

That was the way of things with my parents. I had been taken into the fatherly embrace of one of my uncles and told that I could “talk about it,” if I wanted, and it was hinted that there must have been an explosion of sorts, a fight to which I must have borne witness. (Being as everyone knew that I had no friends or pursuits to distract me from solitary study in my bedroom.) Even as I knew that it said something about me, my character, that could not be contradicted with words, I felt my shoulders stiffening, drawing away like a tree subtly growing away from a close neighbor out of fear of losing its share of the light. I murmured that there was nothing to talk about, and I suppose that my glance that refused to meet his might have been misread as being evasive, even insolent.

Cold. Sullen. These words punctuated the whispers my grandparents and uncles--“concerned parties,” naturally--exchanged while glancing in my direction. There was a furtive shushing and my grandmother’s watery, patronizing voice: Hurt. Denial. Natural at this stage. Will come around. Give him time.

None of them understood the gradual wearing away of my parents’ marriage, the much-loved fabric of their union growing too small to contain that which it was expected to hold. As with the torn breeches, there was only a moment of cold discomfort and a surprised glance and the realization--It’s over?!--that something much-loved was now little more than rubbish to be cast aside, that our own being has betrayed us and grown beyond what that love could contain.

It was my father who first told me of their intentions to “separate,” calling me into his chilly, geometric study overlooking the square and presenting his marriage to my mother like he might present a building to one of his clients, lifting away the roof to expose inner workings that were best left unseen. He had a habit of making boxlike gestures with his hands as he spoke, as though outlining the dimensions of rooms; into these “rooms” he placed my mother. Me. I felt that I was supposed to drop my emotions into them and let him seal them shut with his hands.

He spoke of his goals and her goals and their careers and their discrete social circles and “drift,” that was the word he used: “We have moved apart, through the slow workings of time, like two marble blocks once pressed flush against each other.” Hands placed parallel to each other on the table slid apart in a drastic move that made me flinch. He laughed. “Not that abruptly, of course. One can look at two marble buildings day by day, looking for drift, and never see it forming even as he can pass into the space between them.”

Naturally, my father would compare his marriage to two errant buildings.

“So separation isn’t a choice, Eressetor, but more an inevitability. It is just where time has placed us. No need to be angry or sad, any more than the hard-working architect who constructed those two buildings should begrudge the centuries that moved his masterpieces apart, creating what might be construed as a flaw.” He shrugged. “Instead of one unified masterpiece, you have two of equal splendor. That is not flawed, I don’t think.”

My mother had called me into her studio not long after with the same intention.

The pungent smell of ink overlaying the dusty odor of parchment lingered as though in denial, but already, her art supplies were being packed into crates, as though she’d merely been waiting for the excuse to do so. Her ink-stained hands were not prone to sketching compartments into which emotion could be locked away as were my father’s; dismissing the servants with a wave of the fingers, she sat us opposite each other. Reaching out, she held my hands, stroking the backs of my wrists, while she leaned forward with elbows propped on her knees and her pendulous jewelry swinging in the space between us. “A leaf,” she said, “may fall from a branch and follow a meandering course to the sea.” Her hand likewise meandered poetically into the air. “Is it frightened? Perhaps. Could it resist, and remain where it has grown and flourished? Perhaps. But the effort of that …” Her fingers fluttered at her temples as though warding off a headache, tucking tendrils of hair behind her ears. “After a while, don’t you think that the exhaustion would remove any comfort you might otherwise have? I wonder, Eressetor, if it is not better to let the river carry us and enjoy the new sights which we might otherwise have been denied before being released into the vast freedom of the sea.” She squeezed my hands in both of hers and sighed dramatically.

The result of all the “meandering” and “drifting” in my parents’ marriage was waking up to a cart hitched in the street in front of the house and two burly Elves trying to maneuver my mother’s worktable down the narrow path, between Atar’s roses on one side and Amil’s rock garden on the other.

All of this--the separation--came at the time when I had my “trouble.” But of course, they were not related.

As even spurious correlation can inspire the notion of a relationship, though, I was given pitying looks in the weeks that followed and undue sympathy from normally contemptuous relatives and associates of my parents’. I was called aside, again by an uncle, though a different one this time. My mother had three brothers, all with pointy rodent-like faces and heads that looked two small upon their bulky bodies. Whereas my mother was an artist and delicate of hand (and, purportedly, of mind), her brothers were quarry workers with voices used to shouting over a chorus of falling pickaxes and tumbling stone; they regarded their sister--her marriage, her career, her son--with a patronizing fondness and were given to ruffling my hair, even when I had it secured in neat, precise plaits that were damaged by their rambunctious shows of affection.

“Eressetor,” said my uncle, and again, I found myself in the circle of his arm, smelling his musky, hard-working scent, “you must understand that this is not your fault.”

For it was believed that surely I must think that it was. My father had never been fond of children, and my mother’s “accident" was the proverbial beginning of the end for their marriage. At least, this was widely believed and whispered in circles where it was thought I could not hear what was being said. “He always did require a lot of maintenance,” it was said, scornfully, of my father by my mother’s family. (Interestingly, his family said the same of her.) He required his meat cooked “well done” and a fresh tunic every day; certainly these things--according to the contempt in my uncles’ eyes--were indicative of a pathological need for great deals of attention. Which had obviously been taken from him when I was born and my mother laved her attention upon a newborn infant instead of him.

This was my father’s problem, not mine, my uncle assured me, giving my shoulders a chummy squeeze, neglecting to note my crisp-pressed robes and plaited hair and polished shoes indicating that I obviously shared in my father’s “pathology.”

Those to whom my “trouble” had been confided by my stricken parents were even more adamant in their assertions: “Eressetor. This is not your fault.” My eldest uncle’s beefy, calloused hands gripping me above the elbows and even delivering a curt little shake as though desperate to force the knowledge into me. “No matter what happens between them, you mustn’t believe that it is your fault.”

Of course, no one bothered to ask: Did I think it was my fault? For I did not. Lying in my bed at night, in the house my father had built long ago, with my hands folded on my belly and staring at the cracks in the ceiling that widened imperceptibly with each passing year, I waited for an assault of anger or pain … but neither came. I even tried to muster it--surely I must be angry! hurt! for my parents had forsaken their marriage before I’d even come of age!--but could not. My amiable mother returned on occasion from her new house in the artists’ district (designed and built by my father, of course) to retrieve something “forgotten,” and she and my father would have tea on the balcony. She was illustrating a book that he was compiling on the evolution of Telerin architecture after their arrival in Aman; he was designing a series of gazebos for a sculpture garden on which she’d been invited as a consultant. At times, we even ate meals together as a family: mother, father, and son, with a table full of plans and diagrams strewn between us.

Marital separation was uncommon among Elves with underaged children; most separations came only after long marriages, when the interests and pursuits of the partners diverged to the point of impracticality. Still, they were not unheard of, and I waited for my parents to dictate my place in things--that I should remain with my father or go to my mother or assume some sort of nomadic existence in between--but nothing was said.

Of everything, this bothered me the most, niggling me late at night as my restless brained turned over and over what I’d learned that day until exhaustion forced me to contemplate something--anything--else, and I wondered why there wasn’t a greater delineation as to my role in things. I wondered why they didn’t see fit to fight over me. If they both wanted me, this seemed the logical way to go about it.

Could it be, then, that neither wanted me?

I had stayed at my father’s simply for reason of default: It involved no thought, action, or discussion on my part. If anything, I was disturbed less in my pursuits while my mother was in the process of moving, for my father was busy helping her and often skipped making meals for us where my presence would otherwise be required.

I went to his antiseptically utilitarian study, interrupted him at his work. and asked, “Should I go to visit Amil? Live there on occasion? What is the proper protocol for this?”

(I will admit that I’d sought connection with him on the basis of protocol, something I knew we both respected even if neither was silly enough to use a word such as “love” in connection to it: grammar, the proper means to cite written sources, the correct way to codify architectural drawings. Rules. Neither of us had time to shepherd abstract thoughts into a semblance of logic as my mother liked to do … at least not on issues as non-pertinent as the proper capitalization of King Finwë’s various titles or the indication of pipelines beneath a building.)

“Ah, Eressetor,” my father replied, “that would certainly be acceptable. Neither of us has a preference as to where you live; we simply thought it would be easier--for now--for you to stay here. But if you wish otherwise …” His voice was bright: in an effort to placate what he might have perceived as discontent on my part, I wondered? Or in hope that I would “wish otherwise?”

I didn’t know who to disappoint with my presence. So I stayed where I was.

~oOo~

Sitting opposite Fëanáro, I told him of this. Most of it.

I’d once had a tutor in historical lore who’d said that when compiling a historical record, part of any historian’s duty was to select from amid the facts and discard those that might be hurtful to those involved. Those were usually useless anyway, he’d said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

With that in mind, I chose carefully from my parents’ story. I took out the bits about my doubts (replacing it with a cheery “I decided to live with my father,” which was certainly not a lie) and my cynical regard for my parents’ meddlesome families (“they showed rightful concern”; also not a lie), and of course, all mention of the “trouble” and any correlation--spurious or not--between that and the separation.

The bright fire in his eyes slowly cooled and was replaced by something nefarious in its unfamiliarity on his face: bafflement. His brows knitted and his eyes took a suspicious glint. “You are trying to convince me that it just … happened?”

“Yes?” I wanted my voice to sound confident but it betrayed me and lilted at the end into a question.

A barking laugh, cold and humorless: “So you are attempting to convince me that an estrangement happens in the same manner of eroding farmland.”

“To my parents …”

He snorted. “Ai, and so we have the proverbial ‘can of worms,’ Eressetor: that which inspires more questions than it answers.”

Startled, I waited: Why my nonchalance? What sort of emotional deficiency was implied by my inability to feel anything for my parents’ failed marriage? Why the delusions that separating anything “bonded”--as in flesh as well as spirit--should be a painless affair?

But that was not what he asked: “If not to escape the pain you parents have inflicted upon you, why, then, are you here?”

Two days before the begetting day feast, I awoke to a general clamor about the house. Not the fabricated noise to which Fëanáro’s sons were prone--footsteps too loud upon the stairs, brash voices raised unnecessarily--but a genuine commotion.

I emerged just as Telvo was raising his fist to knock. “Eressetor!” he exclaimed with unbridled delight. “Grandfather Finwë has returned!” and he scampered away down the hall without waiting for my reply.

In recent weeks, I had become slovenly in my appearance, forsaking my good robes that required careful laundering and pressing for softer, casual robes or tunics and breeches. At the announcement of Finwë’s arrival, though, I recoiled back into my chamber with pounding dread in my heart. I selected my best robes--black with silver trim--and quickly fastened my unbound hair into plaits. I scrubbed the ink stains from my fingers as best as I could, for I had also become negligent of this. I am meeting the King! came my feverish thought whenever my preparations felt foolish, followed by the afterthought: Well, not the King any longer …

The noise from the dining room welled up until and spilled forth into the hallway, as though it could no longer be bound by the walls. It wasn’t the normal cacophony of mingled voices, though, but a single powerful one being served and answered by others, struggling to be recognized against its might. With great trepidation, I stepped into the room, fearing that I would be noticed--and dreading that I would not. How does one address a displaced king? I wondered. Our rules of etiquette had never envisioned--and so never addressed--such a possibility.

Finwë sat at the head of the table, in Fëanáro’s usual place: His raiment was simple and suited for travel yet so well-made that it conferred elegance in its simplicity alone. I saw much of Finwë in Fëanáro’s face, for Finwë had the same exquisite beauty that might have been crafted--forged from fire and honed with much loving attention--rather than born in the rather happenstance manner of normal Elves.

His eyes, though, were different from his son’s: as bright blue as the base of a flame. Fëanáro’s eyes were winks of light upon the silvery sea.

Quietly, I slid into my accustomed place at the end of the table beside Telvo’s place, who was the only of Fëanáro’s sons missing. Finwë’s voice filled the room not by virtue of volume so much as power: as though it was meant to command even the quiet, forgotten corners of space. Even Fëanáro--who was never quiet or motionless for long--was content to lean his hand upon his cheek and gaze into his father’s face, his lips curled into a vague smile.

Finwë was telling a tale of hilarity, judging from the laughter that met many of his words, of the ordeal which Fëanáro’s poor messenger had to endure in order to finally track him down in a small town high in the mountains. “The air was so thin at such heights that the poor lad nearly fainted upon my feet!” said Finwë, but it was admiration rather than mockery in his voice. He raised a glass of wine, and I noticed for the first time the flush-faced messenger was sitting across the table from me: “To the true heroes of our kingdom, who keep a dotty old Elf like me from humiliating himself by forgetting his beloved grandson’s begetting day!”

Telvo shoved through the kitchen door then with two unopened bottles of wine that he plunked down at his grandfather’s elbow, moving to stand behind Fëanáro with one arm draped over his father’s shoulder and pressing his chest.

Fëanáro linked his fingers with Telvo’s and--turning over his hand--pressed a kiss to the palm. Telvo looked at me and winked.

“Oh!” cried Fëanáro suddenly, dropping Telvo’s hand and freeing him to scurry back into the kitchen. “I did not even see him come in, but Atar, this is the apprentice whom I had written you about: Eressetor. His father, you might remember, designed the lesser structures in your botanical gardens. And Eressetor, my father Finwë.”

I tried to rise, but my foot got caught in the bench and I nearly fell over. Pityo was watching me with an eyebrow cocked and laughter trapped behind his lips; Maitimo was politely giving his full attention to cutting a sausage into tiny pieces. Terentaulë’s cheeks were flushed with sympathy for me, and I realized that I had failed to even notice her presence, upon arrival--she whom I loved! I blamed that on the overpowering presence of Finwë.

Finwë waved my efforts aside. “No, lad, please sit. You owe me no honor. Here, I am but the father of your master … and certainly not at all responsible for his extraordinary skill or intellect!”

His dismissal was just as well because my foot slipped then and I plunked back down to the bench, landing hard enough to rattle some of the place settings, feeling silly and conspicuous in my good robes when the others--up to and including Finwë himself--dressed casually, almost sloppily, in preparation for another day of hard work. But that quickly, the noise in the room had risen to cover my blunder; questions were being tossed at Finwë by his grandsons faster than he could answer them. I lifted my face--still hot with shame--to hopefully find the sympathetic glance of Terentaulë again, but my eyes met Fëanáro’s instead, and he held my gaze for a long while, his face devoid of expression, until I finally looked away.

~oOo~

“The calm before the storm,” Maitimo said of that day, “the day before the day before the feast.” Cooks were arriving from Formenos to begin preparations, and Fëanáro had given all of his sons a day off from labor to keep them “out from underfoot”--his precise words--as though that was any danger with such loud, strapping men as averse to housework as they were.

Terentaulë and Vingarië went into Formenos to have Terentaulë’s gown altered. The last she’d worn it, I’d overheard, she’d been just married to Curufinwë and much thinner, not yet a mother. The sons went riding in the forest to relieve their tension--or so Maitimo said when he’d graciously invited me along, his silvery eyes too wide and hopeful to be fully genuine.

I’d declined and remained in the relative peace of the library. The cooks laughed and joked outside as they plucked vegetables from Fëanáro’s kitchen garden and rinsed them beneath the water pump, but the glass of the library windows strained all but their most raucous interjections and preserved the silence. Soon, even they were gone, busy in the kitchen preparing for the feast now only two days away, and well out of earshot.

I settled in the windowseat with a mathematics book I’d been puzzling over that Fëanáro had instructed me to learn. It was a study of his own devising and much talked about in engineering circles in Tirion--I had heard my father discussing it with his colleagues with a tone of awed contempt just before leaving--but mathematics has never been one of my strongest subjects, and I found the theories falling from my brain faster than I could put them in there.

I was grateful for the distraction of a flash of color passing by the window: Telvo. Apparently--unsurprisingly--he hadn’t gone riding with his brothers. More often than not, lately, he was left behind, uninvited so far as I could tell, though I couldn’t tell if his brothers meant to exclude him or were so used to him declining their invitations that it ceased being worth the breath it took to ask him along. He was barefoot, his hair unfettered, wearing a pair of stained breeches and a green tunic much too large for him that I suspected belonged to his father or one of his brothers. There was a strong autumn breeze, and his reddish-brown hair whipped in the wind. He wandered among his father’s vegetables before stopping to poke at an anthill with a stick. His hair hung in tangled clumps past his shoulders; I found myself wondering when it had last been washed. I found myself wondering at its scent--the scent of him--beneath the odor of soaps that normally hid such intimacies from one close enough to indulge in them.

Quickly, I banished that thought from mind with the alarmed force of smashing a pesky and dangerous insect.

I turned back to my book and the safety of dry numbers and equations that ended the same each time. No peevish differences to worry over; none turning out “wrong” that could not be erased and corrected. How I wished, sometimes, that it could be so easy with me: so much wrong that was doomed to remain so. For no matter the efforts I’d made at correcting it, I remained flawed, an aberration.

Outside, another flash of movement distracted me as Telvo quickly straightened, dropping the stick to his side, followed by a voice, “Oh, hallo.” Curiosity roused, I succumbed again and let the page fall shut on my finger.

Another figure came into the garden: a broad-shouldered man with dark hair whom I’d never seen before. He stood with his back to the window where I could not see his face, but his raiment was humbled, tattered in places, that of a farmer. The leather of his boots was broken and muddied. He was speaking intensely to Telvo, and Telvo’s gaze was locked upon his face with the kind of reverent attention I’d only ever seen him give his father. He was nodding fiercely, smiling, twining a clump of hair around his finger. Most of the dark-haired Elf’s words were lost, but I heard him say, “Harvest is in,” and, “Afternoon in the forest?” Telvo nodded again and barked with laughter. “I have the afternoon off,” he said, “just let me get my boots.”

He jogged out of sight around the corner of the house, and a moment later, I heard the frenzied slap of his bare feet on the stairs and the ceiling creaking overhead as he paced around his room. Outside, the dark-haired Elf had turned, and I was stunned by the youthfulness in his face: a broad face unlined by concern, flushed cheekbones and golden-brown eyes of a startling splendor. His mouth was set in a frown; his jaw boxy, but he was not necessarily ugly. Like so many things in my life lately, he defied such convenient definition; in fact--I realized with a squeeze of my heart--though he would not be called to pose for a statue and he earn not a glance in the streets of Tirion, he was beautiful. His fingers were delving through Fëanáro’s pepper plants, divesting them carefully of dead leaves, his face creased with concentration as he plunged his hands into the foliage and pushed it aside as though in search of something. With a smile as startling upon his face as a room transformed by Laurelin’s light after being kept in the dark, behind drapes, his wide, dirt-darkened hands emerged, thumb and forefinger pinching the stem of an unlikely, late-blooming white flower that would have succumbed to the first frost, probably within the week, if it had not succumbed to him first.

Telvo reappeared then with boots upon his feet, feet that barely touched the ground. I heard him laugh as the flower was tucked behind his ear. “Shall we--” the dark-haired Elf began, but Telvo was already skipping in the direction of the forest, turning and jogging backward to watch the other Elf lumbering after him, dancing just out of reach, teasing laughter as bright as bells in the still, silent air.

They disappeared into the trees.

The house was utterly silent. I could hear my heartbeat roaring in my ears, too rapid to be explained by the mathematics book now fallen shut in my lap, my trembling hands resting atop it.

It was hard to lace my boots with fingers that quivered so. I told myself that I was only going out for fresh air, that I would walk in the opposite direction of the one that Telvo and his companion had taken. I ignored the heavy heat in my groin at the thought of the other Elf’s thick fingers putting the tiny flower behind the delicate, perfect ear of Fëanáro’s youngest son.

(So like Fëanáro’s ears, often revealed to me when he bent over my work, pushing his hair back with some annoyance behind his ears to keep it from falling onto the paper. I would like to sculpt them in clay only so that my fingers could memorize their contours without falling prone to the stinging slap I knew would come if I ever dared to reach out and let my fingers brush the pale whorl when seated alone in his office, so close to smell the electric scent of his skin and see his pulse beating with the steady rhythm of a metronome at his throat.)

I found myself following the silvery tracks in the tall grass. Two sets: one heavy-footed, the blades of grass bent and broken beneath a farmer’s heavy boots; the other light and spry as though he who left such tracks could dance upon air if he wished but preferred to have his traces woven around and crisscrossing those of his more earthbound companion. I told myself that I would pause just within the forest; I would follow no farther. I only wanted air, to free myself from the stuffy confines of the library.

Recent rains--common in autumn here, Fëanáro had said--made their tracks easy to follow amid the sparse and dying vegetation. The sky was low and gray that day and the birds long-departed to warmer climes, to make noisy the already heavy, restless airs of Tirion. I walked with careful stealth, though I did not know why. I did not seek Telvo and his friend, certainly. They were likely long gone by now, too far ahead of me to catch.

I had no reason to believe, after all, that they could find reason to stop in their brisk-paced nature walk. For what reason? I would not think of answers to that question.

Because I was aberrant did not mean that others--that Telvo--were the same.

My heartbeat so loud that I felt sure it would have announced my arrival, I came upon them in a clearing.

There was a clear pool bound by rocks, into which flowed a steady stream of bright silver water, skipping down the rocks and splashing with mirth into the basin. One of the rocks was flat and warmed by a beam of Laurelin’s light cutting through the dusty air of the forest, having been admitted through a hole in the canopy of trees. In this beam, as though in the spotlight, Telvo lay naked upon his back on the rock; his clothes were strewn across the forest floor in a trail leading to the rock, as though they’d been removed in haste. Nearest to me was his green tunic, inside out and caught upon a bramble bush.

The dark-haired farmer was slowly undressing too, but my eyes were upon the beautiful son of Fëanáro, his coppery hair spilling off of the rock, his pale skin radiant in Laurelin’s light. Long-fingered, graceful hands slipped from his chest to his belly--hollow, with ribs showing in a delicate ladder of shadows--to caress long, shapely thighs that spread open as the farmer stepped free of his trousers, stumbling rather gracelessly in his haste and nearly falling, and came to kneel between Telvo’s knees.

Telvo clasped the farmer with his legs and lifted his hips. I could not see his face, but I could imagine his provocative beauty, teeth biting his full lower lip, cheeks flushed with delight and anticipation. The front of my breeches had become painfully tight, but I didn’t dare to relieve my lust. My fingernails dug the bark of the tree behind which I hid until I feared that they were bleeding … but I dared not look away from Telvo in the clearing.

The farmer hunkered gracelessly over Telvo’s lithe form and thrust forward in a single, shuddering movement, and Telvo let forth a cry as helpless as one of pain before seizing one of the farmer’s hands and pressing it to his lips. The farmer was moving in jerking, irregular spasms, and Telvo’s back arched away from the rock, offering his chest and belly to the farmer’s hungry lips suddenly seeking to devour as much of his pale skin as could be reached. Telvo laughed in delight and ecstasy, his head lolling from side to side, his beautiful hands plunged into the farmer’s dark hair, his feet linked and locked behind the farmer’s back. The farmer was kissing his face, knocking away the white flower still tucked behind Telvo’s ear in his haste; Telvo rolled his head upon the rock, turned in my direction, but his hair spilled over his face, and he saw nothing.

Until the farmer swept it away with knowing fingers, exposing Telvo’s delicate ear for kissing, and Telvo saw me.

Of that, I was certain, for his eyes locked mine, and he grinned.

As though he was not naked and entwined with another naked man, he grinned and pulled the farmer harder into him, letting forth a moaning gasp that got louder and more wanton as he dug his fingernails into the farmer’s thick upper arms and succumbed to shuddering release.

Even then, his eyes--bright as silver sparks--never left mine, even as he pulled the farmer’s mouth to his for a deep kiss.

I plunged into the forest, heedless of the noise I made; behind me, the farmer rose with a jerk--What was that?--lurching in my direction, wrenching free of Telvo’s legs and Telvo’s delicate, beseeching fingers upon his naked thigh--Nothing, my love, do not forsake me… please?--leaving Telvo’s hand caressing only air, his foot crushing the white flower in his panicked haste.

~oOo~

Breathless and soaked with sweat--arousal withered as though it had never been--I arrived back at the house and pounded up the stairs to my chambers, uncaring who heard me. I writhed out of my damp, dirty clothes and put on something fresh. There were leaves in my hair; I brushed them free and swept the evidence of my guilt beneath the armoire with my foot. I waited for the sound of Telvo’s footsteps behind me, for a knock upon the door … but nothing.

I returned to the library and my mathematics text, left on the windowseat, although I could not concentrate: My blood was pounding so hard that I could count my heartbeat by the darkly flickering pulse behind my eyelids. Trembling fingers turned the pages--tore one--in a frenzied pantomime of reading; the thin paper stuck to my sweaty fingers, and I hated to imagine the state of my face: a guilty, livid red.

Soon, though, it became clear that neither Telvo nor his lover had pursued me.

I even allowed the indulgent hope: Maybe he hadn’t seen me after all?

My heartbeat slowed, and I stared at the book in a better parody of concentration, though I saw not equations but the slender, beautiful body of Fëanáro’s youngest son splayed upon the rock; my brain filled not with numbing calculations but Telvo’s abandoned cries, and I remembered the fire in his eyes and he gave in to the exquisite pleasure that the ungainly farmer had so easily given him.

Or maybe--I had? For he had been looking upon me when he’d climaxed.

I rubbed my knuckles into my eyes, trying to banish such dangerous images and foolish thoughts. For I was aberrant, and even if Fëanáro’s son gave in to such temptation, I would not. I thought of my father’s horror, discovering me watching the other boys bathe when I’d been but thirty-five years old. And when I’d had my trouble …

Of that, I would not think, only to know that it had started in much the same way as had this afternoon’s encounter.

For I had become practiced in looking at men only with an ascetic’s eye: viewing slender hips and long, muscular legs with the calculated sobriety of a sculpture who looks upon the naked bodies of beautiful people for hours each day and remains unmoved. I’d learned to walk past swordmasters’ practices without staring at the damp-skinned, shirtless warriors; learned not to wonder what lay beneath the neat raiment of the beautiful nobility glimpsed at a distance at festivals.

Of Fëanáro.

Insidious as a winter breeze, those words came upon me and I shivered even as I burned, for thoughts of the son awakened thoughts of the father and his dark clothes close-fitted to his blacksmith’s physique, his mischievously beautiful face, his eyes that burned mine like fire …

Weakness overcame me, and I succumbed to it. I imagined Telvo walking towards me, only he became Fëanáro somewhere between footsteps--reddish hair turned raven black--and he undid his tunic as he walked, revealing a swatch of pale chest, and let the sleeves slip free of his arms, baring his flesh to my scrutiny: rippled, muscular belly and strong, slender shoulders, fingers already untwining the ties to his breeches, revealing a thin line of dark hairs, the shadowed hollows beneath his hipbones and smooth, white skin that would be petal-soft to kiss …

I wept into my book for shame, hot tears dropping upon Fëanáro’s neatly inked letters, smudging them irretrievably and leaving the mark of my guilt upon history.

I was aberrant before I even knew the meaning of the word: As young as five years old, being left to play upon the floor with the seven-year-old son of one of my mother’s friends--a designer of stained glass windows, a golden-haired half-Vanyarin man with a wife always away on “commune”--while they disappeared for hours into her workshop, locking the door and forbidding our entry because of the allegedly dangerous materials with which they worked.

I fell in love with the son of my mother’s friend when I was only five years old, for he was as golden as his father and as delicate as a beam of Laurelin’s light and--compared to my strict upbringing--relatively uninhibited. His father did not restrict the amount of candy that he could eat, and he arrived with his pockets bulging with it, and we would share it until our grinning teeth were streaked by color and we couldn’t control our gales of laughter, toys forgotten upon the floor as he held me and I nuzzled my face into his neck.

In the garden, beneath the heavy, fragrant blossoms of my mother’s pear tree, we “married” each other as we’d seen our parents’ friends do, whispering vows to Ilúvatar and squeezing our fingers into “rings” we’d woven each other from blades of grass, rings that yellowed like true gold over time and itched our fingers. But that we did not remove.

While his father and my mother conferred in my mother’s workshop, he took off his clothes and urged me to do the same and we bathed in the reflecting pool that my father had built in the rose garden. His body was like mine and yet not, I learned: skin as golden and silky as cooked sugar, with a regal bearing where my shoulders wanted to crumple and hide my skinny, pale body. His body was like mine perfected, though he insisted upon lifting my chin and looking upon me as though with admiration.

Laurë, I called him. His full name was something like that but with extra syllables tacked on; to me, Laurë was the important part, for he was like the golden light that coaxed my eyes open in the morning.

My father came home early from the work site one day, having developed a headache because of the heat, he said, and he found Laurë and me in the reflecting pool, naked and gazing upon the other’s chubby, babyish bodies (though Laurë was growing quickly and slimming toward maturity), and he hauled us both out by our arms--wrenching my shoulder and making me cry--his face red with shame. He’d interrupted my mother and Laurë’s father at their work, and there was shouting, and Laurë was swept away by his father in haste, without even the chance to say goodbye, although he looked back at me as he was dragged through the doorway, his blue eyes brimming with tears, lost to me with the brutal bang of the door slammed shut.

I was scolded by my father and made to dress in clothes that covered me from throat to ankle in punishment, leaving bare only my hands, despite the heat. Weeping, I brandished my ring woven of grass with childish insolence and found it torn from my finger and crushed beneath my father’s boot. My mother wrung her hands and I waited for her to intercede on my behalf, but she seemed almost relieved for my father’s angry attention being lavished on me, and my trust for her diminished that day, as I cried myself to sleep that night with an empty belly.

Neither Laurë nor his father returned to our house ever again.

I, though, remained aberrant, developing a crush on my historical lore tutor when I was only twenty-two years old: a charismatic young man who’d come on recommendation of one of Prince Nolofinwë’s lords and was prone to acting out the events in the texts with me, casting me in as unlikely of roles as King Finwë or Ulmo or Melian the Maia, making me giggle with his boisterous impersonations while my own playacting remained tentative and hesitant, always stayed by the fear that he would see me as ungainly and silly and no longer worthy of his instruction. (This, though, was accomplished by my father, when he received recommendation of a wizened, cranky old man from Prince Nolofinwë himself; my young tutor with his bright laugh was summarily dismissed and went on to instruct the children of Arafinwë.) Later, I avoided boys my age for my tendency to become infatuated with them, with the violent way that they occupied space, all jostling elbows and boastful voices, so unlike me: pale and bony, called “delicate” by my mother as an excuse why I could not come out to play when the other boys knocked. Soon, they stopped knocking, and I watched them in the street from behind a veil of curtains: flailing limbs practically crackling with energy, leaping and running as though they drew their power from the very air in their lungs and could never be quashed.

They riddled my dreams at night.

I discovered self-love at the age of twenty-six but indulged only once, afterward stricken with guilt so profound that I wept for an hour and scalded my hands in an effort to scrub them clean. After that, even my dreams became sterile, filled with whipping, crackling bodies gyrating austerely in the cold spaces around me, dreams lacking in both sound and color.

After a while, I became not aberrant so much as sexless: proud in my chastity as others my age were in their callow, yearning beauty, my body slumped and twisted from hours of hunching over books and parchments, ugly--I suspected--and eager to admit it, with the pride of one immune to the puerile whims of his peers.

Only, at times--with the same horrific teetering of an acrobat suspended upon a wire high off the ground--I would falter.

As I had at my time of “trouble.”

As I had that afternoon.

When Fëanáro’s six elder sons returned--letting a rush of cold air and noisy chatter into the house--I slipped soundlessly to my chambers as though frightened that they would read guilt in my face and know. For always, I was certain that people knew, that they could tell my aberrance by looking into my face. Certainly, it seemed that my father had always known and my mother--sweetly dismissing the boys on the doorstep--perhaps she had known too.

Pacing my chambers, I considered leaving, going to Fëanáro and pleading an excuse to return to Tirion, for I could not bear the thought of Telvo’s--of Fëanáro’s--eyes upon me after what I’d allowed myself to think that afternoon. This was foolish, coming here, as foolish as the explorer who stumbles for the better part of a day towards the oasis only to discover that it was only a mirage and, by his foolery, he has plunged further into the scorching desert that will take his life.

I opened the door to my armoire and gazed at my trunk at the bottom of it with my robes hung neatly above it. To bend and tug it to the floor with a bang seemed some a monumental effort, and the noise--I feared--would alert Fëanáro to my plans, and then he would know for certain.

I remembered his words--Why, then, are you here?--and suspected that he’d already come close to guessing.

A knock on the door interrupted my ruminations, and I heard a voice emit from my throat and a head poked in my doorway: Maitimo. “Eressetor, Turko and Carnistir have put together a quick meal if you’d like to join us.” And stupidly, I found myself nodding and following him down the steps while he maintained a polite chatter about the success of their hunt that afternoon (and how he wished I’d been able to join them, of course) and the word he’d received lately from his uncles in Tirion that might be of interest to me, as they mentioned my father. I nodded and followed in his wake, grateful for his effortless banter to cover my guilt.

The dining room had been usurped as a staging area for the massive feast day-after-next, and so Curufinwë had set up a table on the patio outside, and Tyelkormo and Carnistir were setting out trays of leftover sliced meats and fruit salad hastily chopped into uneven pieces, while Fëanáro was popping the cork on a bottle of wine and handing it to Finwë to pour into glasses.

Tyelperinquar--who had recently grown from toddling awkwardly about to running in a frightening, headlong manner had pulled free from an exhausted-looking Terentaulë and was circling the table and shrieking. Curufinwë emerged from the house behind his brothers and pressed his hands to his ears. “Terentaulë! For Manwë’s sake!” he shouted, and as though she’d been waiting for that very moment, she whirled on him.

Tyelperinquar’s foot caught one of the flagstones then and he was sent pitching forward, scraping his little hands along the rough face of the rock.

Chaos was abuzz the table like a hive of angry bees: Fëanáro dropped the wine bottle to the table and it fell to its side, chugging wine across the tabletop; Terentaulë tried to push through the throng of Fëanarions gone to comfort their fallen brother-son while she wept and screamed at a livid Curufinwë; Tyelkormo was righting a caterwauling Tyelperinquar while Maitimo was scrabbling about for a napkin to blot the blood from his knees, and Macalaurë was wringing his hands and trying to back out of the mess and only ended up stepping on Carnistir’s toe and inspiring the eruption of another argument.

From amidst the chaos, Finwë emerged and came to me, warm breath whispering in my ear, “The door at the end of the hall to the right, in it is some salve and some bandages and some of Tyelperinquar’s stuffed toys that I picked up out of the parlor. Bring one of each.”

Grateful to let the door fall shut on the ruckus out on the patio, I resisted my urge to tarry and hurried for the sake of poor Tyelperinquar (for even if the afternoon’s events made me doubt that I could muster the resolve to be in love with his mother, the poor boy surely didn’t deserve my dismissal as well) to the end of the hall where three doors stood.

Forgetting Finwë’s exact words, I opened the one at the far end of the hall and something hard and heavy fell and landed on my toe. With a hiss of pain, I stooped to retrieve it.

A statue.

A statue of a woman: a full-bodied woman, naked and reclining with her hair the only covering of her body, done in copper and so exquisite that I winced at the cold touch of metal, for I’d half-expected her to be of warm flesh.

She looked familiar, and the memory came unbidden of a neck craned to see over the heads of people taller than me, a royal procession and a thick-bodied woman with a long rope of coppery hair: but it had not been she in whom I’d been interested, it had been the man who’d held her hand, a dark-haired resplendent man whose eyes I’d wanted to fall on mine, though he’d remained naïve to the admiring crowd around him.

She was Nerdanel, the wife of Fëanáro.

Blushing, knowing that I should not have seen--much less touched--this intimate item, I straightened with it pinched between my fingers to replace it on the shelf and found myself faced with shelves overflowing with hundreds more of the same: statues done in metal and ceramic, charcoal sketches and paintings; Nerdanel laughing and gazing lustily from beneath a curtain of hair and napping on her worktable and resting with her hand upon her pregnant belly; nude and clothed; bathing and sleeping and working.

She was far from an attractive woman but the artworks--seen through the eyes of Fëanáro--did not show that. One of the sketches was so fresh that charcoal flaked off in my fingers: Nerdanel rocking and nursing the twins. Another was so old that the colors had faded into tinted shades of gray: a painting of Nerdanel lying the grass with the ties of her tunic coming undone, still a girl, not yet a wife or mother, laughing at a rain of pink petals being poured upon her from a source unseen, fingers stretching toward the viewer as though reaching for the source of the petals. I felt that if I reached forth too, I could pull her from the painting and into my embrace. I could almost see the slim, pale hand of Fëanáro moving into the picture--a guilty petal still stuck to his finger--and doing just that.

I wrung the statue in my hands, unsure if I wanted to demolish her … or worship her.

My mother had often been called to illustrate books on the Valar, and her drawings of them were different than her drawings of Elves: whimsically abstract, with hair coursing in a way that the wind would never have allowed and flattering features conveniently emphasized while others were dwarfed. Large eyes and tiny feet. Lips as bright as autumn apples upon a face as pale as snow. Bright eyes, benevolent smiles, peaceful hands turned to the sky. There was a certain reverence also in Fëanáro’s study of his departed wife: an ethereal, otherworldly quality to her, a sort of beauty that was more invention than real. But the reason that I reached to touch her face, certain of her reality--as deluded as a bird that crashes into a window, believing it to be empty sky--was not because of his reverence but his mastery of her, as though every detail had seen studied and memorized and worshipped.

What did I feel for that? A maelstrom of emotions: envy, yes, but hatred also for the woman who had the chance to command such reverent loyalty from one such as Fëanáro--and she was so ugly too! so unworthy!--and she’d cast it aside as though it mattered not.

There I stood, likewise ugly and unworthy, unable to imagine such audacity, turning her statue in my hand, fingers brushing thighs and breasts that Fëanáro had caressed in life, the memory of which had probably been with him in casting this statue. I did not hear the footsteps behind me until a shadow fell over the woman lying in my hands. “Eressetor” came the gently admonishing voice, “the closet to the right.”

The statue was taken from me and replaced on the shelf, securely this time, and the door shut upon the images--hundreds of images--of Nerdanel. Finwë opened the closet to the right and piled my arms high with salve and bandages and a stuffed dog made of rags. “We do not speak of that,” he said, and I knew of what he spoke: the closet. “It hurts him.” A warm, paternal hand pressed in the middle of my back and guided me down the hallway, back to the patio, to announce me as Tyelperinquar’s savior.

~oOo~

Both twins were missing at supper that night, and Telvo’s absence brought me a measure of relief, enough that I even cheerfully volunteered to help with the dishes--usually Telvo’s task--in hopes of dispelling any notion of strangeness that Fëanáro or his sons may have sensed about me.

(Although Fëanáro barely glanced at me through the entire meal, instead remaining in deep, avid conversation with his father at one end of the table, leaving me to feign bright-eyed mirth at the other, pretending to be amused by the dirty jokes that Carnistir and Tyelkormo were telling, each trying to best the other. They didn’t notice me either.)

After the meal, Tyelkormo and Carnistir carried the dishes into the kitchen and piled them on the counters amid the pots and pans the cooks had been using for their work that afternoon. I pushed my sleeves around my elbows and pondered the basin full of sudsy water; in my father’s home, dishwashing had been a chore done by a servant. My mother couldn’t chance “ruining her hands,” she said, and my father hadn’t the time, so there was a constantly changing procession of young women who came to do our laundry and dishes, “retiring” when they were taken as apprentices for more illustrious pursuits or when they married and began keeping their own homes.

Fëanáro’s children had no such luxuries, despite growing up in the home of a High Prince. Their hands were calloused and scarred, though from far more than dishwashing. I felt disoriented--privileged, pampered--beside them. Alone in the kitchen, I had no idea where to begin, so I spent the first minute looking from the basin to the piles of food-smeared dishes and back to the basin, waiting for a logical solution to come upon me. Funny how I’d assumed that these tasks worthy of being done by young girls would be easy.

The kitchen door swung open then and admitted Terentaulë, bouncing a fussy Tyelperinquar on her hip. “I’ll wash if you dry,” she said, depositing Tyelperinquar into a corner, where he immediately hopped up and dashed to play alone beneath the table. She sighed and rubbed at the small of her back, then--glancing up to note my surprise--said, “Two always clean the dishes. I’ve always been the one to help Telvo.”

“Oh,” I said, as she nudged me aside and began plunking plates into the basin. A thin steam rose from the water, and I was grateful that she had volunteered to wash. Her hands--when they emerged--were a bright, painful pink, though she seemed not to notice.

“Tyelperinquar likes the time with his uncle.” I glanced behind me, and Tyelperinquar was peering curiously at me from beneath a chair. When my gaze happened upon him, he jerked back into the shadows. Terentaulë laughed. “Don’t worry, he’s just not accustomed to you yet. But Tyelperinquar takes after me in that. Telvo has always been my favorite of the brothers.”

I noticed that she did not qualify: except for my husband of course. She gave me a secretive smile, as though she’d noticed her error too and did not intend to correct it.

So close! I thought. So close to her at last, and here I’d decided not to be in love with her!

If the brothers’ masculinity was in their ability to rouse noise and uproar wherever they went, so Terentaulë’s femininity--despite her arms muscular from working in the garden, despite her thick-calloused hands--was in her subtle invasion of one’s senses: her scent of the bathing powders that she and Vingarië used; the gentle heat of her body beside mine; the quiet power of her voice, when she spoke, in volume rarely exceeding the splash of dishes dropping into the basin but making me crane over to listen, anticipating that words so selective must be worth hearing. Even in her appearance was subtler than that of the Fëanorians--hands glinting with jewels and angular, hard bodies honed for domination--in the gentle curve of breast, belly, hip, a body created for comfort and nurturance, into which one should wish to bury himself and never emerge.

We worked side by side in a comfortable silence, until I heard a furtive scuttle behind me and would have turned if not for Terentaulë’s whispered admonishment and fingers on my wrist: “Shh, no, he will only run back under the table,” followed by a soft touch on my calf, barely perceptible, of a small bird landing, then tiny arms slipped around my leg. Terentaulë giggled and I glanced down to see Tyelperinquar embracing my leg, cheek pressed to my calf and upturned, plaintive eyes on mine, awaiting reproach.

“It seems that he has grown accustomed to you after all!” she said delightedly. “We will not tell his uncles Tyelkormo and Carnistir, for until two months ago he would not even let them hold him without wailing as though put to torment.”

How I wished that I could force my heart to love her! For I knew that I should love the curve of her cheek, the way her hair was coming unbound and falling over her shoulder. I knew that I should love her way of capturing escaped bubbles upon her hand and blowing gently upon them to let Tyelperinquar watch the swirling colors change. But I could not. What was wrong with me that I could not?

The Valar had explained how one might come to lust after a woman already wed; they’d blamed it on the Marring of Arda, as though the allegiances with which we should have been born in our hearts--a spouse chosen for each Elf who would in turn love that Elf and no other, as at Cuiviénen--had been tangled in the tumult that Melkor had unleashed upon the world until some were given no love and some too much. I wondered at the destination of my own affections. I wondered why they had been cast to others like me--other males--when such love was fruitless. Aberrant. I wondered why the Valar could not explain this to me, why they could not quell the hatred of me festering in my heart.

For I could bear to lust after Terentaulë; such affections were common enough to be trite, the stuff of bad love poetry, a rung to be crossed in ascending to adulthood. For who hasn’t briefly coveted the wife of a friend, a married tutor, a distant cousin with bright eyes and long wed? I would scrawl my heartbroken sonnets and maybe even make my tearful confessions here, amid the stink of discarded food and the pungent aroma of soap. I would endure the scorn--the fists--of her husband. And I would grow past her in the way of a scab growing to cover a wound.

I wished that I could love the silence between us, her gentleness and subtlety, but I longed for the crashing uproar of her husband and his brothers, the musky reek of male bodies. I longed for arrogant beauty that knows it deserves love--and so shall be loved. She glanced at me, and I waited for her to say that she knew my thoughts, for so loud and anguished were they in my head that surely she must hear even just a whisper. But she smiled and said, “Eressetor, you are falling behind on drying your dishes.”

Indeed, the pile of damp dishes had grown quite high, and my hands lay idle, twisting the dishcloth. Nervously, I laughed. “Ai. It seems that I have become lost in thought.”

“Indeed, ‘Thought’ is a treacherous place,” she said, and I waited for her to laugh as with a joke, but her face remained grave as she concentrated on scrubbing dried food from between the tines of a fork. “Oh!” she said suddenly, as though struck. “I saw your friend in town. Ornisso? I told him that you were apprenticed to my father-in-law. He was in Formenos, delivering a message to Lord Merkurya. He sends his greetings.”

She fell into silence to match mine. I wondered if she could hear my pounding heart; I wondered if she noticed how I fumbled and nearly dropped Fëanáro’s favorite drinking mug? Tremulous hands sat it on the counter. Into my palm, she pressed the fork to be dried and returned to her task without a word.

My “trouble” came as an innocuous servant--an assistant to Prince Nolofinwë’s chief scribe--with the innocent name Ornisso.

Ornisso, Ornisso … I used to whisper it to myself, writhing at night in tangled sheets in a place between waking and dreaming, where my thoughts strayed beyond my conscious control and yet I recognized their wrongness, my aberrance, in allowing them. I begged my fingers to pinch my flesh and send me hurtling into wakefulness, but doing so was as tortuous as removing honey from the lips of a starving man.

Ornisso!

Shortly before my forty-fifth begetting day, my father decided that the hours that I spent in study deserved to be put to--as he called it--“more productive use.” It was not enough to read and learn; he wanted a tangible result at the end of the day. “As my labors produce buildings--or at least heaps of brick that aspire to be buildings--so should the extraordinary intelligence with which you’ve been gifted go to more productive use.”

My father--having done a major renovation for one of Prince Nolofinwë’s lords--was growing close to the prince himself in the affectionate, weaseling way of a small child squirming between its parents. More and more of his time, he spent in the prince’s company: at feasts or counsels, being called to put his professional’s eye on a series of plans that the prince’s wife Anairë had drafted. His boastful suppertime conversation was littered with the name Nolofinwë, the title of Prince having been dropped long ago, at least in reference to--if not in the company of--Prince Nolofinwë.

My mother evenly chewed her food and gazed out the window and said nothing, but my father’s bright chatter would not be stayed.

The allegiance with the prince began to bear fruit for my father, though, when the offhand remark somehow made its way to him that Prince Nolofinwë had recently “gifted” a half-dozen of his best scribal apprentices to one of his lords in the north, requiring that assistants be moved to take their place, ultimately resulting in a shortage of assistants and a great deal of drudgery being forced on those who no longer believed the rote copying of documents to be within the realm of reasonable duties that they should be expected to perform. This resulted in--according to my bright-eyed father--the clever mentioning of my diligence and success in my studies, to which the prince (“Nolofinwë”) had been very receptive.

I was granted an interview with Nolofinwë’s brusque chief scribe, who asked me three questions so bland that I would forget them in time for my father to ask at supper that evening. The scribe--“Mornólo” he was called; a man with an unusually large forehead and lank silver-blond hair--scratched on a piece of parchment as I spoke, and I was not entirely convinced that what he was writing had anything to do with what I was saying.

“You’re appointed,” he said when I paused to breathe midway through my third answer, announcing, even as he gathered his papers and hastened out the door, that I should report an hour past the Mingling the next day.

A day of work as a scribe’s assistant was a tedious one, mostly copying documents that had already been proofed and revised by a scribe or one of the apprentices; an hour had the ability to stretch overlong and ponderous as a drop of molasses slowly oozing from the back of the spoon. My hand ached by the midday luncheon break--I, who had thought myself beyond such neophyte’s dilemmas!--and my mind felt drowned in the long march of endless black letters. I sat on the grass in the library courtyard and nibbled at the meal that my mother had had the maidservant pack into a sack for me. I wasn’t really hungry.

Nearby, beneath an apple tree, three of the other assistants sat, swapping meals and laughing. One--the apparent ringleader--kept glancing my way. He was pale and slight in form, easily ignored and even more easily disregarded--it would seem--with dishwater gray eyes and pale brown hair as fine as flax that had a habit of escaping any restraint that he attempted to impose upon it. Yet he dominated the group, the courtyard, with his presence. He had a breathless voice and cheeks that tended to flush with laughter. I kept from looking in his direction.

Soon, a shadow slipped over me, and a hand extended in front of my face. “Join us?” Startled, I glanced up at the pale boy and--against my better judgment--extended my hand to his. He was stronger than he looked--I would learn that many aspects of his appearance were deceitful--and he dragged me easily to my feet. I stood almost a full head taller than him. My hand already in his, laughing, he turned the grasp into a handshake. “I am Ornisso,” he said, and I stammered, “Er-Eressetor.”

“It’s a pleasure, Eressetor. We’d like you to join us for what remains of luncheon, if you would?” He bowed and indicated in the direction of the other two boys--watching me with wide-eyed, blank stares--as though it was his place to make concessions to me.

Up close, I could see that his eyes were in fact gray-green, a complicated color that would enthrall me in days to come. I would earn my mother’s ire, making a mess of her inks, trying to mix such an impossible hue. And his cheeks and nose were speckled with pale freckles. Those, I would trace with my fingers, naming constellations among them, while he lay on the ground and laughed. They stood out more when his face flushed with laughter. And passion.

Then, naturally, pondering such notions remained impossible, and he’d led me to his friends and introduced me. Their loose triangle shifted and became a square with our collective meals at the center. “Now,” said Ornisso, “I think that two apples are a fair trade for bread and cheese.”

“Bollocks,” said one of the other boys, a lanky blond who I would learn came from Taniquetil. My eyes widened at his insolence. The others remained unfazed.

“There is mold on the cheese!” Ornisso declared. “And it is not a cheese that is supposed to be moldy!”

“I am supposed to make a meal of two apples?”

“If you can make a meal of moldy cheese, then two apples should be a treat!”

Ornisso, I would learn, was considered the “head scribal assistant,” a patronizing title that had been created (according to the blond boy from Taniquetil, who liked whisper to me as we worked) to assuage him after he hadn’t been chosen as one of the half-dozen new apprentices. “He is next in line,” I was told, “and it should by rights have been his. He was the best among us. But they chose based on seniority rather than competence.” A shrug that was anything but carefree; shoulders stiff, it betrayed grievances unresolved and deeper than a mere scribal apprenticeship. “The one chosen in his stead was five years older and on the job a year longer and he has a wife and new baby to mind.” Another stiff-shouldered shrug followed by angry silence.

(I would learn other things of Ornisso: notably, that he was allergic to ink. The nearly translucent skin on the backs of his pale hands would rise in painful-looking welts as he worked, and I would exclaim over them. “But why? Why take this line of work if it hurts you so?” and he would reply, grinning, “What we love, Eressetor, is never what’s best for us!”)

Of course, in years to come, I would think often on how he’d been overlooked for the apprenticeship and the words would return to me--“seniority rather than competence”--and I would hear a depth to them that I had not then perceived. Naturally, most of the Elves in Nolofinwë’s employ believed that Fëanáro’s place belonged to their prince. Both were eldest sons in a sense, but Nolofinwë was widely regarded as the more competent leader. Yet King Finwë persisted in his belief that Fëanáro’s place was Fëanáro’s alone, and Nolofinwë was relegated to the humble station of a second-born child, a High Prince in title only.

Never did I sense displeasure in Nolofinwë for this, on the few rare occasions when I came among his company, but his servants: how their faces would rise into a livid flush just to ponder it! I imagined the sort of celebration there that must have followed Fëanáro’s exile, despite Nolofinwë’s own purported forgiveness of his half-brother.

My loyalty was never questioned, and of my fascination with the enigmatic eldest prince, I never spoke, not even to Ornisso. Strangely, in that short year in Nolofinwë’s employ, I thought little of Fëanáro, even as I continued to study his work in my private time. But “Fëanáro" was a word on a page, a byline, and the ephemeral figure with bright eyes and strong hands that had saved me in the street that day retired to a place of legend: remembered but scarcely believed.

After my “trouble,” only then did I think again of him.

Amid the other assistants, I strove hard, determined to excel even at the mindless, tedious task of a scribal assistant, and I quickly grew to rank with Ornisso. He and I became fast friends as a result, working late into Telperion’s hours by lamplight, opposite each other at the long tables where the assistants did their copying, rapid whispers competing with the scratching of our quills. I spoke more in that year, I think, than I had in the whole of my life up to that point. Ornisso’s mind met mine but did not easily bend to what I’d previously thought of airtight logic; we argued late into the night, long after our work was completed, and when we occasionally agreed on a point, we would make emphatic, passionate declarations--volleying back and forth like a ball between two children eager to test their coordination on each other--inciting the other until my heart pounded with startling vigor and the freckles on his face stood out like dots of brown ink. He “loved my mind,” he said. “I think we share a single thought, at times.” When I mentioned how often we disagreed--on art, politics, literature--he laughed and said, “Many are the trees that spring from the ground overlying a subterranean river, but their source is the same.”

Ornisso was the most beloved of the assistants for both his good humor and his competence, and he was unfailingly adored by both the scribes and the other assistants. Even Mornólo was less harsh with him than the others, almost paternal. In his wide, gray-green eyes, it was impossible to believe that he felt anything less than love for every person whom he looked upon, and in his voice was a sincerity that few others could muster. To even the most sniveling of the assistants, he lent his attention, patted their shoulders and gave them reassurances, twisted the most obdurately despondent faces into smiles.

In the intensity of his gaze--with the weight of his attention--it was hard to imagine that one’s small problems did not form the crux upon which Arda balanced, that in his intervention on one’s behalf, he was executing some heroic beyond merely assuaging another in the string of neurotics who confided in him.

With me, it was different: he sought me, for ever a private person, I dared not take my confessions to anyone, even him. It was academia of which we spoke. “I have found my match in you!” he frequently said, and even as he praised me, I was not lost on the fact that he also praised himself.

But it seemed so inconsequential. Naturally, someone with his gifts should recognize his abilities. It was not fair to expect otherwise, in asking him to be fraudulent in his assessments of himself. His pride was more than earned, more than justified.

As time progressed and Ornisso and I began to monopolize each other’s attention more and more, I began to notice how conversation faltered when I entered the room, how I would turn to find that the prickling along the back of my neck was caused by concentrated, antipathetic stares that were rarely lowered out of politeness or common tact. I heard the rumors but was quick to dismiss them, for I had not yet fully acknowledged my aberrance, and I remained chaste, asexual. In feverish whispers to Ornisso, alone late at night, I spat about my disgust for those who could not accept platonic friendship and professional camaraderie as something that was not an affront to their own--albeit lesser--intelligence. Or worse: something sexual. Ornisso nodded rapidly and did not speak. His freckles remained ghostly on his cheeks, and he quickly changed the subject.

But my dreams betrayed me: In my dreams, Ornisso came to me, and I healed the wounds on the backs of his hands with kisses. What we love is never what’s best for us. “Oh! But you are!” His head on my chest, privy to the intimacy of my beating heart, the rush of air into my chest, the workings of my life. Our bodies clashed with the same intimacy as our minds, and I awoke in a tangle of soaked sheets, my groin throbbing with painful arousal.

One night, we spoke so late that the Lights had almost mingled by the time Ornisso, yawning, decided to succumb to bed. He lived in the palace, in the servants’ quarters, for his family was of the farming folk living south of Tirion, a two-hour ride on horseback. It was a ten-minute walk back to my father’s house, but--dizzy with exhaustion--I swayed on my feet and pondered whether I should sleep in the library. “Do not be silly!” said Ornisso. “You are welcome to stay with me! My bed is large enough for two.”

But I could not, for fear of waking from one of my dreams, unfulfilled, and finding Ornisso in the bed beside me, a solid reality instead of a dream dissipating with the rising light of morning. I feared what he might learn of me or what I might in the delirium of dreams do to him.

I politely declined and claimed that my energy was returning and that I would easily make it home. I refused to see disappointment in Ornisso’s face; it could not be that he had wanted me to share his bed. He was concerned, I convinced myself, for my safety. That is why his brow furrowed so.

In fact, I made it to the first garden outside the palace and slept upon a bench in a gazebo, waking hours later to discover two laughing little girls had scattered me with birdseed and were watching the sparrows scurry along my slumbering body, picking seeds from amid the folds of my robes. Much to their disappointment, I rose--scattering birdseed and sparrows both--and lumbered back to work.

Ornisso was already there, of course, and grinning with the news that one of the apprentices had written a treatise on the divergent styles of music between the Noldor and the Vanyar that was being discussed in illustrious circles. “No work today, Eressetor!” he cried, spinning me about. “We have cause for celebration!”

(What this meant: the apprentice would surely have to be named a scribe or chance earning ridicule upon the House of Nolofinwë. And an assistant would move to take his place. We all believed that would be Ornisso. It would have to be Ornisso.)

Gladly, I gave in to the celebration, for Prince Nolofinwë himself had sent down trays of food and bottles of wine with a congratulatory note attached, and we all gathered to listen to the apprentice read the treatise aloud amid much drunken cheering not exactly suited to the apprentice’s dry, discursive style. Ornisso had given me a glass of wine, and I sipped it, but as the reverie rose and the joy of celebration pounded in my blood, I drank faster, and Ornisso was always at my elbow to refill my glass from bottles that seemed never to empty.

I drank until I could barely walk--Ornisso was not much better--and Mornólo finally broke the festivities, ordering everyone home to their beds. “I shall have to walk you home,” said Ornisso, stumbling against me and taking my arm, tugging me toward the door to the courtyard. We wandered out to the courtyard before we realized that we’d taken the wrong door and collapsed into a gale of giggles. Mornólo reappeared, his mouth moving in angry shapes that suggested sound that couldn’t make it past the exuberant rush of blood in my ears. I heard Ornisso’s lovely, breathy voice making our apologies; I heard someone snickering and realized that that was me, but I was too drunk to feel horrified. Ornisso had a firm grip of my arm, and we were dragging each other back inside to the cool library, then the hallway.

Somewhere in there, Ornisso’s arm slipped around my waist and my arm slipped around his. We made it as far as the first decorative alcove before collapsing into each other’s embrace, our breaths sweetly fermented and mingling where our lips threatened to touch in a kiss. “Eressetor …” Ornisso’s finger rose and caressed my lips. I gasped and closed my eyes and something warmer--soft as the petals of a rose--replaced it.

Lips parted and the tips of our tongues touched, drew back, as frightened animals into their burrows. He laughed against my lips, plunged deeper that time. I moaned into his mouth, our tongues entwined and the drunken heat of the wine settling into my groin. Hands caressed chests, tangled in hair. He tasted of wine and something sweet beneath: Ornisso. He kissed my throat and the hairs on my arms rose in delight. Our bodies--until then, nearly bent at the waist to keep our hips from touching, sensing the danger in such--came suddenly together, with his hands upon my buttocks, his hips grinding mine, our chests pressing each other so that I could feel his heart pounding as he could surely feel mine. I believed that they matched in rhythm to each other, as though the life in our veins came from the same source too, as Ornisso had said once of our thoughts. In our open mouths, our breaths mingled: one sustenance, one heartbeat, one desire.

Farther down the hall, we heard the library door swing open and footsteps moving in our direction. Suddenly sober, we wrenched apart, and cold air hungrily rushed to fill the space between us. We found the angry eyes of Mornólo. I heard him this time: “I thought I told you to be home, Eressetor?” and Ornisso, pleading on my behalf, “He had to catch his breath. But we are recovered now, and I will see him home.”

~oOo~

We stole moments together when we could, seated side by side in an otherwise deserted library, quills still pinched between fingers, blots of ink bleeding onto otherwise meticulous pages, lips seeking and tongues tangling, kisses so deep that we would have to surface for air.

When our free days coincided, we went to the deserted gardens of lower Tirion and lay in seclusion beneath the trees. I forsook my robes for light tunics and breeches, aching to feel Ornisso’s hands warm against my skin with as little cloth between us as possible. Sometimes, he grew brave and would caress the naked skin of my chest and quivering belly, lifting my tunic to bare my flesh to his scrutiny--my eyes closed tightly as though prepared to endure pain--my breath rising to a gasp when I felt his lips upon me, tongue darting into my navel, rising along my chest to flick against my nipple before settling his face into the curve of my neck, breathing hard, fighting to regain control. For we understood enough to have made rules for our conduct together: no removal of clothing, even shoes; no touching below the waist. Lying on my back, legs tangled with his, the protuberance in the front of my breeches was obvious--and how it ached for him!--but he said nothing, and his trembling hands tugged my tunic to cover my bared chest and belly.

“Eressetor,” he whispered, “I want us to make love to each other.”

But I didn’t really know what that meant, even as I nodded and said that I wanted it too. My father had instructed me in the mechanics of “mating” between a male and a female at a young age, but Ornisso and I were both males, and I could not imagine how it would work between us. Though in my secret fantasies, allowed only in the depths of night where they could be lost amid dreams and forgotten in the morning, he put not only his hands but his mouth on me--and I, on him. But I did not expect him to agree to something like that in real life.

Ornisso appeared to know more than I did; indeed, he was the more courageous of us, touching and kissing me in ways that I dared not imagine, sliding his tongue inside my ear and nibbling my nipples until I nearly screamed and had to wrench away to keep from releasing inside of my breeches. I wondered, sometimes, if he’d had other lovers before me, but I dared not ask. I dared not wonder at the implication of the blond Elf from Taniquetil and his sudden anger with me and astounded silence with Ornisso. I dared not question why I sometimes interrupted my lover in heated arguments with others in the corners of stacks where no one went … except Ornisso and me, to steal kisses amid the musty reek of moldering books.

The lovemaking Ornisso wanted, it would have to take place in his bedroom. Or so he said. Summer Festival was coming upon us, and many of the apprentices and assistants had been given leave to return to their families, and the servants’ quarters would be relatively deserted. I would remain late in the library under the pretense of study. Amid the frenzied Festival preparations, no one would notice whether I was there or not. And I would go to him.

~oOo~

The blond Elf. I knew his name once. I must have. We had been friends … or almost friends. Certainly, we’d talked. Certainly, I’d needed to say his name on occasion.

But his name was erased from my memories with all the force of scrubbing away at a parchment until it tears, removing the ink, yes, but also leaving a hole, a wound, that reminds me of the pain contained in those original words, requiring such drastic obliteration. Or word. In his name.

The day of the Summer Festival, I made my excuses to my father of work I had to finish in the library. Carefully, I’d bathed and dressed, leaving my hair for once unfettered for Ornisso claimed to like it best that way. If my father noticed, he said nothing. It was my mother who was dismayed that I might be late to the festival. “Ai, that that drudgery should take you away from one of the few opportunities you have to celebrate actual freedom!” She looked at my father when she said it, although the words were supposedly directed at me.

Ornisso had been right: Nolofinwë’s palace was in chaos, with servants running about with trays of food and decorations; tents were being raised on the lawn and lanterns strung between the trees. I blended effortlessly into their midst, climbing the stairs of the servants’ quarters to the nearly deserted third floor where the scribal apprentices and assistants lived. Most had left to return to their families for the festival, and the hallway was a long row of doors closed upon only emptiness and silence. I’d never been to the servants’ quarters much less Ornisso’s room, and I’d written the number on my palm in ink, lest I forget: 12. Room 12.

Faintly, I could hear the sound of voices. Strange, I thought, but remembered that Ornisso had not been assured that all of the other residents would leave for the festival. I walked carefully and silently down the hall, lest they hear me and wonder at my presence there, counting doors as I passed them: 2. 4. 6. My heart felt like it squeezed a thousand frenzied beats in the time it took to pass from each door to the next.

At last I came to door 12 … and the voices had gotten louder. One was clearly Ornisso’s; I recognized his breathy laugh.

Panic sparked in my heart like a jolt of electricity. My hands were already quavering as they reached for the doorknob. Surely, there is an explanation for this! I should have knocked; I know that now. “Just come in!” Ornisso had told me, for if we were to share such physical intimacy, the familiarity of walking through one’s door without needing invitation should also be assumed. I’d believed him on this. I’d wanted to believe him on this. So I hadn’t knocked; I let my sweaty hand slip on the doorknob and fumble it open, wanting an explanation, trusting by the wide gray-green innocence of Ornisso’s eyes that it would be a good one.

But it was not.

In Ornisso’s arms, he held the blond Elf from Taniquetil whose name I can't--don't want to--remember.

My voice was caught in my throat--it wanted to scream, and in my mind, it was--and they did not see me at first. Ornisso held him and caressed his golden hair; he was naked above the waist and Ornisso’s tunic was partly undone. The familiar prattling chatter between them I believed was something that only I shared with Ornisso. The intimacy of hands on naked flesh, that had been my right too.

Ornisso glanced up then and saw me in the door. “Eressetor! You’re early!” His gray-green eyes wide with shock but already blinking, guiltless.

I was early--by a few minutes, perhaps. Ornisso tried, but the blond Elf would not let Ornisso wrench away. He held his lover--my lover--in his adamant grip. He smiled at me with triumph.

There was a dull roaring in my ears. I tried to turn and run, but Ornisso had wriggled free of his golden Vanyarin lover and was dragging me into the room. His familiar lips--I’d kissed them so many times--his wriggling tongue that had tasted mine were forming explanations. Excuses. Between roaring heartbeats, I caught individual words: Never promised commitment. Could not forsake him. Love you both. Could not break his heart. I never said, I never promised, I never said that I was yours alone.

Like shards of metal were his words, driven into the tender flesh of my reeling mind.

Of course, of course he was right! He had never promised that I was his alone! That was my own spurious conjecture, born of kisses and caresses and intimacies that I’d never imagined--or maybe never wanted to imagine--him sharing with another.

Once again, my logic bowed beneath the weight of his; he prevailed over me. He is better than me! Better than me again!

Again, I tried to escape. He held me there; he was not finished making explanations that I did not want to hear. I flailed and cracked my hip against the corner of his desk. Unseen, beneath my clothes, blood and bruise flourished; I felt nothing. I slapped his face, scratched his skin; later, I would find his blood beneath my nails and the scratches on his face would be used as evidence of our collective guilt.

Then, of course, such rationality was impossible. Though Ornisso was making his best efforts to calm me through logic: I never said! Again, those words, that presumption of innocence! Leaving me as the one guilty, the one who’d been wrong. My wounds, then, self-inflicted.

“It is unnatural!” I heard myself cry. “To love two such as that!”

Ornisso caught his hands in mine. He kissed my quivering lips, so familiar, so intimate a touch that I almost believed that I could close my eyes and this would all be a terrible nightmare. The mussed bed behind him would manifest behind my back; we would “make love,” as he’d called it. Love. For I did love him.

His hands were warm, a comfort to mine icy cold.

“Eressetor,” he said, “you speak of that which is unnatural?” A bitter laugh, like none I’d imagined within the capabilities of my jovial lover. “When you--like I--give in to the foolish urges of fruitless love? Already we are aberrations; why not unnatural too!”

And so it was affixed upon me: Aberration.

~oOo~

Ornisso took me home, and I curled in my bed and wept. I refused my mother’s summons to the Summer Festival and, for three days, went unnoticed in my grief. My father was busy at his work, having forsaken the festival to complete a set of designs for Prince Nolofinwë. My mother went without us, a dash of color upon the walkway--laughter as bright as glasses ringing together in a toast--racing to the carriage that awaited her, faceless hands reaching out to draw her faster into their embrace.

My strange behavior was only noted when I failed to show up for my work the day after the festival. I heard Mornólo in the parlor downstairs, speaking with my father. Unlike him. A motivated worker. Reason to believe. Unfortunate involvement with another assistant. “Ornisso.” Gifted but possessing a reputation. Rumor of “homosexual” affairs with other assistants. Gifted but … unfortunate.

With the headlong force of a stampeding beast, my father burst into my bedroom. The underpants I’d worn to Ornisso’s--bloodied by my collision with his desk--were in the laundry basket, and it did not take him long to find them. To label the blood as “evidence” of something more nefarious. There were witnesses--“Plenty of them!” my father shouted--who would attest to Ornisso leading me home “ashen-faced and shaken”; one of the servants had seen us coming from his room, and I could barely keep my footing on the stairs, he said. Ornisso had to hold me up, lift me from the last step to the floor. I had been weeping.

These notions were presented to me as facts, irrefutable, as though I had not been there to witness them.

My father conjured a name, one of his “friends” from Prince Nolofinwë’s court, a healer, but I refused to allow him to examine me, so the marks on my hip went unnoticed and furthered the cause for my guilt. If the blood was easily explained, my father insisted--shouting while Mornólo hovered in the door behind him--then why the refusal? I curled tighter in my bed. I could see the progression of my father’s logic, and I laughed, for how much further from the truth could it be? But neither was I guiltless; neither could I deny that Ornisso and I had been lovers. No matter whether I verified to his false beliefs or told the truth, the admission would come out: We had been lovers. I’d loved him, alike in flesh to myself, a fruitless, unnatural love. I was aberrant.

“There were scratches, also, on Ornisso’s face,” said Mornólo from the doorway, “and he will not tell us from where they came.”

My father dropped to his knees beside my bed. His hands fluttered over me, as though afraid to touch me--his own aberrant son--but yet hopeful at the same time that this could somehow all be pinned back on Ornisso. That my good name--and his--could be recovered. The hope in his voice was cleverly covered by dismay: “Eressetor. Eressetor, did he take you by force?”

Who had betrayed me more? Ornisso? Or my father?

My father’s hand alighted on my shoulder and idly stroked me through the bedclothes as one might placate a nervous animal. Say it! Save my name! Say that he raped you!

Oh, how he must have hoped for it! Travesty! Such violence against my son! My innocent Eressetor by those despicable, desperate aberrants! Hoping that my pain was not one of the heart but a violation of body and spirit, something from which I would not easily recover and which he could use to his advantage. I saw him nodding, accepting sympathies. Demanding justice. My innocent son! The label of “aberrant” gone and “victim” tacked upon me in its place.

I shook my head and spoke into the pillow, but loudly, so that there was no doubt that he could hear me: “No. It was nothing like that.”

~oOo~

Ornisso and I were both dismissed from service. Although--I found out from Terentaulë--Mornólo had pled on Ornisso's behalf to Nolofinwë, had him reassigned in the north. But I’d been there less than a year and was still regarded as dispensable, and Mornólo was not willing to risk his own reputation to save both of our jobs.

My “trouble,” it came to be called, by my father. As though it was a passing fancy, a mistake I’d made and not an indication of the person that I was. “We will not speak of it,” my mother decided, “ever again, beyond this night.” She’d returned from revelry to this discovery; she’d paced, still in her festival clothes, smelling of a spicy, unfamiliar perfume, wineglass clutched in hand.

But my father spoke of it, to my mother’s brothers. A fight erupted that night, a rare occurrence between my parents, who rarely expended any sort of emotion--antipathetic or otherwise--on each other. “How could you?” she sobbed. “Our shame!” And my father replied that he had to get it out, as though the disgusting truth about me had festered in his thoughts and threatened to burst in a spray of pus if allowed to remain untouched. And from there, word spread like pestilence, from the most innocuous of encounters: “You heard of Eressetor? And the unfortunate ‘affair’ with the boy from the scribal assistants?” For no one could bear the pressure of such hideous information; always, it begged to relieved, the infection released, as though speaking of it to others with an appropriate amount of disdain might make the aberrance leech into their blood and poison them as it had me. Speaking of it served the same painful purpose as slicing open an infected sore to release that which it harbored within.

Not long after, my parents separated. It was easy to correlate the two--my “trouble” and their separation--but of course, the separation had been underway for years, unnoticed. My “trouble,” perhaps, was what brought it to their attention, but it was hardly the cause.

I was taken into the embraces of my uncles. We still love you, despite … And how proud they were of that! As though some sacrifice had to be made, some great turmoil endured, to keep the hatred from their hearts at first word of my “trouble.”

My thoughts returned to Fëanáro often in those days. Guilty hours, I spent thinking of him, of the strong, capable arms seizing me from the street, rescuing me. In my more indulgent hours, I would walk to the market and stand by the roadside. How easy to hurl myself beneath the wheels of the passing carts! I wondered if he’d be there to whisk me away from harm again.

Of course, I knew that he would not, for he had been exiled not long after Ornisso and I had been dismissed from the service of Nolofinwë. So I returned home and carefully penned my letters to him. Letters that I fed into the fire at the end of the night.

Except for one.

Once, I possessed the courage--or maybe, foolishness?--to send one of the letters with a messenger going north. Not that I expected anything to come of it. But I hoped that I’d find peace in the long silence where I went unanswered.

I didn’t expect a reply even enough to want one.

But I got one.

After supper and chores, Terentaulë and I drifted to the parlor in an uncomfortable silence. Tyelperinquar whimpered in her arms, perhaps expressing what we would not: a sudden tension, discomfort, as though the unspoken words between us had created a pressure, forcing us apart. I should have made my excuses, gone off to my chambers alone to begin packing my things. If Terentaulë knew of my “trouble,” who else knew? Curufinwë? Vingarië? Telvo?

Fëanáro?

Perhaps they all knew and rightfully despised me.

We passed the stairway to our chambers, and I should have taken it. If I worked all night, then I could have my trunks packed by tomorrow. Slip away during the height of festivities, without causing a scene, bidding farewell only to Fëanáro, pleading homesickness or word of a family emergency or anything to get me out of his doors with a minimal inquisition.

I should have bolted for the stairs at first chance, but I did not. The thought of my chambers--a lonely box so like that into which my father would have had me placed, if he could, if not for Fëanáro saving me with this invitation to “apprenticeship”--repulsed me. The thought of silence broken only by the soughing of my heartbeat in my ears made my nails dig my palms. I would go mad, I feared, if forced to spend another moment alone.

I wasn’t ready to let go yet: of this place, of this disjointed family, of Fëanáro. I wasn’t ready to go back to Tirion or to acknowledge that the same disdainful pity that I’d received there might also await me here.

I had this bizarre image in my mind like the farces to which my mother would take me when I was small, acted out by puppets made of bright cloth with glittering button-eyes, the voices obnoxious caricatures of speech: There was me--a pale-faced puppet with somber black robes, a portrait of dignity, haughty almost with a pointed nose and clipped manner of speaking--being chased by an imp of Ornisso with wide insincere buttons for eyes and a speckled face, chasing me endlessly through the whole of history. Waiting until I was settled, gasping and bent with hands upon my knees, in a place of peace, then springing upon me again, his freckled cheeks upraised in a mockery of joy, of laughter. And off I ran again, until all of the corners of Aman were exhausted and everyone whispered of me from behind their hands and snickered: That Eressetor! An oddity; an aberrant! Applauding as they did, so grateful to laugh at my expense, my darkest secrets exposed with the same brutality of clothing torn away, flesh bared. How glad they were--laughing, clapping their hand together--that it was me and not them.

Even to cold, secluded Formenos, Ornisso had followed me. I cursed him.

And, defiant, I resisted him.

I followed Terentaulë past the stairs and to the parlor, where the five elder sons of Fëanáro were gathered before the fire (for nights were growing cold), their voices not as loud and brash as usual. I was reminded of the way that the trees will lie still--leaves obediently turned over to reveal their silvery bellies, unmoving and submissive--as a thunderstorm gathers overhead. It is as though they are waiting--not necessarily yet afraid--but waiting to see if they shall need to be afraid, their voices low and hesitant, ears cocked for the first sign of trouble.

Vingarië lay in the arms of Macalaurë, who was having elaborate plaits put into his hair by Maitimo; Tyelkormo squinted in the light of a lamp at a boot that he was mending while Curufinwë sat at his side, book open upon his lap, unread; Carnistir lay on the floor, stretched upon his back with his head tilted, watching the fire leaping in the grate.

Tyelperinquar squirmed in Terentaulë’s arms, emitting whimpering moans that threatened to explode into sobs, and Terentaulë placed him upon the floor and he took off in a flurry of chubby legs to race into his father’s arms.

Terentaulë perched on the sofa next to Vingarië and opposite her husband. I took a chair in a shadowy corner, hoping to escape notice, but Maitimo nodded in my direction: “Eressetor,” causing the other brothers to glance my way in coincident obedience, the way one of a flock of birds rising in a flurry of wings can cause the others to follow. As one, they looked away and back to their tasks.

Tyelkormo drove the heavy needle into the tip of his finger and cursed quietly. Carnistir sighed and shifted to his side, arm folded beneath his head, unblinking eyes fixed on the fire.

“According to some lore,” he said, interrupting the murmur of conversation between the brothers, “one can read the future in fire.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Carnistir,” said Maitimo without looking up from where he was affixing silver thread into Macalaurë’s plaits with nimble, twisting fingers.

“Did I say according to me, Nelyo? No. I said ‘some lore.’ " But his gaze never left the fire, writhing more fiercely now as though rebuking Maitimo for his doubts.

It was Macalaurë who spoke next, his voice soft and uncertain: “Do you think that she is coming?”

“No,” said Curufinwë harshly, from across the room. Tyelperinquar was drifting to sleep with his head on Curufinwë’s lap; though his voice snapped like a whip brought down upon naked flesh, the fingers that twined through his son’s fine black curls were gentle. “She is not coming ever again.”

Beside him, Tyelkormo, defiant: “You do not know that.” Biting his lip, the needle driven into his fingertip again.

“She’s left us, Turko.”

“She left Atar, not us.”

“She left all of us.”

Ponderous silence fell, the likes of which I’d never imagined could settle between the sons of Fëanáro, who so easily charged the air with their unflagging energy, their voices striking the walls of a room with such force that one imagined they might knock them aside, as though they could be contained only by the open air and the bounds of Varda’s stars, not to be constrained by structure and architecture, the constructs of simple Elven minds. The fire whipped and twisted; Maitimo yanked Macalaurë’s hair hard enough to elicit a gasp and a hand flown to his head, wincing.

“You neglect to consider your mother’s perspective in all of this.”

Terentaulë.

A brave voice, not necessarily loud but forceful, rending the silence, startling me to the degree that I flinched in my seat, though the sons must have been better accustomed to such adamant outbursts: As one, they raised their heads to glance at Terentaulë; as one, they returned wordlessly to their tasks.

Except Curufinwë, whose smoldering eyes fixed upon his wife. She stared defiantly back.

“There is nothing to ‘consider,’ Terentaulë. She had the choice to stay with her family, and she left. It is that simple. She left Atar; she left us. Nothing about that is worthy of consideration.”

“You have reduced your vision to see only from your father’s perspective,” Terentaulë retorted. Her apple-green eyes were livid, aflame. “But a marriage is made of two people and the desires of two, not one. There is no domination, no obligation, in marriage. It is a consensus, a bargain, and if one fails to uphold half--his half--then the other is under no obligation either.”

“That is like you, Terentaulë, to view marriage as you would buying shoes. You fail to consider the union of spirits. It is unnatural to break that.”

“It is not breaking it to live apart.”

“Then you fail to consider her children!” Curufinwë’s precarious composure was lost, snapping like a branch under weight, pouring forth such a rage that Tyelperinquar was startled from sleep with a shriek. “We are expected to endure or be torn in half by her selfishness? Her inability to give her husband--her family--the loyalty that he deserves?”

“Some might logically point out, Curufinwë, that the exile was applied only to your father, so it is you who left, not her.”

Curufinwë’s gray eyes blazed with a white-hot heat; in his lap, Tyelperinquar was trying to wriggle free, but his father’ s grasp had tightened and held him with a fierce possessiveness, pressed to his body. I could see the frantic rising and falling of Curufinwë’s chest even from where I sat. A vein pounded at his temple.

“You,” he said to Terentaulë who leaned forward to meet his eyes, unafraid, “you disloyal, treacherous--”

“Curufinwë!” It was Maitimo who shouted. “Enough! In front of your son?” Disgust and despair twisted his fair features. Beside him, Macalaurë watched Curufinwë with wide, pitying eyes; Vingarië had buried her face into her husband’s chest and Macalaurë stroked her hair with such force as though seeking to prove, we are not like them!

“Exactly,” said Curufinwë, rising and gathering a wailing Tyelperinquar into his arms. “My son should not have to listen to his mother so lightly speak of dissolving a family. As though she admires what our mother has done.” He stormed from the room and the sound of Tyelperinquar’s unrelenting sobs plotted his progress down the hall and up the stairs, where the door slammed with a thunderous bang that made us wince as though a jolt of electricity had made a circuit through the room.

Tyelkormo had set aside his mending; his fingers twisted in his lap. Maitimo resumed plaiting Macalaurë’s hair, but his fingers quivered and fumbled the silver threads he was weaving into it, and Macalaurë reached back, caught his fingers, and squeezed them. “I am sorry,” Terentaulë said, to no one in particular, but her square-set shoulders and the proud lift of her chin said differently.

Carnistir was the only one unmoved by what we’d just witnessed: a fight between husband and wife, that which is supposed to be kept secret and tucked away, as squeamish when revealed as stirring another’s bloody wound with a finger. He gazed into the fire, hands folded upon his chest. “The fire says that she is not coming.”

~oOo~

We departed for bed not long after, although it was still early, content to heed Maitimo’s advice that we all try to sleep in order to enjoy the next day’s festivities. “For it is a celebration,” he said to our sullen faces, his false-bright voice fooling none of us, even I, who had known him only a short time.

I lingered in the shadows, feeling like a guilty witness, and waited for his brothers and sisters-in-law to file from the room. Maitimo dawdled also, picking up the boot that Tyelkormo had been mending and left lying unfinished, inspecting it and smiling at the fumbling stitches, folding it to take with him, probably to be fixed and finished by the morning, knowing Maitimo.

“Good night?” I called softly, my voice turning the salutation into a question at the last moment. Maitimo turned to meet my gaze, and I had to look away. So different from his father in both appearance and mood, but his eyes burned with the same fierce fire. “Eressetor,” he said, “I am sorry that you had to witness that. Our family--” His voice broke; he smiled, as though to cover his distress, fidgeting with Tyelkormo’s boot, picking at the awkward stitches--“our family is broken. Hurting. And we are fighting to fix ourselves but … it is hard. And whenever it seems that the wound is closed, something careless reopens it, and we all bleed anew.” He tucked Tyelkormo’s boot beneath his arm and laid his hand upon my shoulder as he passed. “Good night, Eressetor. Pray that she comes tomorrow.” His penetrating gaze fixed upon my eyes, appraising but not seeing.

I need to leave this place.

I need to leave this place because the next time, Maitimo will look into my eyes and he will know: I don’t want her to come back.

He will know that I am--

I fled the room before I could even admit my next thought to myself.

I lay in bed that night, wakeful, fretting. My trunk in the armoire beckoned me, but I lacked the fortitude. Just as I’d lacked the fortitude to resist the gentle temptation of Ornisso’s kiss, refusing to see what had been obvious to all until it was too late, until all were irreversibly hurt, marked by the incident. So would I be hurt here, I feared.

Unless I kicked free of the bedclothes, packed my trunk, and waited until Fëanáro was drunk and joyful tomorrow to tell him that I would be returning to Tirion, to my home. My father.

But I lacked the fortitude. Because I loved--

I loved it here. Why? I did not know … or would not admit, at least.

Outside my bedroom door, the floorboards creaked furtively; matched voices, speaking in a whisper: The twins had returned, from their separate excursions, at the same time. “Your ring …” I heard Pityo say, and Telvo’s nervous laugh. “Oh. Of course,” their voices receding as they moved down the hallway to their adjoining bedrooms.

The mystery of this family, with its allegiances forged and dissolved--feelings fractured as easily as fragile porcelain dashed against stone--and quickly mended, a family over which Fëanáro presided, the fire in his spirit annealing the bonds between his sons even as his fervor threatened also to destroy them, reduce them to ashes. And like anything subjected to such unrelenting heat, his sons became at once stronger and yet threatening to erupt into conflagration, bowing and melting with too greater a heat and pressure, the madness in their eyes looking a lot like fire.

I needed to leave. But I would not.

In the bedroom next door, Terentaulë paced, trying to soothe a restive Tyelperinquar to sleep. I heard her singing gentle lullabies, her voice tremulous with tears. The floor creaked with heavier footfalls, and I heard Curufinwë’s low voice. “Here. Let me.”

Seamlessly, his smooth, baritone voice took over singing, and Tyelperinquar’s fussing subsided. I heard their mattress creak and Terentaulë’s soft weeping replaced that of her son.

Curufinwë’s voice, sketching a path from where I knew the cradle lay to the bed he shared with his wife. “Hey. Terentaulë. Don’t do this.” Another creak and I imagined them joined, arms wrapping the other, upon the bed. His lips drinking her tears from her cheeks. “I love you, you know?”

“I--I know. And I’m so sorry for--for what I said.” There was a long, heavy silence; I imaged his hands caressing her, melting the clothes from her body. Lips pressing flesh in answer to her apology. “I don’t want to ever leave you.” So faint a whisper that I barely heard, but their heads were right behind mine with only a thin wall between. I heard.

Curufinwë answered, much more adamant, “Then don’t.” To which she had no answer that I heard, only a soft gasp of passion.

~oOo~

The next day was a flurried rush of fighting for the bathrooms and ironing good robes and plaiting hair and keeping a lookout for guests upon the path. It was Carnistir’s begetting day, and he was flushed with pleasure, accepting handshakes from everyone and hugs from his brothers. Dutifully, I gave my good wishes, and he surprised me with a quick, painful embrace. I smelled wine on his breath and, beneath that, a scent of scorch, of green life left too long beneath the merciless fire of Laurelin.

Just after the Mingling of the Lights, Fëanáro shouted up the stairs: “We need to sit together for a minute for breakfast!” and I trudged down the stairs--having been sleepily pondering the trunk in my armoire and wondering if I could pack it before the feast began--in a throng of his sons and daughters-in-law. Breakfast was cold bread with jam and fruit, with each of us expected to set his own place and pour his own juice. Curufinwë and Terentaulë were adamantly hand-in-hand--even when it hampered their progress in setting their places for breakfast--eager to prove their reconciliation. Tyelkormo looked grumpy and had his hair twisted into a towel, still wearing his nightclothes. Both twins were tousle-haired and sleepy, and they whispered together in a rare show of friendship.

Only Maitimo and Finwë were fully dressed, and Maitimo was nervously picking at his fruit salad and Finwë was smiling too widely as though hoping that joy was in fact contagious.

Fëanáro plunged into our midst, grinning and pushing more food onto our plates than we could eat. “Atar--” Tyelkormo protested as his father lavished his plate with piles of grapes.

“Oh, don’t complain. You need your energy!”

“But I don’t even like grapes.” Annoyed, Tyelkormo tossed his plate aside and rejoined the line to begin again, as though it would have been too much effort to pick out the grapes from amid the cubes of melon and toast with marmalade that he preferred.

Eventually, everyone was served and seated around the table. From his trouser’s pocket, Pityo withdrew a small object and plunked it onto the table: a tiny hourglass, set to measure a single minute.

Tyelkormo snickered. Fëanáro looked aghast. “Pityo--”

“You always say ‘one minute!’ You know that I hate breakfast and sitting around like a bunch of fools eating bloody grapes and toast, but you insist ‘one minute’ and argue when I declare my minute expired, so here you go: inarguable proof of ‘one minute.’ " The table fell into silence except for the nearly inaudible hiss of the sand spilling through the hourglass; we all watched, our flatware suspended between our fingers, caught between plate and mouth, and waited.

“Well,” said Pityo when the last grain had dropped into the bottom chamber with its brethren, “that’s it. One minute undeniably up.” He plucked up his hourglass and shoved it back into his pocket, passing Carnistir on his way out of the room and pausing to hug him from behind, around the neck, planting a kiss upon his hair. “Blessings on your begetting day, Brother. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Carnistir answered, but Pityo had already released him and was hustling from the room. Fëanáro sighed loudly and Telvo--who’d weaseled in to sit beside him--leaned on his arm as though trying to make up for the boorish behavior of his twin brother. I’d avoided his glance or nearness to him out of horror of yesterday’s incident, and he’d remained ignorant of me, choosing to mutter to his twin brother and then cling to their father. But with all the room’s attention upon him, he glanced bashfully up through the fringe of his lashes.

And he looked at me.

He smiled.

And Pityo burst back into the room. “Atar!” he cried, breathless with excitement. “There is a messenger coming up the path. And--” his face breaking into a smile, as though even his usual sullen, dismissive demeanor couldn’t contain his joy--“he is clad in Amil’s colors.”

There was a rush for the door, and I was caught up in it, my blood pounding as I tried to convince myself that it was because I was happy and excited like the others, that the roar of impatient footsteps and the bright exclamations crashing in a cacophony like cymbals being smashed around my head was a thing of beauty, of joy. I dismissed the voice that said, But if she returns, then you have no reason to stay. For that was foolish, and I knew this.

There was a crush through the door, but we relented to let Fëanáro through first and the rest of us piled behind him to wait on the stairs to the house, a bedraggled throng half-dressed and still tousled from sleep, wide grins showing unwashed teeth, hands clenching each other’s in hope.

Except mine. I stood among them as a stranger, and no one thought to hold my hand.

Pityo had been right: A rider was making his slow, careful way into the valley, bearing the unmistakable crest of Nerdanel. My father had been fond of decrying Nerdanel’s crest before she’d separated from Fëanáro; afterward, the crest was the cause of their estrangement, to hear him talk. The audacity of a wife to assume a crest--as though assuming a house--separate from that of her husband! It was portended from the beginning, he would say in ponderous tones, that their union should sunder, nudging me with his toe and saying, “Never marry a woman who insists upon her own crest, Eressetor!” as though that was something about which I would ever have to worry.

Her device was the star of Fëanáro upon the shield of her father’s design and around it stood seven stars. Gold on red: the colors also of Fëanáro’s heraldry, but her red was deeper and less harsh on the eye, closer to maroon, and the gold subtle also, the hue of harvest wheat. His red was the color of freshly shed blood, with the gold glinting as bright as Laurelin upon the restless sea. Side by side, the eye was drawn first to his, wandering to hers only as an afterthought. I wondered if she’d planned it that way.

Seeing all of us waiting on the steps, the messenger reined his horse and dismounted, looping the reins around a tree and loosely enough to give the animal freedom to graze. He jogged towards us, a rolled scroll already produced from his pouch and held loosely in his hand.

Fëanáro stepped forward to welcome him, and the messenger kneeled. “Greetings, my lord. I come bearing a message from your wife, the Lady Nerdanel of Tirion.” The parchment, though, stayed neatly rolled, clasped tightly in the messenger’s hand.

“Well,” said Fëanáro with a quavering laugh, “have out with it then.” Holding out his hand, wiggling his fingers as though to summon the message to him: the long-awaited reply from the estranged wife.

“Begging pardon, my lord, but the Lady Nerdanel specifically directed that the message is not to be given to you. It is intended for Prince Carnistir, your son.”

The messenger’s eyes remained politely averted and, with Fëanáro's back to us, none of us bore witness to the countenance of Fëanáro as his hopes were quashed before the whole of his family. He took an unsteady step back from the messenger. His shoulders remained straight and proud, rigid, but his hands hung empty at his sides, sad somehow, as though he did not know what to do with them. The hands of Fëanáro, from which wondrous creations were born, that had held his children and made love to his wife, now empty. Purposeless.

Beside me, Carnistir had frozen, his dark gray eyes wide as though with fright and his feet fixed firmly to the ground, the last traces of a hopeful smile still teasing his lips as though longing to prolong the joy that had seized them for a single meaningless minute. It was Finwë who stepped forward and gave Carnistir a gentle nudge. “He has a message for you,” Finwë whispered, and with his arm around the shoulders of his grandson, he led him forward, to hold out a trembling hand and take the parchment that the messenger proffered. And Finwë went to Fëanáro’s side, to take his son into his solid one-armed embrace, a show of strength and solidarity. Even though Fëanáro was taller than his father and his shoulders were proud, he seemed diminutive and pitifully helpless in the circle of his father’s arm.

Carnistir fumbled open the seal on the paper and unrolled it. We waited, waited for word. At last he spoke. “She sends her regrets for not being able to attend,” he said in a bold, trembling voice. He stood with his back to us, the paper stretched so mercilessly tight between his hands that I feared it would tear. “She names my begetting day as one of the six greatest days of her life. She sends her love--‘seven times,’ it says--to us. Her children.”

Carnistir’s hands crushed together then, crumpling the paper between them and casting it into the dirt of the path. Uncombed hair shielding his face, his eyes, from our scrutiny, he stalked up the steps as we parted to make way for him as though repelled. The messenger bowed once more to Fëanáro and hastened away, mounting and roughly reining his horse back up the hill.

One by one, we returned to the house in a solemn procession. I followed Maitimo, feeling a torrent of emotions that I could not yet untangle from each other long enough to decipher their precise meaning, only that I felt on the verge of both laughter and tears and could not quite name why.

Behind me, I heard a furtive sound and turned to see Telvo scurry to retrieve the crumpled message from the dust, smoothing it and folding it into a neat square, to be tucked into his pocket.

Maitimo held the door for him, and the brothers exchanged a solemn glance. Maitimo shut the door behind him, and my last sight before the latch clicked into place and barred the front path from sight was Fëanáro turning to fully receive his father’s embrace, pale hands clutching at Finwë’s strong, dignified shoulders with the same desperate need as a drowning man clinging to a rock to save his life.

We gladly lost ourselves in the minutia of preparing for a feast: bathing carefully and plaiting our hair, pressing our finest robes and fastidiously dressing, fastening jewels around our throats and wrists, slipping rings on finger stiff and adamantly not trembling. I opened my armoire door, pondered the trunk at its bottom, and whisked out my best robes without another thought. Not today. I could not leave today.

Maitimo had taken over the role of the father, inspecting each of his brothers in turn, answering their calls for help, his scarlet hair streaming like a banner behind him as he rushed hither and thither yet impeccable and gleaming when I met him at the bottom of the stairs--“Eressetor. You look well!”--his practiced decorum betrayed only by his tendency to twitch aside the drapes, checking the time by the degree of light. “Would you do me the favor,” he asked, “of keeping watch of the door, to greet arriving guests?” I nodded, wondering why--perhaps he was going to check on his father?--but dared not ask, but he must have seen the curious gleam in my eyes. “Even heirs to thrones and eldest sons need to break for the restroom every now and again,” he said, and his voice was amused, and I smiled … and I do believe that it was genuine.

By the light outside, it was an hour before the first guests were supposed to arrive but the House of Fëanáro--even if more often than not in a tumult of chaos--liked to project an aura of perfection to outsiders. If someone arrived early, one of the House would be there to greet him, even if only the master’s apprentice.

Somewhere in the house, I thought, Fëanáro must have been readying himself for the evening ahead. His own son’s begetting day. The feast he had planned. He must.

A knock on the door interrupted my thoughts, and I went to answer it, opening the door to the surprising sight of the dark-haired farmer--Telvo’s lover--standing on the other side, fist still raised as though he hadn’t expected to be answered. His robes were dark blue and ill-fitted: too tight in his broad shoulders and so snug across his chest that the fasteners were straining to hold the two edges of cloth together. He was unusually large, although he seemed to shrink a few inches upon seeing me, his shoulders curving inward as though trying to make himself smaller. His skin was swarthy from working in the heights of Laurelin’s hours; he gave off a strong odor of soap barely masking a smell of earth and onions. His face was indeed beautiful, and he was not much older than me: deep-set amber eyes and high cheekbones, a jaw that reminded me of a shovel and a mouth inclined to frown. Despite it all, he was still beautiful. When he spoke, his mouth didn’t move so much as fall open, his words tangling with each other in the same flustered, desperate way of the feet of a clumsy man instructed to dance.

“Oh,” he said upon seeing me, flinching and blushing. “I--Telvo--I … I was told to arrive early. By Telvo.” His big, stub-fingered hand lifted to smooth back hair so tightly bound back from his face that the corners of his eyes were stretched, giving him an incongruous, exotic look.

“Well … come in?” I said, but from behind me came bounding footsteps upon the stairs: Telvo, dressed in golden-yellow robes, hair half-plaited and barefoot, having escaped Maitimo’s scrutiny, face stretched into a grin. “Nandolin!” he cried, and the farmer’s jaw fell open into an improbably beautiful smile and--as though I didn’t exist--they embraced.

Nandolin recovered his manners before Telvo and tugged from his arms. “Ah, yes,” said Telvo, turning to me. “Eressetor. This is Nandolin, my most beloved … friend.” His bright gray eyes glittered as though with a challenge, and I was reminded of the feral looks on the faces of those who competed in the King’s annual swordplay competition. “I don’t believe that you’ve exactly met.”

My hand was enveloped in Nandolin’s big, callused one. Telvo’s eyes never left my face.

“I--I’m charmed, Er-Eressetor,” stammered Nandolin, and the word was as incongruous to describe him as it would have been to call the hulking, shadowy house of Fëanáro “quaint.” His palm was dry and gritty as though with dirt, and I will admit that I was preoccupied with the idea that that hand--as broad as a salad plate with knuckles still dark with grime--had touched Telvo. Knew the porcelain skin beneath his clothes, even knew (I dared think!) the intimate insides of his body. I had seen it; I knew. Smirking, Telvo knew too. And that shovel-jaw, it had fallen open, the thick tongue incapable of speech had coaxed open Telvo’s china-doll lips, tasting him as no one else had. Easily coaxing ecstasy from the proud, smirking Fëanorion with those big hands.

Telvo’s hand alighted on Nandolin’s arm. “Dearest, you will help my father to set up the canopy in the back garden?” The two of them turning as though I’d faded from existence and walking down the hallway together, not touching but with only a hair’s breadth between them, and I heard Telvo remark, “Eressetor is my father’s apprentice. From Tirion. You know Ornisso, who stays on occasion in the city? They were friends, in days gone by. Or so I’ve heard.”

Without waiting for Maitimo to reappear, I fled for the stairs.

~oOo~

The festivities erupted that evening like a handful of confetti tossed into the air: innocuous and insubstantial at the beginning, mushrooming into a florid display that meandered long into the night. In the dining room--the chandelier alight with a thousand candles, the light of the room dancing and heaving as though the very air was aflame--the feast began, spilling into the outdoors beneath banners tousled by the wind. The table was laden with foods of all sorts: roasted beasts of every variety and a patchwork of fruits and vegetables of every color; there were two dozen different kinds of pies that--when cut open by the obliging cooks dressed in black with bright jewels at their throats--released a billow of aroma that mingled and spread throughout the house, leaking even into the outdoors and drawing even the most reluctant back for seconds.

Outside, the festivities were lit by the stars and lamps strung high above our heads, encased in lanterns of colored glass that made colorful, hazy patches of light upon the stone floor. Tables ringed a dance floor filled with whirling couples before the feast was even underway for an hour; an ensemble of three black-clad Elves with eyes dark as pools of blue-black ink plucked at a harp, played at a flute, and beat upon a loose circle of drums: animal skins stretched tight over long-drained wine casks. As though cajoled by the festivities, even the air had forgotten to be cold; the wind smelled of wine and feasts; the music akin to the long-ago sound of wind and water beneath a sky lit only by stars.

Here, of course, we had also the Treelight: a silver haze to the south, creeping like a frost from the horizon as the night waxed, the music swelled, and the laughter drowned even the roar of the drums, destroying any illusion of sadness.

Fëanáro made his appearance, resplendent in dark robes trimmed in scarlet and gold, making his rounds of the guests with his father at his elbow where--I thought bitterly--his wife should be. His teeth were bared in a grin and laughter burst with alarming ease from his throat.

The sons of Fëanáro--except Telvo--spent most of the night with a long line of women parading through their arms. At last, the elusive betrothed of Pityo made an appearance: a beautiful golden-haired girl who tended to look belligerently bored if her fiancé wandered too far from her side. Carnistir--the guest of honor--was not off his feet all night, swiping wine goblets and hors d’oeuvres from the trays of passing waiters as he left the arms of one woman and was immediately tugged into the arms of another.

Telvo wandered at the edges of the party with Nandolin at his side, never touching but speaking with an intimate intensity that left room for no one else in his line of sight. Neither danced with anyone but neither did they show their affection … except for one occasion when I caught them eating plates of food together at the head table, Telvo filching nibbles of casserole from Nandolin’s plate.

At another time, I noticed Finwë dancing with a round of maidens--young girls humoring him, delighted by the bright joy in his eyes--and Fëanáro sitting sullenly, like something discarded, at the head table. At his elbow, Telvo leaned, whispering into his ear, both pairs of eyes fixed on me.

I looked away.

Midnight came and a toast was made to Carnistir by Fëanáro with the stars glinting overhead as sharp and bright as razors and Telperion’s wan, mid-night light barely perceptible this far north. Outside the circle of lantern light, the night was frigid, the wind whipping the trees into restless fury, but wine, dance, and mirth kept winter’s chill at bay, and the party wound onward, into the night.

After the toast, I became aware that Fëanáro was missing. Finwë had settled into a discussion with the lords of Formenos at a table in the corner, near the shadows, and his son was nowhere to be seen.

Nor were Telvo and Nandolin.

I did not leave the party seeking them. I made excuses about the rising volume of the music making my head ache; I convinced myself that I needed air, away from the close heat of inebriated Elven bodies. I’d had very little wine, but it was twisting my vision, making the images melt and stir together: a spray of Maitimo’s scarlet hair and a scintilla of light off a silver flute and Terentaulë’s green-clad figure winding with that of her husband, kissing him like no one was watching. The roar of voices undercut by the throbbing music was as primitive as a heartbeat, the crowd squeezing and surging with the rhythm of my blood, exciting me in the same way that a beast is tantalized by the scent of pain and its own insatiable hunger into doing that which is known to be wrong.

I had to get away.

I was not seeking Fëanáro.

The cold wind outside the festivities slapped my face as though to rouse me before committing a regrettable act in my stupor, but I still burned deep inside, as subterranean fires will smolder for years unless the ground covering them--protecting them--is torn away and they are given relief.

I was not seeking Fëanáro. But I found him, upon the balcony overlooking his northern garden.

My footsteps were light--nearly silent--upon the ground, but he heard me as I approached him overlooking the garden, where the shadows were the deepest, and upon dark twisting vines, strange flowers grew, as heavy and scarlet as beads of blood, with so sweet a scent that one became drunk and eventually sick upon breathing it, yet ever hungered for more. Upon the stone railing, he leaned on his elbows, overlooking the garden. His hair was coming unbound, slipping down his back. In the midnight darkness, it was as black as the sky beyond the stars, and I wondered if daring to dip my hand into it would be similarly like plunging into infinity; if I’d be unable to ever swim again to the surface.

He turned, and his face was a portrait of grief that became something else when he saw me. Or so I hoped to believe. “Eressetor …” a smile lighting upon his lips, his hand stretched toward me. “So you have similarly wearied of the festivities? Please, come and join me.”

I meant to turn and run away or at least make my excuses, but my disobedient, willful feet carried me in his direction until my arm was beneath his hand so warm that it burned even through the heavy robes and tunic that I wore beneath, awakening skin beneath that had gone cold without me even realizing it. Shoulder to shoulder, we leaned against the balcony, with silence hanging between us that Fëanáro had once been eager for me to fill with words. Explain to me … Tell me … I stared out into the seething shadows of his strange gardens; the fat, red blossoms endured even in the bitterness of impending winter, so red that they seemed to glow faintly, little blushes in the darkness. I blinked hard.

Fëanáro did not see my reaction but he must have felt my shoulder stiffen against his. “My son Nelyo,” he said, “is nothing if not a genius in convincing things to bend to his will. People, horses, roses … he tells them to glow, to give light in the darkness, and they oblige.” Laughing in awe, as though he had not done the same--and more--in stone; as though he was not the father of Maitimo and so also to credit for his son’s prodigy.

From the shadows came a trill of laughter--a rippling glissando played upon silver bells--as though the roses saw humor in my doubt, in my surprise. As though they’d known all along that in the House of Fëanáro, nothing was considered impossible.

“They are strange,” I whispered, “but somehow … beautiful.” I shivered in memory of the laughter; the roses seemed to glow darker. “I have never seen their like before.”

“I grow them only here. Nelyo was proud of them--he created them when we still lived in Tirion--and he offered freely his gifts to all of the Noldor, but none would take them. They shrunk from them, saying that they were too strange and unnatural. Aberrant. So I planted them in the north, where the light serves a purpose beyond the mere delight of spoiled lords who scoff at what they do not understand.

“Nelyo … he was hurt by the rejection. He did not say as much, but he would never come here, to this garden, and he gave up his work with roses ... until the exile. He has resumed, to my great joy, in the time that his brothers leave spare for him.” In a voice as low as the whisper of the wind in the trees, Fëanáro continued, “It is strange, the blessings that we have found in exile.”

From the depthless shadows between the roses came another trill of laugher, and Telvo emerged, hand-in-hand with Nandolin.

I stiffened and waited for Fëanáro’s shock and outrage. His youngest son had his arms twined around the neck of the broad-shouldered farmer; their foreheads were pressed together, noses bumping, then their lips joining, seeking, parting to allow tongues to twine, Telvo’s fingers digging into his lover’s dark tresses. Nandolin was pushing Telvo backward to collide with a tree framed on either side by blushing roses that illuminated thick, awkward fingers adept at undoing the elaborate ties on Telvo’s robes, then a sliver of pale skin widening as heavy cloth was pushed aside, kisses raining upon tender flesh and leaving a stain of bruises rising in their wake like droplets of dark wine.

Fëanáro nudged my arm. “We should go and should not watch this.”

I found myself in his study as though transported there by magic, blinking in confusion at the roaring fire that made my skin tingle and burn; the room tilted and then righted itself by slow degrees. I had not drunken much at the party but my mind was sluggish and drowsy as though I’d had a bottle of wine to myself. The roses, I thought, remembering their heady scent that still seemed to linger inside my senses. No, that was wine, a burble of liquid like laughter, being poured by Fëanáro into two glasses, one for each of us. He’d removed his robes and was wearing only a short-sleeved tunic and a pair of breeches, both black, both silk, clinging to the planes of his body and caressed by the writhing firelight, the silk bound so close to his skin that the fire seemed to arise--not from reflection--from his flesh itself.

“No …” I muttered, pressing fingers to a forehead that expected to ache but was still heady, intoxicated, not knowing what I denied. My skin was burning now in the warmth of the fire, frozen flesh at last brought to life. Fëanáro was sitting opposite me, but he did not ask me to speak. He was drinking deeply of his wine, and I was close enough to see his throat working, to see how his lips were reddened by it and the way his tongue darted out to lick it away. He grinned. “Drink your wine, Eressetor.”

I meant to refuse, but my hand lifted the glass to my lips and my tongue--intoxicated by a taste that exploded like ecstasy inside my mouth--twisted into the protestation, “But Telvo …”

Words billowing from my mouth, beyond my conscious control. I clicked my jaw shut.

Fëanáro was sipping his wine again, his eyes keen on mine. “What about Telvo?”

“You … you know?” I waited for the words to reverse themselves, for something new--filled with scorn to which a father by rights should be entitled--for surely his approval was imagined, a dream. But his words poured forth with the liquid ease of wine from an uncorked bottle, and like wine, I let them soak my senses. I became drunk on them; like inebriation, I let them release strange conflicting emotions: delight, worship, rage.

“Of course I know,” he said. “I’ve known since my son was a young boy that he fancied other males over women.” Hesitating, smirking: “This surprises you?” For a moment reverting to the cynical, scornful master who had the power to cow me, I rebelled in an explosion of words that I didn’t recognize as mine--for surely they did not generate in my thoughts--until I heard my voice rippling upon the air: “But--but it is perversion!” Thinking of the son with his arms around the father, always touching, nuzzling, with the comfortable affection of a lover. Dully, a realization bloomed, as strange and slightly repulsive as the fat, glowing blooms on the rosebushes outside. “And you … you--with them?”

I waited for Fëanáro’s eyes to glint like light on steel, but they did not. He laughed and drank again of his wine. “Me? Eressetor, Telvo is my son, and Telvo is also happily married!” His mirth frothy and effusing the room. The connection--Telvo and marriage--was not for my enfeebled mind to make. I boggled; shook my head, as though awakening and trying to clear the last clinging strands of sleep from my brain.

“M-married?”

“Yes! Married!” he cried joyfully. “Telvo has been married since shortly after our exile. He and Nandolin followed all of the ‘traditions’ dictated by our people. Nandolin asked my permission, and I gave it. They had a year-long betrothal and a ceremony like that of any other couple. They have rings that I made for them, though they can rarely wear them because of the scorn of others. The questions of others where love is never answer enough. They even both kept their virginity until the night of their marriage, then bonded each other in Telvo’s bed. In that,” he smirked, “they were keeping more to tradition than any of my other sons, who have collectively tried to impregnate half of Tirion and much of Formenos as well.” He laughed.

The room was swiveling around me. I wondered if I would fall to the ground in a faint. My blood was pounding in my ears as though seeking escape. I thought of Telvo, of his eyes on mine. The contentment of one wedded is supposed to be obvious there. Always, I had believed that I could perceive it in the eyes and voices of my parents, on those of Fëanáro’s sons who were wed. Fëanáro himself, even, though I tried not to hear, and though it was torn by anguish. But Telvo …

“His eyes,” I whispered, “I have never seen--”

“People see what they wish to see, Eressetor. No one wishes to acknowledge my son’s ‘non-traditional’ marriage. So they do not. No one speaks of it; no one sees. In my eyes, they claim to see evidence of my marriage, of a bond with a woman who has not loved me in years, who has repudiated me in public and in her heart. But in Telvo’s eyes, they see nothing. Because the nature of his marriage does not fit their narrow idea of what constitutes love. ‘How can he love another male?’ they say. Because he does. Because it is both his nature and his choice.

“So none recognize his marriage. They look past it. None of his family sent gifts for his wedding, even his own mother. It simply does not exist to them.

“But Eru … Eru recognized the bond and gave them leave to be wed. Yet others believe their authority greater in the matter, that their arbitrary rules coined for a purpose that we no longer need--multiplying our people, creating heirs in case of their eventual demise--exceeds Eru’s own wishes in the matter.”

Fëanáro rose from his chair and began pacing. Color rose into his pale face, brought on by wine and frustration. He stopped to pour himself more wine; finished it in a hasty gulp. I fidgeted in my chair and fervently wished that I had never wandered away from the party.

But if he accepted such aberrance in his own son …

I opened my mouth and spoke before my better sense could convince me to do otherwise. “Master, you asked me once why I chose to come here, and I think that I should tell you. There was a boy named--” My voice broke on the name: Ornisso. Ornisso, the name of my ignominy, who has haunted my dreams and my waking thoughts since the day I first beheld his freckled face and duplicitous green eyes; Ornisso beneath my hands and mouth, unlocking ecstasy I hadn’t believed possible. Unlocking love that I hadn’t believed could be wrung from a wizened heart like mine. Ornisso, who could be replaced by only one other.

Fëanáro.

“Ornisso.” To hear the name, suddenly, in Fëanáro’s voice stung me like a slap to the face. The room reeled, and I nearly toppled out of the chair. Had my thoughts been so clear upon my face? I feared that I might be sick. Fëanáro came to my chair and knelt beside me; his eyes were alarmed, and there was a very pale reflection of me in the deep black centers of them. “Eressetor, do not look so shocked.” His wineglass was nudged to my mouth, still warm from his lips. I drank; I drank wine and I drank him, I thought, deliriously. He was an under-taste now, beneath the wine: the taste of ozone after a close-falling lightning strike. The taste of him dazzled like the explosion of fireflies behind my eyes. “Shortly after receiving your letter asking to come here, I wrote to my half-brother in Tirion. We like to play a ruse, that we are friends,” he said sardonically, “so that he feels better about my exile and so that I can tell my wife honestly that I am seeking retribution for what I have done. So we correspond, every week, of our false joy. I knew your father’s name, for he had always made a point of making himself my enemy. And allying himself--in turn--with my half-brother. So I mentioned your interest in an apprenticeship with me; I will admit that it was intended to wound him, that his ‘most loyal’ subject in fact had an only-son who sought me. Naturally, he wrote back and cautioned me about you, saying that you and this ‘Ornisso’ of his had been caught in an act of ‘unclean fornication,’ that you had been dismissed from his service because he suspected that his precious Ornisso could never had had a hand in it. Ornisso had to be disciplined, of course, to give an appearance of justice, so he was sent to an apprenticeship in the north. ‘I suspect that your Eressetor is seeking Ornisso,’ he wrote, and I wrote back that I doubted it--since Ornisso’s appointment is one hundred leagues west of Formenos--and that I had decided to take you as an apprentice. I heard no more from Nolofinwë on the subject.”

The room lurched and I tipped into Fëanáro’s arms. I opened my mouth to speak, to defend myself as I had become accustomed to doing. The tired words hung, ever-ready, upon my tongue, ready to tumble forth in a jumble of denials and protestations. My head fell against his shoulder; his hair whispered across my face, and I felt safer than I had even in the early days in my father’s home, before my parents separated, before I had ever heard the name Ornisso and my father remained aloof of me, still believing his son to be normal, when I could still convince myself that I would be normal, that adulthood would see me married, with a son and a career as a loremaster. And happy.

My lips writhed but no sound came out, as though I could no longer protest what I knew to be true.

I was aberrant.

Softly, Fëanáro’s fingers alighted on my lips. “Hush,” he whispered, and he cradled me in his arms like I was his own child. My hand rose to touch him--to pull him closer? or push him away?--and the feel of his tunic was as silken as warm water.

I had come here because of Ornisso. To escape Ornisso. Hadn’t I?

Tears coursed down my face, pattered on his bare arms.

“I no more believe that you chose to come to me because of your ex-lover,” said Fëanáro, “than you should believe that I brought you here because I knew that you loved other males. We chose each other for a different reason, Eressetor.”

Around a throat tight with tears, I managed, “What reason?” and he whispered, “That is not for us to know,” tilting my face to his and kissing my mouth, as I’d never been kissed before, with a gentle passion like a warm hearth on a cold night. He tasted of wine, and I parted my lips to drink of him; I tasted his lips with my tongue and found that they easily parted as though he was as eager to taste me as I was him; our tongues entwined between us and someone moaned--which of us, I would never know--and he pulled me from my chair and to the floor, to lie upon the thick, luxuriant carpet that depicted the Music of the Ainur, to lie beside him, our hearts pounding in frenzied unison and our bodies crossing the innocent distance that Ornisso and I had always been careful to keep: arms wrapping shoulders, chest pressing chest, belly against belly, and hips pressing hips.

He broke the kiss first, though barely; his lips were so near to mind that I could feel their teasing warmth, our breaths mingled between us.

This cannot be real. Cannot.

There was a throbbing heat in my groin that would not be quelled by kisses alone. But I dared not hope for that; I dared not hope for anything but to awaken in my own bed and discover that this was all a dream.

His body stretched beside mine, his hand upon the small of my back, my buttocks, burning me through my heavy, despicable robes.

I closed my eyes. Tightly. Better to awaken now, before I fell prone to delusion of dreams, before I awakened in painful disappointment, unfulfilled. He stroked my back through my clothes, rippling along the bones of my spine, eliciting a shiver like a scale played fast upon harp strings; his lips roamed my face, kissing my cheeks and the tip of my nose, pressing to each eyelid in turn, making them squeeze shut tighter.

A heartbeat: and time had changed again, moving forward without me. I was lifting my head sodden with the ache of inebriation from the silken carpet. And he was gone.

He was standing at the fireplace, hands braced against the mantle, staring into the tousled flames as if seeking answers, his unbound hair spilling over his shoulders and swaying in the direction of the fire, as though seeking to drag him forward and headfirst into the flames. His silk tunic and breeches gleamed faintly, fitting the contours of his body--the long lines of his back, his firmly rounded backside--like a thin sheen of oil.

Beside me, the chair: had I tumbled from it, succumbing to the wine and roses, the kisses and caresses but a dream? My arousal strained against the bonds of clothing--tight-fitted undergarments and heavy robes--and made a shameful mound at my groin. If he turned, he would see and know. Blood heated my face and my arousal first twitched then withered at the thought. He would know.

Had it all been a dream?

I stood on trembling knees and the room reeled, giving me the same vertiginous feeling as standing with my feet in the surf and staring at the horizon, the water rushing over my feet and creating the illusion of sliding into the sea. I pitched forward, caught myself with a hand to the floor, the room dipping as though the floor had suddenly opened beneath me. My hair had been torn from its plaits; the fine velvet of my robes, crushed and wrinkled. My eyes felt swollen, the corners grainy with what felt like dirt but I knew to be mucus, yet I dared not trust relinquishing my grip upon the floor to wipe it away.

A strong hand gripped my arm and hauled me to my feet. “Come, Eressetor. You have had too much wine and you need your bed.” A floor passed beneath my feet--was I walking? My leaden legs lacked the strength to lift themselves, but there were steps, falling away beneath me and a progression of doors shut tightly on either side like secrets kept.

~oOo~

I awakened in my bed, the heavy quilt piled atop me. I was sweating beneath the bedclothes even as my hands--lying neatly atop the quilt--trembled with the cold.

A dream!

I did not remember coming here, only shards of a dream, bizarre and phantasmagoric, of the dusky glow of roses, music swirling at my back like the iridescent sheen of light upon oil, and the burning heat of lips upon mine.

Ornisso? No. Fëanáro.

Outside, the feast had finally broken, and the night was filled with shadows and silence so deep that it seemed to possess a texture: that of quickmud, viscous and unrelenting, rising to grip first my ankles, then my calves, slipping like a lover’s caress to my thighs to bind my waist and press upon my chest, snaking around my throat and into my open mouth, silencing even my breathless protests until it--the silence--was again complete and I was demolished.

Upon the silence, my shame exploded in red flares inside my head, and I closed my eyes. If I had been able to will Fëanáro into the place of dreams, then why did my shame remain persistently solid? Real? Why couldn’t this also be a dream; this abashment lashed to my ankle like a leaden weight, holding me in this place that I longed to escape and yet could not, this place with steep sides into which--whenever I dared crawl forward--I was only dragged back again?

Fëanáro! My own master! Fallen onto the floor like a sack of grain, possibly writhing there, moaning, in my florid, shameful dreams. In my mind, I saw Fëanáro at my awakening, stretching toward the fire with his back turned modestly to me, leaving me in the privacy of fantasy. What if I had cried out loud? What if I had touched him as he doubtlessly tried to rouse me, spoken my passions to him? My awful secret? I feared that I had; I remembered a conversation about Ornisso and Telvo, who had been bound in his lover’s arms in the strange garden in my dreams like pale prey. The words were as clear as drumbeats against the inside of my skull, becoming slippery as soon as I began to tighten my grip upon the memory, as mischievously furtive as an eel darting between my fingers.

What had I done?

Hot tears scalded my numb cheeks, pooling in my ears, but I dared not give voice to my sobs; I dared not rend the silence. Around me, the house slept, with nary a breath or a rustle of movement to betray the presence of others, a portent of my fate: to live alone, a shame and a failure, mistrustful in the company of others.

Fëanáro’s lips upon mine: Had that been a dream? Did I dare to hope?

I turned my face into the pillow to subdue my sobs. I knew what I had to do. Come the morning, I would pack and leave.

~oOo~

I was not summoned for the mandatory minute-long breakfast and I awoke to scalding daylight pouring between drapes that I--in my inebriated weariness last night--had failed to close, the house around me rattling with the same insistent cacophony as a gourd filled with stones and shaken to make noise.

Memory rushed upon me then, crushing me: of my error the night before, of what might or might not have been a dream but most certainly had been a mistake. I pinched my eyes shut--less against the piercing light than the shame--my blood pounding with little fists along the length of my body in a frenzy of humiliation. I would have liked to allow it to explode forth; I would like to be borne on the wind, to the halls of Mandos, to let the Valar fix me and make me right and whole. I would like to be reborn, to start again, in a world where “Eressetor” was but a memory eroding with time as rock beneath swift-running waters.

I rose from bed, expecting the sodden pain of a hangover, but my head was clear, my eyes not wincing even in the sharp midday light. My heart hammered with healthy--albeit terrified--vigor, propelling me to my armoire to select clothes for the day and to finally perform the action that I had prolonged avoiding: dragging my trunk from the bottom of the armoire and to the floor with a hearty bang that was lost amid the commotion in the house but seemed a worthy punctuation to this day, this moment: the moment when aberration began to define me.

With a slow, shuddering exhale, I rose and smoothed my rumpled nightclothes with trembling hands, pondering the trunk that now lay upon the floor, waiting to be unhinged and opened, packed again with the things that I’d once laid so carefully within, so full of hope for this apprenticeship. For escape. Only to find myself more tightly bound by my aberration here than I’d even been at home. I’d tried … and failed.

With a sharp intake of breath meant to be fortifying, I bent and unlatched the trunk, letting the lid fall open. I would bury my hopes in there.

Outside my chamber, there was a shout and feet pounding on the stairs, laughter intentionally loud to chase away the silence--and then a loud knock upon my chamber door that made me flinch as though I’d been struck.

I called for the person to enter, and Telvo’s head poked into the room. “Ah, Eressetor! You are awake!” Slipping through the door and nudging it shut behind him with his heel. He wore a rumpled red tunic and tan breeches with bright blue patches at the knees; his reddish hair was a rumpled mess held back from his face with a strip of leather. He was patting his pockets; his tunic seemed to be full of them. “Forsaken shirts! Atar had them made with pockets for quills and other notions, never expecting that we would lose--ah!” Quick fingers extracted that for which he’d been looking. “Here!” A folded slip of paper, jabbed in my direction, his body already inclining toward the door and escape. I watched my pale quavering hand extend to take it; heard myself mutter what must have been gratitude.

Like a bright fish darting into a haze of murk to escape a predator’s gaze, he disappeared through the door as though he’d never been, the only evidence of his presence his faint, lingering scent of musk--and earth and onions.

Something strange about his hand, I thought, offering the note to me. I turned the paper over in my hands and closed my eyes to recall the memory: a spark of gold upon his finger, quick as a wink, then shoved back into his pocket.

A wedding band.

Trembling fingers unfolded the note, but it was not Telvo’s handwriting, as I’d expected, nor Ornisso’s, as I’d feared. It was Fëanáro’s.

Eressetor, meet me for a walk behind the forge; I wish to speak with you.
-F

The paper fluttered from my fingers, tumbling once, to lie facedown inside the trunk.

I arrived at the forge when Laurelin was at her brightest, trying to quell nerves that sizzled with dread, my hands clasped over my stomach knotted so tightly that it ached. It was not amiss for Fëanáro to call me for council, but he usually summoned me to his study; never had I been called to the forge or asked to “walk with him.” I wondered what it meant, my mind turning over the possibilities and liking none of the answers; my thoughts whirled and swirled and doubled back upon themselves, dwelling on nuances (was his handwriting sloppier than usual?) and speculating about the unknown (had he seen me? fallen upon the floor, writhing in ecstasy beneath his phantom hands?), recombining possibilities until my head ached and I closed my eyes, seeking relief, and collided with Tyelkormo--“Hey! Watch where you’re going!”--muttering an apology that might have been Quenya or might have been one of the archaic languages I’d been studying for all that I was aware of it.

The forge was the most secretive of the buildings on the estate, and even Fëanáro’s beloved Curufinwë and Maitimo were no longer permitted to enter without invitation. Which was--so far as I knew--no longer given. Behind the windows were dark curtains carefully secured, tacked at the corners of the windows to prevent even the tiniest of cracks from forming through which one might peer into the secrets of the forge. Striding up to the windows and peering in, one saw only oneself looking back, like staring into a dark mirror. I watched myself approach the forge in one of these windows, noting my bowed back and nervous hands writhing and tearing at each other but unable to do anything about it; I attached words to my appearance--insecure, immature, pathetic--and wondered why I had been cursed to survive eternity like this.

I paced a circle around the forge, but Fëanáro wasn’t there. Or, at least, he didn’t appear to be. With conflicting feelings of relief and disappointment, I turned to head back to the house and continue packing when I heard the door open behind me and a voice call, “Eressetor?”

I whirled around faster than I’d intended, stumbled, and nearly fell. Fëanáro was leaning out of the forge door, and he stepped quickly outside, drawing a cord from around his neck and using a slender key to lock the door behind him.

Some people have said that the downfall of the Noldor began when locks were invented, creating soil ripe for rumors to fester like mushrooms in the secret darkness behind locked doors. Though it was not Fëanáro who invented them, the locks or the rumors.

He tucked the key away and strode towards me, wearing a dingy tunic that might have once been white and a pair of brown trousers torn at the knees and sloppily mended. His heavy boots were untied; his hair unrestrained and uncombed, still tousled from sleep. As he passed, he caught my arm and hurried me into the forest.

Overnight, it seemed, the trees had dropped their leaves and now arched over us, mostly bare, veining the day-lit sky with darkness, nodding and creaking in the meager autumn wind. Beneath our feet, the once-splendid remains of the leaves lay, giving off a thick, festering odor of rot, cushioning our steps and letting us pass in near-silence through the forest.

Once, I tried to speak, to tell him that I was leaving, but he hushed me. My heart thundered; surely he could hear it or at least feel my pulse, beating against the palm of his hand still clutching my arm. At last--when we could see only forest on every side of us--he slowed to a gentler pace and his hand slipped down the inside of my arm, fumbling my hand and squeezing it quickly and awkwardly before folding with his other arm across his chest.

My heart jolted in surprise, and I blinked: There was no doubt that I was sober--too sober, perhaps. Surely, I had not imagined that?

Was I going mad?

“Eressetor, I desperately needed to speak to you, away from the others, now that we are both of clearer minds.” We walked side by side, our arms kept to ourselves, looking straight ahead at the leaf-strewn forest stretching before us. He was naught to me but a voice and a dark slip of hair in the periphery of my vision. I kept my arms clenched tightly around my body, as he did, to keep from shivering in the chilly shadows of the forest and to keep him from seeing the way that I trembled, waiting for him to go on, knowing that the truth about the prior night was only moments from being revealed.

What had happened? Surely he--Fëanáro, a prince of his people, married and the father of seven sons--had not kissed me.

“Last night …” he began and fumbled. His head tipped further forward until his chin must have been on his chest; this I knew because I saw his hair move from the corner of my eye, sliding forward and over his shoulder.

I could have looked and seen the pulse beating rapidly at his throat, the uncertainty he hid in his eyes. But I did not for fear that he would perceive the same of me.

He drew a deep breath and began again, “Last night … I owe you an apology for that, Eressetor. You were intoxicated and what I did …” His voice was high and false, and he reminded me of how I used to sound when I lied to my mother as a small child and claimed not to know where her chocolate squares had gone, even as I sucked the last guilty remains of them from my fingers.

He is not sorry … but it behooves him to convince me that he is.

Sorry for what?

Clearing my throat and willing my voice not to tremble, I said, “I have no memory of last night. My lord.”

He whirled on me. “You remember nothing?”

“Only strange dreams. Dreams that cannot be, the contents of which I am not willing to divulge.”

He laughed and began walking again, striding with aggressive purpose, and I had to jog to keep up. “When Nelyo was small,” he said, “he used to dream about waking up and going to the lavatory. Dreams, mind you. But when we checked his room, there was a puddle in the corner. Let me guess your dreams, Eressetor? You came upon me on the balcony. We stood, overlooking Nelyo’s roses, and we watched Telvo and his husband beginning to make love. I took you away then, to my study, and I kissed you and carried you to your bed, where I undressed you and tucked you between the sheets and might have remained and laid with you--touched you, loved you--but for the fact that you were solidly unconscious. Of course, I had to touch you to dress you and put you into your bed, but I tried to remain proper, and I slept in my own bed, as is expected of the Noldorin High Prince, the father of seven sons.”

It took him several moments to realize that I was no longer walking beside him. He stopped and turned, and we surveyed each other across a stretch of forest floor.

“Do not do this, Eressetor,” he said. “Do not pretend that it was not real for shame; do act as though you and I are normal men with normal lusts for I heard your words--your confessions--and I felt your desire as surely as you felt mine.” His chest heaved; his fair features twisted like a beautiful painting crumpled and terrible to look upon. The cold autumn breeze slithered between the trees and against my arms; I could not seem to stop shaking. “My Lord …” I said.

“Since when do you call me that?” His voice was raw, broken. He stepped forward and rubbed my foolishly bare arms with hands that burned. “When did I start being ‘my Lord’ and stop being ‘Fëanáro?’ ”

I wondered if he would embrace me. I wanted him to and didn’t, didn’t know if I could bear his touch against my body. His hands, touching only my upper arms, had me teetering upon the brink of madness. “My--‘Fëanáro’--" the juxtaposition of those two words made my cheeks burn--“you speak of ‘our’ abnormal lusts but--forgive me--you are wed. To a woman.”

And you have fathered seven sons with her! More than any other Elf in any of the accounts of history!

And your lust for her was the subject of derision and envy in Tirion!

But I did not say those things. His smile sagged, his features tightening as with a wince of pain. He took my arm and we began walking again. This time, when his hand slipped into mine, it stayed there, our fingers entwined, his hot flesh warming my cold hand. “There are those,” he said, “who love as they should--or as it is believed that they should--who love exclusively those of a gender opposite theirs. Then there are those such as Telvo and Nandolin--you--who love exclusively those of the same gender. And then there are those of us who like both, who shall be satisfied by no marriage because we ever desire what we do not have. That is I, Eressetor.

“When I was young, I believed myself to love exclusively males. Women were so often frivolous and irritating; I associated them all with my stepmother, who was then being courted by my father and desperately sought to marry him--and acted like it. The sound of their laughter, the scent of their perfume, the sight of their tiny, despicable feet in their silly pointy-toed shoes--it enraged me. I believed myself incapable of loving such a creature. Aulë took me as an apprentice around that time, and both my father and I were grateful, though neither would admit it. I began to spend almost all of my time in Aulë’s company, returning home only rarely, and I”--he laughed--“fell in love with him. With Aulë.

“I know now that it was not really love but born instead of loneliness and sexual desire that I did not then understand, but I believed myself in love with him so fervently that I even treated Yavanna--my archenemy, from my perspective then--with cruelty, until Aulë accosted me and threatened to send me back to my father for my misbehavior, and in desperation, I broke down and confessed all to him: that I loved him and wished Yavanna gone so that he might sunder his bond with her and marry me, as my father had done with Indis.

“I hate now to think of what his honest thoughts must have been then, but he took pity upon me and did not condemn me outrightly nor did he--so far as I know--tell anyone of my confession. But he explained to me that ‘love’ such as mine--and he left no doubt that he didn’t believe it to be love at all but rather a strange perversion come upon a strange child--was neither normal nor ordained, and it was against the laws of nature. Eru had made us male and female, he said, for the purpose of union and procreation, and to turn our desires to other purposes trivialized them and made our sexuality solely about pleasure. Just as, he said, we will eat the flesh of beasts but not our own kind, for it is unnatural, and though we may derive satiation and pleasure from consuming the flesh of Elves, it defies the order of the world and so causes pain and evil that otherwise would not have been.

“Of course I--for all of my delusions of grandeur--was young and still very naïve, not to mention agonized over his rejection of me, and I did not protest the obvious flaws in his comparison of homosexuality to cannibalism. In fact, I bawled my eyes out, as they say, and he took pity upon me. He said that he would tell no one of my ‘confusion’; in fact, he wondered if it had been partly his doing, for he kept me strictly sequestered for much of the day, intensely studying, and I was not allowed to communicate with others my own age or my family except for a single letter written to and read from my father each evening. He said that he had failed to consider that my rapid maturity might extend not only to physical and intellectual but sexual maturity as well, and that I needed to be around Elves my own age to learn about the proper expressions of that. So, he said, he would act as though I’d said nothing to him, so long as I consented to be sent north, where other young, aspiring metalsmiths frequently took their first apprenticeships in the mines. It was hard and dirty work, and by virtue of being a High Prince, he hadn’t believed it suitable or necessary, but clearly it was.

“So I was sent to a mine not far from here, to serve a master who lived in Formenos. The work pleased me and exhausted me to where I possessed not the strength to think on Aulë or my abnormal desires, but the fear was always there, and I shunned Elves my own age--male and female--for fear of discovering that Aulë had been wrong, that I truly was abnormal and doomed to lust after my own kind and abhor women.

“Naturally, I made rapid progress in my work, and my master soon appointed me as his assistant and took on a new apprentice: Nerdanel.

“Nerdanel was different than any woman I’d ever met before. She was quiet and thoughtful but she could match wits with the best. She could match wits with me. And,” he added with a laugh, “she didn’t even wear awful pointy-toed shoes. Many hours we spent in each other’s company, and our friendship grew, and it came to where I realized that I desired her, very deeply, to where I dreamt of her nightly and she filled my fantasies. Yet, at the same time, I was still attracted to other males. My love for Nerdanel just happened to be stronger than that.

“I believed that she also loved me, so I asked her to marry me. But before I let her answer, I told her--second of all people in the world--my awful secret. She held me for a long time that night before she gave me her answer, but at last, she did. ‘I will marry you,’ she said, ‘if you can set aside your desires for others and love only me.’ She is not a beautiful woman, as you probably know, and she feared that I would tire of her and desire, as she said, ‘one of my own league.’ Her deepest fear, I believe--though she never said as much--was that this eventual paramour would be another male, that I would bring shame upon her: that she was so ugly and clumsy that her husband had to turn to another male to satisfy him as a woman should. I gave her my promise, and we were married.

“Aulë stood at my wedding, and he said nothing--as he had promised--about my long-ago transgression and confessions, but I could see that he was pleased that he had been right all along, that I had managed to find normal love for women. Yet, I had not. Not entirely. I continued to desire males--the male body, the touch of male hands--and pleasures that my wife could not give, but I kept my promise to her, and I never strayed from our marriage except in thought. And if a man cannot have his own thoughts and private dreams, then what can he have?

“One by one, our sons were born, and as they grew, I watched each for signs of my abnormality. Fervently I wished--even praying to Eru--that none of them would be cursed as I had been, not because I would have been ashamed of him but because I wanted none of my children to suffer and go without love because of ‘conventions’ that he’d had no part in making. It continues to seem unjust to me that we are born into the rules and choices of a society and expected to follow them without question, to pay for the folly of our ancestors. Because our forefathers didn’t consider the possibility that a man should wish to love and marry another man--or that a woman should wish to love and marry another woman--then we are expected to conform to those ancestors’ narrow beliefs rather than what Eru has ordained possible. And by our very existence, Eressetor, Eru has proven that our kind is as much a part of the Music as those who call themselves ‘normal,’ and as the Ainulindalë teaches us, Eru put nothing in the Music that does not n the end do glory unto Eru’s creation. But others seek to suppress it, not for lack of understanding so much as lack of a willingness to understand. But I suppose that that is part of the Music as well.

“I was heartened, though, as was my wife--for though she didn’t speak of it, I know that she also watched each of our sons closely for signs of aberration--that each of our five sons grew with a healthy (if not a bit voracious) appetite for women, and it seemed that my prayers had been answered beyond my expectations. Perhaps, I often thought, Eru has a sense of humor after all and enjoyed watching me worry instead over their excessive lust for the opposite sex. Nelyo came home at the age of thirty-nine, in tears because his thirty-seven-year-old girl-friend feared that she might be pregnant; that was, luckily, a groundless worry. But after that, as they matured one by one, I had to answer for their behavior to more angry fathers than I care to remember; placate more heartbroken, weeping ‘maidens’ than I have fingers and toes; and I learned to knock before entering any room with a closed door, including--and this was Tyelkormo--my own bedroom. But I had my wish, did I not? And who was I to dispute a blessing?

“After Curufinwë’s birth, Nerdanel and I agreed that he would be the last, as both his pregnancy and delivery were difficult for her, and it was questioned whether they would both survive--or whether they both might even perish. We’d pushed it too far, we feared, and so we contented ourselves with our five healthy sons and were careful ever after in our lovemaking. But accidents happen or maybe we’d grown careless with time and no conceptions, and when Curufinwë was just over one hundred years old, after a bout of what appeared to be poisoning from a particularly foul meal that Macalaurë had made, the healer proclaimed her not poisoned but pregnant. And with twins, nonetheless!

“The twins were born without much fuss at all, both of them healthy, and it seemed that our worries had been groundless. It was almost as if it had been meant to be.

“In the eight months or so between when we discovered that Nerdanel was with child and the births of the twins, I turned my prayers to asking--not for my unborn sons to be of ‘normal’ sexuality--but asking that my wife survive this final pregnancy and childbirth, asking that both my little boys be happy and healthy and never have to suffer as I had, without a mother, and enduring the temptations of their widowed father. And again, my prayer was granted.

“But it was not long before it became obvious that the younger of the two--despite the fact that they were alike in all else and that his twin had the same desire for women as my elder sons--was aberrant, as I had been. As I am. And Telvo is innocent and has never doubted the best intentions of anyone; he is like his mother and not at all like me in personality and temperament: kind and patient, striving ever to understand rather than master. He assumed that others--his mother, his brothers--would accept him for what he was and likewise try to understand him. They did not. They reacted with fear and hatred, not for him but for what they believed he’d chosen to be, and they tried to change him. Naturally, they could not. You and I know that it is not a matter of choice but rather a matter of being, as ordained as the colors of our eyes or our maleness. And though they came eventually to love him despite his aberrance, nothing has ever been the same between them. And neither my wife nor half of my sons, I am ashamed to say--including his own twin brother--will acknowledge his marriage to Nandolin, reacting with silence to it on the best of days and calling it ‘filth’ and ‘aberration’ on the worst.

“My wife left me when I was exiled and publicly repudiated my doubts about the Valar. Since then--nearly a decade--I have pursued her, and though I have had the opportunity to take new lovers, I have honored my promise to her. Until last night. Last night, I kissed you Eressetor, and held you in my arms, and I was unfaithful in mind as well as body, and I found that it did not destroy me. For I have learned that my wife will not return to me, no matter what I do. The bond between us was sundered long before I kissed you last night, but it took that kiss to see that. I have lost my hope in her and so seek it anew, with you.”

We stopped in the clearing and he challenged me with his stare. He took my quavering hands in his and kissed my knuckles. His gaze never left mine.

I laughed then, maniacally, laughing so hard that the trees seemed to shake with my mirth, rattling their skeletal branches and spilling the last of their dying leaves upon us. The wind roared in acquiescence and Fëanáro grinned at me, and we were alike in our madness.

“All this time,” I said between peals of laughter twisting toward the sky and the slate-gray clouds roiling overhead, “I have dreaded this; it has been my worst nightmare and now …” My face burned, cheeks twisted into a grin wider than possible for me--the heartless stoic--and I realized that I was sobbing, nuzzling his chest and accepting his embrace. Warm hands swept the hair from the back of my neck and something burned there, a kiss, and my head lolled around and his mouth pressed the pounding artery in my throat, tongue teasing pallid flesh, his teeth smiling against me.

There was a feeling of being lifted and propelled and something solid bumped my back, and I realized that he had me pressed against a tree; his hands were pushing at my robes and baring my skinny white legs with thick, knobby knees, trembling with both cold and terrified relief to be touched, at last, by one such as he. His mouth had claimed mine again, his tongue in my mouth and trailing the line of my jaw and prodding inside of my ear. His hands were busy below his waist and with the ease of swiping papers from a table with the flat of his hand, his breeches had slid away--but of course, he had done this before, even if never with a male, was an experienced lover--and I felt his naked arousal prodding the inside of my bare thigh even as nimble fingers had taken to peeling away my underpants.

“Eressetor, for love of Eru, I have denied myself so long, and I want you so badly,” he said, fingernails scratching my buttocks in his haste as my heart hammered in sudden fear of what he meant to do. He was already throbbing against my leg, thrusting against me, hand fondling my genitals with a practiced haste, almost painfully, before lifting to poke his two fingers into his mouth. I was painfully hard, my heart beating so fast with terror and desire that it was a single hot roar of blood, my entire body a column of flame and my legs lifted to straddle his waist, trembling.

A slick finger prodded me, plunging into my untouched depths before a second joined it and I shouted in pain. “Eressetor, relax, damn it,” he growled, and he was trying to stretch my resistant flesh but my frightened body had clenched upon him and hurt us both, and he pulled out with a grunt. His erection against my thigh felt huge, and I quailed at the thought of taking him inside of me--not when even this, two fingers, hurt so much--and he was becoming frustrated with me. He bit my throat then soothed it with his tongue; he fumbled himself to my entrance although I was not prepared, and I rebelled and thrust away from him, writhing from his grasp and falling upon my naked backside upon the damp, fallen leaves, pale, trembling hands concerned with fumbling my robes to cover my nakedness.

He had no such modesty and stood before me--naked below the waist and tunic torn half open--with an astounded sneer upon his face, beautiful and terrible, with long, muscled legs and taut belly and his erection rising red-purple from the dark hair at his groin and damp at the tip, formidable and beautiful and terrifying.

I could look on him all day, but I hid my eyes, pulled my knees to my chest. I heard his name wheeze out in an exhale: Fëanáro. “Have I misunderstood?” he said in a strange, staccato voice that belied his hurt bewilderment, his anger with me. “Have I misunderstood your desire for me? I have never made love with a man, but I have not brought seven children into the world without some knowledge of the mechanics of it, and you are acting like a dumb virgin.”

In a quavering voice, I managed to say, “I am,” followed by a shuddering exhale that might have been a laugh, and I realized that--despite his scorn of those who believed the vicious lies spread as rumors in the house of his half-brother--he had assumed by the same rumors and my aberrance that I must have been guilty as accused. “Ornisso and I,” I added in a whispered, “we only kissed; no one has ever touched me before you.”

Swiftly, he stepped into his breeches and the laces were redone so rapidly that it seemed by magic that a second skin was brought to cover the first, and he lifted me into an embrace, leaning me against the tree again but apologizing for his error this time with tender kisses, coaxing open my lips with his tongue and caressing my face and chest with warm, gentle hands, kissing my eyes and nose and the soft skin of my throat. “Let me touch you?” he said--at once a demand and a question--with his fingers already slipped past my waist and fondling the tip of my erection, and as I nodded, he took also my hand and pressed it to his groin, moaning into my mouth in his pleasure.

“We will start slowly.” His breath came in ragged gasps and his face was damp with sweat, his eyes feral and as bright as steel fresh from the fire. “Just touching. We’ll bring each other to climax with just our hands. From there …” He spoke no further and plied my lips with gentle kisses, moving down my face and neck, lost his composure there and moaned, and I felt his teeth on my flesh, closing upon me, almost hurting, then in his mercy, retreating, a quick tongue prodding the marks he’d made, soothing them into nonexistence.

His hand was on my erection, having weaseled beneath my robes, and many times I was on the brink of succumbing to pleasure; he’d knocked my hand away from clumsily stroking him through his breeches after he’d nearly climaxed; he wanted me to climax first or maybe come together. I could not tell from the unintelligible words whispered against my skin, punctuated by nips and kisses. His touch was expert, maddening, but I could not bring myself to give into it; I seemed to believe--foolishly, irrationally--that instead of ecstasy, my body would explode into searing pain if I did.

“Eressetor, come …” That I felt as well as heard, against the delicate ridge of my collarbone where he was leaving kisses, blue-black marks. “Please!” He was pushing his hips against me, faster now, and I whispered something like “I can’t,” and he shouted then and thrust against me, his face twisted as though in pain, and even through his breeches--still primly laced because I’d been too shy to presume the right to strip him as he had to done me--I could feel him throbbing, and then he was the one quivering and helpless, collapsed in my arms.

He dropped to his knees to push his face into my belly, moaning weakly, and I was still hard and unfulfilled but somehow relieved that he’d given in to release first and left me unsatisfied. Still pure. One of my hands twined in his hair as warm and slippery as silk, damp with the sweat of his exertions; the other was busy tugging my robes in place to cover my nakedness.

I examined myself in the mirror that night, naked: It had been years since I’d found the fortitude to look upon my naked reflection, and I could not meet my own eyes, even now, having endured the touch and (doubtlessly) scrutiny of Fëanáro. My throat and the top of my chest were blackened by bruises as though I’d been beaten or maybe nearly strangled; in places, the blood had risen in little red-brown stipples against my unhealthily pale skin. I touched them and expected them to hurt, but they did not. How violent, love! I found myself thinking. Even beneath where my hair fell thick and dark against my neck, the tip of my ear: bitten, bruised. I’d combed my hair over my ears to cover it and worn high-necked robes to supper that night; I had seen Fëanáro smile at that, when none of his sons were looking.

Beneath that, a pale chest nearly sunken and ribs too prominent, as though starved; tiny pinkish nipples puckered, like they were trying to hide. Cold-bumps had risen on my skin, on my scrawny chest and gaunt arms dominated by bony, pointy elbows, the flesh loose and jiggling where the curve of muscle should be, indeed was on the arms of Fëanáro and his sons. My hipbones stuck forward too and cast gray shadows upon the taut-stretched skin of my narrow hips. I dared even look at my groin, as I never did, even while washing or relieving myself, at the bristling dark hair that spread awhile from my groin and up my belly and across my thighs like a perilous fungus that begged not to be touched, at my cock that seemed to shrivel away from my gaze.

I did not possess the strength to examine myself further: the stick-thin legs with black hairs sprouted randomly from my skin like wires, the pallid buttocks flat and flaccid like pancakes, feet long and bony with horn-yellow toenails. I saw myself through his eyes, the eyes of an artist and a genius who understood better than anyone the meaning of perfection, of beauty. I understood little of either, just enough to know that I was their contrary.

I swathed myself in a bath towel, but when I pondered my bed--the trunk still open beside it, hungry and waiting with only a single paper dropped inside of it--I plunged between the satin sheets without pajamas. My flesh remembered his touch and the heat of his kisses; the marks upon my flesh ached with something that was not pain. I squirmed against the frigid sheets as though they could cool my desire, but they did not, and I fell into restless sleep and dreamt of him.

~oOo~

In delirium, I awoke, a scream buried in my throat, pushing forth with the force of one buried alive, giving me just enough time to turn my face into the pillow before a shout erupted from the confines of my throat.

I had released into the sheets, hot seed splattered across icy-cold satin, orgasm gripping my hips as though in a vice and thrusting them into the bedclothes in a seizure of ecstasy. The ghost of Fëanáro was upon me, smiling in satisfaction, having invaded my body and spirit, having made me succumb.

But of course, it was a dream, and it passed, and I arose, shaking, to pull nightclothes over my damp, naked body, driven by something that pulled me out of my chambers and into the hallway, bare feet burned by the frigid stone floors.

Only a dream!

There was a mirror on the wall, something made by Maitimo that he had said once gave Fëanáro hope of artistic talent in his eldest son before discovering his hopeless mediocrity. It was a series of mirrored pieces layered upon each other and dazzling to the eye, images embedded within images, a person within a yawning mouth or glinting inside an eye; it was sensual, I saw now, with one’s mouth closing upon one’s own image or at the center of an adoring gaze, where an eye should be. Naturally Maitimo--beautiful Maitimo--would design such a piece; I could imagine him before it--hands upon his young, blossoming body--just as I could imagine Fëanáro doing the same and proclaiming it genius. As I passed, I caught sight of myself within it, and I was hideous--whites showing around my frightened eyes, face flour-pale--devouring myself and seeing naught but myself, and I ran harder, nearly tripping upon the stairs, in my haste to reach my destination that remained unknown to my conscious sense but seemed (somehow) to involve that bizarre and repugnant mirror.

I found myself lost in the tangle of Fëanáro’s sprawling home yet still in pursuit, heart hammering. Then suddenly, I was in the long corridor leading off of the patio with the three closets at the end with no recollection of coming there. A pale hand, surprisingly steady, was reaching for and twisting the knob; it was slick with sweat and had trouble finding purchase, but it yanked the door open and the portrait of Nerdanel tumbled upon me: her young face and rust-colored hair, almost as ugly as me, upon her back with breasts flattened and androgynous beneath her tunic, her hands as broad as a man’s and stretched toward the painter, fingers splayed, grabbing at the petals that he showered upon her. But the adoration in her eyes: beautiful.

Because, of course, its source was himself beautiful.

In fact, the glints of light in her eyes betraying her exaltation. Were they reflections, of the young man bent over her and scattering her with petals? For whom she reached with hands spread wide and nearly quivering inside the canvas? Was it his reflection that rendered her ugly face somehow worthy of his love?

Inside the closet: a thousand icons of her, upon canvas, in metal, in clay. All of them bravely brandished her flaws, almost flaunted them. My jealous eyes fixed upon each in turn--the fleshy hips, the bulges of fat at her lower back, the ponderous bovine breasts--and found reason for disgust … and hope. My hands sought the statue that had dropped upon me the first time I’d happened into this closet, made in copper with her hair strewn upon her breasts, her thighs closed primly but the fork of her legs still uncovered, that place that had last known the rough love of Fëanáro. I wondered, if I took it, would he miss it? But though the statues of her in the closet were numerous, the one done in copper was missing.

In its place were new icons that had not been there before: a girlishly young Nerdanel, her hair damp from labor, smiling into the face of a newborn Maitimo; a pale bust done with her hair flowing in a sea of copper around her; a painting done of her back, bent over a table in her workshop. These were distinct and I would have remembered them; the latter, when I pressed it to my face, still smelled oily, of fresh paint.

With only my love for the beautiful Fëanáro keeping me from putting my clenched and trembling fist through Nerdanel’s laughing portrait--as though I could scatter the petals even from the hand of her admirer--I stuffed the items back into the closet, unsure what they proved, and returned to uneasy sleep.

~oOo~

As Fëanáro’s lover, I achieved a new status. I remained his apprentice, but he became harder on me. I had transcended the status of a mere student brought to act as a pawn in the endless subtle games that he played with his half-brother. He threw my parchments--carefully connived and written again and again until the penmanship was perfect--upon his desk, teeth clenched in rage. “This! This is juvenile! Maitimo did better at the age of thirty!” He held me to a higher standard now, it seemed, much as he held his sons. Taking me to the brink of hurt rage--tears burning my eyes, lips quavering and unable to muster the strength for speech--he always rescinded at exactly the right moment, as I had seen him do while scolding Tyelperinquar, sweeping him from his feet and tickling his belly and laughing suddenly, until the tears had melted from Tyelperinquar’s eyes. This he did with me. He railed and even--on one or two occasions--tore my hard work to shreds; then he took me into his arms and kissed my mouth. “I know what you are capable of. You must trust me, for I love you and would never hurt you.” Pushing me onto my back, upon his desk, upon the rejected shreds of paper, plying me with kisses and caresses until I forgot my hurt and believed him and strode from his study with headlong determination never to disappoint him again.

But I did disappoint him; we all disappointed him, for he expected perfection, and we were not perfect; we were not him.

We would meet in the privacy of his study or else walked in the forest, to the secret places that he said only he knew. We told no one of the strange turn that our relationship had taken, even Telvo, for Fëanáro cautioned me that although they were known as Pityo and Telvo now, long before, they’d been Ambarussa and even the most secret thoughts of one was never fully his own. Telvo, he said, was the purest in heart of all of his sons and would never intentionally betray us, but the bond between twins was something that we could not understand and should not dare to judge. “So we shall tell no one,” he said, “for no one shall understand.”

Though I believed that Telvo knew that something had changed, for he would appear at my side at odd hours during the day, saying nothing and looking into my face as though waiting for something. He and Pityo had switched places at the dining room table and he sat beside me now and Pityo opposite us; his knee brushed mine beneath the table throughout the meal. I forced myself to meet his eyes on the rare occasions when we spoke; I longed to see the bond with Nandolin in his eyes, as Fëanáro had said that I would.

I was working in the library one day, rewriting one of my essays that Fëanáro had shredded and refused to return to me, claiming that it was best started anew. I was in a particularly foul mood, and I looked up to Telvo seated across from me, his arm stretched across the table and his head lying atop it, basking in a golden streak of daylight spilling between the drapes. As the bar of light moved, so Telvo shifted with it, his face turned into the light and the gray of his eyes nearly indiscernible from the whites, the black centers constricted to a tiny pinprick. He blinked lazily, blinded momentarily, and I leaned forward to peer into his eyes.

“For what are you looking, Eressetor?” he asked me, and I fell back, rebuked. He straightened, his auburn hair falling in a tumble over his shoulder. Indeed, he did resemble Fëanáro least of all of the sons, though his delicate features surely came from his father, not his mother.

“N-nothing,” I stammered and resumed writing.

“Do not lie. You stare into my eyes and you never did before. I know that you are not in love with me,” he said with a laugh, “so have out with it, Eressetor. You want to see if I am in fact wed to Nandolin, is that it?”

Swiftly, before I could regret it, I nodded.

He clamored across the table on his elbows and took my face in his hands, and we stared into each other’s eyes. His were gray but almost yellowish at the centers; this close, his breath tickled my face and I could smell the earthy scent of his skin, overlaid with the aroma of soap. The pupils of his eyes were dilating, having been removed from the light, and I looked for my reflection there … and saw nothing but something that spun ever onward, across the span of time, a dark and placid peace.

I gasped, and my hands lifted to clench his wrists.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “So maybe now, you will believe?” I nodded and he stroked my cheek. “Eressetor, I am sorry for you. For what happened with Ornisso”--shushing me with a finger pressed against my lips--“and therefore to you. He is not a bad person but confused; he tried with me too, long ago, but I had already seen Nandolin from afar and believed that I loved him. So his ploys did not work. It is said,” Telvo added with a wry grin, “that Ornisso can smell our aberrance on us like a dog sniffs blood. That he needs more love than any single person can give and so he shall always be bereft. Try to find pity for him, Eressetor, rather than anger.”

Tenderly, he kissed my forehead, as though we were not nearly the same age, as though he was much older and bestowing me with his wisdom, and his feet slipped back to the floor and he was gone.

I’d asked Fëanáro once, seated upon his lap in his study and watching the Lights mingle, his hand tucked between my knees, his heartbeat against my back, why Telvo and Nandolin--if they were married--lived apart. “Nandolin is his father’s only son, and his help is required with farm work,” Fëanáro had said, “so he cannot come here but for single nights, sometimes not even that.”

“Why, then, doesn’t Telvo go to him?”

“Certainly, he could. I would allow it, and Nandolin’s family is simple, quiet folk; always have they desired first their son’s happiness. Telvo, they see, makes him happy, and alongside me, they rejoiced in their marriage. But my wife Nerdanel, she does not understand, and we had harsh words about their marriage, even after I was exiled. Telvo believes, I fear, that to live fully with Nandolin as a husband will drive his mother and me further apart, so he acts not to shame her, in hopes that our marriage will be restored. In hopes that--if he does not disappoint her--she will come home to me and to his brothers.”

Telvo is the purest in heart of my sons.

“I have told him that the hope of that is frail, but he persists. After the exile ends, he says, he will remain in Formenos when the rest of us return to Tirion. The scrutiny upon us shall not be so strong then, and likely, no one will notice. Until then, he says, he wants Nerdanel to have the fewest reasons possible to hate me.” He’d laughed bitterly then, and my heart had been uneasy in my chest.

With winter upon us and the crops harvested, Nandolin came often to supper, to sit beside Telvo, and was ignored by most of his brothers-in-law. In the parlor after the meal, Macalaurë was called to play the harp, and Telvo curled in Nandolin’s lap, Nandolin’s fingers twined in his hair, and Pityo rose suddenly and stalked from the room.

Fëanáro leaped to his feet to follow, but Telvo held up his hand. “Do not, Atar. One day, mayhap, he will know in his heart the kind of love that I have in mine, and he will understand what it is to desire parting from a limb before parting from a lover. What he knows now, it is not love, but the kind of desire that entertains for a short while and leaves one cold over the whole of time. It is envy of my blessing--not hatred of it--that sunders us. But that shall change.”

Jaw set resolutely, Fëanáro sat down again.

Staring into the fire, as the first note of Macalaurë’s song fell like warm rain upon our ears, Telvo said so softly that only those nearest to him--Nandolin, Fëanáro, and I--could hear him, “Fate hastens love to him now, disguised as Night, and he shall know bliss before the end.”

~oOo~

Fëanáro and I had yet to spend a night together, more of my accord than his. He would kiss me goodnight at my chamber door on some nights. “Eressetor. Let me come in with you,” his kisses hot upon my lips and face, his arousal grinding against my hips, until I was forced to push him away and remind him in tremulous whispers of how risky and unwise it was.

At last, he would wait no longer. “Eressetor,” he said, after summoning me to his study one day, “I want you to spend the night in my bed beside me tonight.” He was pacing furiously, his hands wringing together. “I will hear no excuses! Tyelkormo, Carnistir, and Pityo are gone on a midwinter hunt, and none of the others are near enough to my chambers to hear anything amiss.” He fell to his knees before my chair; he nuzzled my hands and suckled my fingertips, one by one. Tingles of pleasure coursed up my arms, crackling in my brain, until I wondered if I would ever be sated of him. “Please. I have been lonely for so long!”

Reluctantly, I agreed, and he shouted with joy and delivered a surprising kiss to the inside of my thigh--clad only in breeches--making arousal settle into my groin with the sudden heaviness of an anvil dropped from a height. “Tonight …” he said, parting my legs further, his lips so close to my groin that I could feel his breath warming me, staring up at me with a wicked smirk upon his face.

We had yet to move beyond kisses and caresses, though Fëanáro had certainly tried, prodding me with his fingers until I shouted in pain and wriggled away, sinking to his knees to pleasure me orally even as I tugged him up again by fistfuls of his hair. “No, don’t …” “Why? I don’t understand!” “Just … don’t.”

He managed to bring me to climax on a few occasions but not often, and when he did, there was little pleasure in it but more of a defensive reaction, the rubbery spasm of muscles and a dutiful squirt of semen. My body stubbornly resisted him even as I desired him so strongly that I was sick with it, maddened by it, yet I could not bear to allow him to bring me to completion. It was he who writhed beneath me, who stemmed his cries against my shoulder and neck. It was he who was reduced to lying trembling and helpless in my arms. I feared this, one so great as Fëanáro brought to his knees, proclaiming his love for me in tongues I’d never heard, his pupils dilated to where his eyes appeared depthless and black.

I returned often at night to the closet at the end of the hall, where the paintings and statues changed by the day, relentlessly horded by Fëanáro--doubtlessly--when I was not around. He was obsessed with her, I realized, even as he claimed to love me. I wondered what other troves like this he kept around the house. The forge, locked and secret. Such obsession, like a disease; I feared it claiming me if I gave in to him as he had given in to her.

After the others had retired to bed, Fëanáro came to my chambers to retrieve me. I’d packed some overnight things--my best silk nightshirt, a hairbrush, and a few toiletry items--and crept after him down the hall. He still slept in the master suite, a room built in symmetry for two people: two of everything, two closets, two bathrooms. I’d never been in there before, but as I knew my way around his house as though my instinct, I knew this too. And I knew that he dwelt on that symmetry--the empty half--and felt incomplete himself, lying alone in his big bed at night.

There was a sitting room at the front of the suite and even a private dining room, but he led me past all of this and into the bedroom. He was like one maddened, fairly snapping with energy, squeezing my hand with an almost-painful force, grinning so that his teeth were bared top and bottom. The bedroom was just as I’d imagined: symmetrical, with his bathroom and closets on one side and Nerdanel’s on the other. There were even two writing desks, against opposite walls. His was a mess of ragged quills, sloppy stacks of parchment, and dog-eared books. The lid was shut upon hers; the state of it relative to his was not for me to know.

And at the room’s center: the bed. Big enough that I could lie across it with my arms stretched overhead and not be able to touch both sides, raised on a dais accessed by two stairs, with a skylight overhead showing a patch of starry sky. Fëanáro was still dressed for forge-work, and as I stood awkwardly trying not to make it too obvious that I was studying his bed, thinking of him naked between the bedclothes with her, in throes of ecstasy that I could not contemplate, he removed his jewelry and tossed it onto a bureau and yanked his tunic over his head. “I will have a bath before I come to you, Eressetor, so no worries about that.” He held me to his naked chest and kissed me. He smelled pungently of sweat with the dusty odor of soot beneath. He trailed a line of kisses to my ear and whispered, “Tonight will be special. Wait for me in bed.”

I heard him running water and bumping around inside his bathroom, and nervously, I disrobed and put on my silken nightclothes. I’d had yet to allow him to see me completely naked, dreading the impact of all of my flaws viewed at once, but rather only to see essential parts bared briefly then tucked away again while he gasped and moaned in the aftermath of ecstasy. I even turned my back to his bathroom door, though I could hear him stepping into the bathwater and knew that he would not emerge anytime soon. All of my nightclothes were long and high in the neck, and I secured every last button, tugging the sleeves to my wrists, and turning to contemplate the bed.

It had been made neatly and--I sensed--in my honor, with a brightly patterned quilt done in a Star of Fëanáro pattern smoothed neatly across it and pillows piled high in inviting chaos. Nervously ascending the stairs and peeling back the quilt, I found red satin sheets that clung to my skin with the same slippery coolness as water, tucked tightly beneath the mattress. I stuck my legs beneath them without untucking the bed, scooting into place and settling awkwardly against the dozen or so pillows piled behind my head, the quilt and bed sheets tucked beneath my chin. The bed smelled of the charged air before a thunderstorm, of Fëanáro. I breathed him in, absorbed him into my blood. I wished that I’d thought to bring a book, but then, that was too marital and bland, to have him emerge from his bath, slick and naked, to find me tucked into his bed and absorbed in a book. I lay with my neck bent awkwardly against the pillows and listening to the splashing from inside his bathroom, wondering what he was doing, wishing that I could watch.

I should have asked to watch. He probably would have liked that, would have made a show of slick caresses and his perfect, naked form.

Even though the bed was wider than any I’d ever seen much less slept in, I was stretched at the edge of it with yards of quilt and mattress and satin sheets to the other side of me. This had been one of his marital beds--the other in his home in Tirion--and I suppose it had ceased being an object of much marvel to Nerdanel. They probably stood on opposite sides of it, undressing and peeling back the bedclothes, arguing or discussing or fallen into the insular silences that I suppose don’t feel odd once one has been married for so long. I wondered if they’d crossed the width of this bed and held each other, even at the end of their marriage. I wondered if any of their children had been conceived here. Tyelkormo had been begotten in the summer as had the twins, and the family had spent most of their summers here. I wondered what Tyelkormo and Pityo would say to know that I was about to sleep in the bed where their lives had begun. I wondered what Telvo would say. One of the six greatest days of my life, Nerdanel’s letter had said of Carnistir’s begetting. I wondered if Fëanáro would be thinking of those days as he laid here with me, if he would regret that it was my touches and kisses--not hers--that were superimposed upon the memories they’d shared here.

Each place he put me seemed to erase a bit of her. Even as I felt a guilty twinge of joy for this, I wondered if he would one day come to resent me for it.

In the bathroom, a drain was opened and water gurgled from the bathtub, and a moment later, he emerged with his hair stuck to his shoulders in wet tendrils, with only a thin towel around his waist and not hiding much. Already, I could see, he was half-aroused, though I had learned that it didn’t take much to arouse Fëanáro: a suggestive look or an unintended innuendo, and he was pressing my hand to his groin to feel how hard he was. No wonder you have seven sons! I’d said once, frightened by his intensity that I could never hope to approximate much less match.

“Look at you!” he laughed. “Swathed in that bed like a cocoon!” He made a circle of the room, extinguishing all of the lamps except for the two beside the bed; he climbed the dais and yanked back the covers of the carefully made bed with such force that they were even torn from me. Still wearing his towel, though it was coming loose at the side and baring his long thigh nearly to his hip, he knelt beside me. He smelled of soap; beneath that, the electrical essence that was Fëanáro. “This,” he said, indicating my prostrate body in my prim nightclothes, “will not do. You shouldn’t have bothered to bring nightclothes at all. I want to feel your naked skin on mine tonight.” He knelt to begin undoing my buttons and whispered in my ear, “I want to feel all of you, inside and out.”

Heart hammering, I caught his hands before my shirt was half-undone and brought them, trembling, to my lips. “I--I do not want to disrobe.”

He took my hand, hooked it where the towel was tight around his waist, tugged it free to fall to the bed in a limp pile. He was fully aroused now and beautiful in the lamplight, kneeling with his legs splayed and his damp hair clinging to his bare chest. But he was used to eyes upon him; he was a prince and beautiful at that.

“Please, Eressetor,” he said, and I expected him to guide my hand to his erection but he held it, bringing it to his lips, tenderly kissing my knuckles. “I let you look upon me, and from the desire in your eyes, you like it. I want also to look upon you, to know and master every inch of you as I am slowly letting you learn and master me.”

“But--I am not beautiful like you.” He was easing my nightshirt past my shoulders, coaxing me to lift my body so that he could slide it down and toss it away. My narrow shoulders were bared, then my skinny chest and belly, with its line of hair leading to my groin. His hands were beneath my buttocks, lifting, gently sliding my nightclothes away, leaving me bared and shamed, trembling hands lifting to cover myself and just as quickly nudged aside by Fëanáro. “Hush,” he said, allowing his eyes to slide slowly down the length of my body. “I believe that you are beautiful.”

He lay atop me, our arousals pressing each other, and kissed me deeply. One of his arms was stretched, reaching to fumble open the drawer on the bedside table, withdrawing something that he tucked into the palm of his hand. My eyes were opened and rolled to the side, trying to see what he was doing, even as he kissed me with such depth and passion that I should not have been able to resist him. He grew frustrated with me sometimes because I could.

“Lie back. Close your eyes,” he said, rising to slide down the bed, to press kisses to my chest. “Do not worry about what I am doing, for I will not hurt you and you must trust me. Relax and give in to the pleasure of it.”

Quavering hands pressed to the mattress on either side of me, I did as he’d instructed, though I was as tense as a wire. “Relax,” he whispered again, massaging my shoulders and arms with skilled hands that had me doing as he’d commanded within less than a minute. He kissed my nipples and down my trembling belly. He spread my thighs with gentle hands, and I acquiesced. When his mouth enveloped the head of my penis, I shouted in pleasure and surprise.

He laughed and the laughter made most pleasing vibrations. I moaned. “I knew that you would like it. See, you must trust me,” he said, spreading my legs further. My heart gave a nervous shudder. “Keep your eyes closed. Focus on the pleasure.”

He’d slicked his finger with something, and he probed by entrance. “Fëanáro …” I whimpered, but he hushed me and licked the length of my arousal, plunging into my tight insides when I quivered with the ecstasy of his tongue upon forbidden flesh. I shouted again, but this time with surprise and pain, and he withdrew the finger for a moment before prodding me again, and I writhed. “Fëanáro, no, it hurts,” but he had my thighs pinned beneath him, and though I thrashed, I could not escape one so much larger and stronger than me, as he was.

“Eressetor, you are tense and you assume that it will hurt and so it does,” he growled impatiently. He released me and was kneeling over me again. Something was dripping onto my belly; I opened my eyes to see him slicking his arousal with the same oily substance that he’d used on his fingers. I remembered the time in the woods, Telvo flat on his back upon the rock with the much-larger Nandolin thrusting into him, his cries that could have been borne of pain if one didn’t see his eyes, the fevered wildness there, and see how quickly he climaxed, even with his arousal untouched, Nandolin’s hands pressing his hips to the rock, holding him to the mercy of his thrusts. I twitched at the memory, and Fëanáro smiled. Smiled and kissed me. “It will be good. You will experience sensations that you don’t yet know are possible. But you must expect pleasure, not pain. You must relax and trust me.” His eyes as bright as flames in the quavering, lamplit semi-darkness, he asked, “Do you think that you can do that?”

I must have nodded because my ankles were being lifted onto his shoulders, his erection positioned at my entrance. His hands roved my body, and his cheeks were flushed with color; I was nearly panting with apprehension … apprehension, yes, but also an elusive twinkling of desire, wanting the sort of union that I had seen between Telvo and Nandolin.

With a hiss of breath, he thrust inside of me, and I screamed in pain and found his fingers pressing my mouth. I tried to kick free of him; I bit his fingers, but he only retreated and thrust into me again, deeper this time, past tight, resistant flesh, and tears cut burning tracks down my cheeks already damp with sweat, and his hand lifted from my mouth to wipe them away with the backs of his fingers.

“I love you,” he whispered. “Do not cry, do not hurt, for I love you.” He moved inside of me then, touching a place that made a white-hot flash behind my eyes, half agony and half ecstasy. He watched the transformation upon my face and grinned. “Yes, Eressetor. Yes.” Kissing my skinny, pale legs trembling upon his shoulders, moving inside of me again until I didn’t think that I could bear it--the painful intrusion or the agonizing pleasure of it--and I screamed into his hand that had again covered my mouth, and he thrust into me again, his pupils dilated and mad, his lips skinned back from his teeth, and I felt his length throbbing inside of me, and I thought, This is love! This is union! before he released and we became one flesh.

Trembling, gasping upon the bed, I could manage only to clamp my arms around him as he fell to the mattress beside me, burying his face in my hair and whispering my name like an invocation against loneliness. Eressetor, Eressetor, how I love you, Eressetor. It had taken less than a minute, and it was over. I’d survived, though I ached inside and the stickiness trickling between my thighs, I knew, was a mixture of his seed and my blood, but that--I suppose--was our union.

I adore you.

Daringly, he had taken to leaving little notes upon scraps of paper, tucked into the books on which I was working for the week. Sitting opposite Maitimo in the library, I would find them and tuck them hastily beneath the table before Maitimo could see, peeking at them pressed into the palm of my hand, my pallid cheeks ablaze.

You have become my life.

Maitimo was working on a new variety of roses, puzzling over the possible combinations for long hours, trying to breed a variety with petals clear and crystal as water. So far, his experiments had yielded only species that were blue-gray and reeked slightly of fish. I was immersed in the Ardacarmë, a dusty tome that described the building of the world by the Valar in tedious, savoring detail, and amid the accounts of raising mountains and delving oceans, I found the notes tucked away and written in Fëanáro’s unmistakable hand.

I love you.

“What if someone else finds them?” I’d hissed to him, after finding the first weeks earlier, a few days after our lovemaking had finally been successful.

“No one but you has reason or interest to revisit that boring tripe,” he’d said with a wave of his hand, his voice trying to sound condescending but too humored, affectionate despite his best attempts otherwise. He’d dismissed the Ardacarmë as thinly veiled proselytism designed to glorify the accomplishments of the Valar while utterly negating their failures, and I’d been amused to read, upon the first page, “Firsthand Accounts of Creation, Transcribed and Translated by Curufinwë Fëanáro Finwion,” in a very familiar hand.

“Maitimo might find reason to reference it, as might Curufinwë,” I’d argued, but he’d made a dismissive noise with his lips and gone back to pondering a list of steel alloys for a project on which he was working in the forge, needing something malleable with a bluish cast.

“Then I shall tell them that the notes were left long ago. For their mother,” and his dismissive tone--as well as the mention of Nerdanel--told me that the subject was closed.

The nights we could spend together were rare treats. Always, we slept in his bed because I’d pointed out the ease with which I could hear Curufinwë and Terentaulë next door, and he’d smiled impishly and said, “You listen to my son and his wife making love?” not giving me chance to answer before laughing at my open mouth fighting to answer without incriminating myself, saying, “No worries, I would probably listen too.”

I thought of him constantly, sketched bits of him in the margins of my notes and shredded the paper, guilty. I took a brief liking for love poetry because of how keenly it expressed my emotions, but that died quickly when I discovered that Fëanáro had marked most of his poetry books with notations about which poems to give to Nerdanel for what occasion. I could not read of “passionate fire” while thinking that he’d given her that poem when they’d discovered that she was pregnant with Tyelkormo.

What I hadn’t meant to do--give in to love and obsession, helplessness--I’d done, turning upon my back and baring my throat to the beast, hoping that he would see fit to spare my life.

In the loneliness of nights spent alone in my own bed, I pondered the whole of my existence like this, should Nerdanel return and Fëanáro forsake me. I would never be able to love another like this; like Fëanáro’s Silmarils or the Trees of Yavanna, this love was something that I could only accomplish once, and the thought of an eternity alone in my bed, listening to the lonely sough of my blood night after night … I would not bear it.

In my dark fantasies, Fëanáro left me and I cut myself with his blade and bled upon the floor or I used the book on botany that he’d translated to concentrate and mix a poison, and I took my own life. In my dark fantasies, my spirit lingered just long enough to watch him collapse into grief.

My darkest fantasies failed to consider: What if he didn’t grieve at all?

Nightly--except when I slept in his bed, in his arms, and so was assured of his love for me--I checked the closet at the end of the hall. Not long after he’d begun leaving me notes, I found a new steel statue there with a bluish cast: Nerdanel in a dress flowing around her ankles, seeming to rise from the froth of the sea.

He still loves her.

I slammed the door and did not sleep that night, but the next night--when the house slumbered--I returned to torment myself yet again. The statue, though, was gone.

There were plenty of others--sketches, paintings, statues, ceramics--to take its place.

I dreamed sometimes of binding Fëanáro to my bed--wrists tied to the headboard; feet to the footboard and legs splayed open, the secret places of his body opened to my intentions, defenseless--facedown, with a cloth upon his eyes and a gag in his mouth.

No. No cloth and no gag. I wanted him to see and scream with what I did to him. I would penetrate him as he’d done me, without mercy, under the guise of love, giving him pleasure skewered with a silver spike of pain. Many times since, he’d penetrated me; even now, he hurt me with the excuse of his ardor. More than once, I’d bled and awakened in the morning to insides that felt like mush. Yet he never let me enter him, and I dared not ask.

In my dreams, I didn’t ask, I just did. Just as he’d done to me.

I didn’t tell him my dreams, although I think that he would have liked to hear them. Probably, he would have supplied me with the rope to act them out. (Once, he’d bound my hands with a silken scarf, over my head, but there would be no silk for him: I wanted rope that would chafe his wrists and ankles as he writhed, at once trying to escape me and impale himself further upon me.) But in the dark of night, I thought of them and brought myself to climax over and over again until I was exhausted. Then, often, my thoughts took an even darker road and pondered Nerdanel’s return and his leaving me … and my own death to avenge his betrayal.

His blade, cold against my flesh, and my blood spilling upon the ground, gleaming darkly in the low light of evening, seeping beneath a closed, locked door.

The forge door.

I awakened and realized that I had been dreaming.

~oOo~

The forge. Daily, Fëanáro disappeared there, emerging blinking and distracted, sometimes irritated, sometimes sullen. Sometimes jubilant, as though a dream had come true in there, manifested beneath his hands like magic.

I’d never given much thought to what he did in there for the work of a craftsman had always been boring to me, too finite, to confine the wanderings of one’s imagination to what can be held in the hand. I preferred the nebulous realms of abstract thought, of philosophy and literature and history, where theories were possible that could not be tested and hope, therefore, need never die. That which came into existence beneath Fëanáro’s hands was too tangible and, therefore, did not interest me.

Maybe he was counting on that?

He was a craftsman and always busy, yet he no longer accepted commissions and burned unanswered the letters from hopeful young Elves wishing for an apprenticeship with him. He was in the forge for hours, yet never showed any signs of productivity. On some days, the hammering was unrelenting and the air smelled sanguine, of hot steel. On other days, I wallowed in silence, but he was behind the door and the door was locked and he expected us--me--to believe that he was working.

I began finding excuses to walk past the forge door, and always, I paused in front of it and tried the knob, running away with my heart hammering in reproach when I found it locked yet again.

What is he hiding there?

I decided to take an interest in his work. Lying in his bed one night, with my head upon his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow from our exertions and breathing the electric scent of his skin, I asked him, “What exactly do you do in the forge, Fëanáro?”

“Projects,” he answered, and closed his arms upon me--a sign that I was to sleep--but I could not. For the whole of the night, I listened to his heart and wondered why it never resumed its normal rhythm but rather tripped, nervous and clumsy, until I found restless repose in the morning and ceased hearing it altogether.

Another time, as he critiqued one of my essays on the Ardacarmë, I pushed again, harder: “I would like to spend the day with you. In the forge. To see what you do.”

Without looking up from the page, which was already bleeding with red ink from comments that he’d made, he muttered, “You told me that you hate forge-work, so why would you want to do that?”

“Because I hate forge-work but I love you and I feel as though I should know what captivates you. Inspires you. Takes you from me for so many hours every day.” I laughed nervously. I did not sound like myself but rather a parody of Maitmo, diplomatic and subtly, viciously persuasive, sensual and swaggering; only, unlike Maitimo, I was not good at it. Fëanáro’s brow had knit; he heard it too.

“It’s not possible, Eressetor,” he added, and I immediately retorted with the childish squeak, “Why not?”

“Because,” he said with the patient, tired sigh of a father who has raised seven sons and now only barely endures the puerility of his adult lover, “you are not trained and it is dangerous in there. I work with many chemicals and materials of a new and rather experimental nature, and they are not very stable and could be upset by the slightest error on your part. And I could not bear for you to be injured.”

Of course, those of his sons who were trained--Maitimo, Carnistir, Curufinwë--were also banned from the forge. As winter thawed into reluctant spring, I sat outside on a rare warm day while Terentaulë and Vingarië scoured clothes in a huge washtub; Vingarië was consoling Terentaulë, who’d had a vicious fight with Curufinwë that morning. “Well,” quipped Terentaulë, “I blame Fëanáro because, when he locked his forge against his sons, Curufinwë began to go mad with boredom. Where he would burn and freeze and hammer upon metal, he has turned his attentions instead to me.” Bestowing me then with a careful look, like she had forgotten my presence and had spoken amiss somehow, scrubbing the clothes hard as though I--as Fëanáro’s apprentice--also deserved some of the blame.

Daily, I checked the door. Daily, it was locked.

I tried to glean some information from Maitimo, but he was clever in diplomacy whereas I was awkward--my tongue a thick wad in my mouth; my voice high and false--and he recognized my attempts and became suspicious, and I said no more of it, lest I lose his trust entirely.

When I was not with Fëanáro, I thought of him. The spaces between the words on the page were shaped into his face, his busy hands. What was he doing? What was that coming to life, earning his singular focus as I never had? It was her, it was his hands caressing her body done in metal, shaping her from his memories, letting thought of her--who had betrayed him--usurp me. Who loved him.

He invited me to his bed that night, and he lay at my back and wanted to enter me, but I refused, and we fought. “Why do you reject me?” “Why must you always decide how we make love?” “Why don’t you trust me?” “Why do you want to do what you know will hurt me?”

“The hurt is in your imagination,” he said, and I flopped away from him and across the massive bed, to curl on my side, tottering so close to the edge that my knees poked over the side. The mattress creaked as he stood, and I heard the rustle of cloth slipping over his body as he dressed, and he went into the sitting room, closing the bedroom door with a bang.

It is happening again! Just as it did with Ornisso! You have trusted your heart to a faithless man.

I wondered if I should leave and return to my own chambers and bed. I hated myself, for I so rarely got to spend nights with him, and now I’d ruined it. I flopped onto my back and cursed myself.

I must have slept because I awakened and he was standing over me. “Are you quite finished now? With your tantrum?”

I waited for my defenses to bristle, but his voice was tender, and he slid into the bed and slipped his arms around me, and I could not. I loved him. I nestled stiffly into his embrace and raised my arms to hold him too, caressing his strong shoulders and arms through the thin silk of his nightshirt. I was still naked, but his hands were not tempted to roam my body. Vaguely, I wondered: Should I be insulted by this? Or maybe--naked and defenseless where he was clothed--I should fear him?

“Eressetor, I do not know why you will not trust me,” he said suddenly. “You feel different to me lately, as though you are always guarded, expecting me to suddenly strike out and wound you. It is as it was when we first began to love each other and I believed that you were afraid to give your heart to me. At last, you did … why are you trying to take it back? Now, of all times, when I love you so much and need you so badly? I know that you have been hurt in the past, by that ‘Ornisso,’ but I have been hurt too, my heart trod upon by my faithless wife who loved the Valar more than her husband and the father of her children. Who would sooner kneel with her nose in the dirt than stand proudly beside me, in defense of our right to think freely for ourselves, as Eru intended. Do you think that I am any less afraid to give myself to you? That it is easy to trust you when you could find one young, like yourself, and unwed without the burden of seven children, at any moment? And forsake me? Yet you will not give me your trust, even as I lie with my heart bared to your mercy, telling you that I love you … and yet you doubt.”

When the light of Laurelin shyly emerges each morning, so the tender leaves of newborn plants will uncurl towards her. That was me: delicate and still easily hurt, but reaching for his voice--for the light of the world--and drinking of it, becoming stronger, daring to hope for blossom?

I snuggled closer to him, and his chin was upon my hair, our limbs raveled and the lengths of our bodies pressing, not in lust for once but simple and perfect love.

~oOo~

There was heaviness upon the House of Fëanáro, a swollen feeling like clouds ready to burst with rain, but I was dazed by love, and I did not feel it. Not immediately. Like the hairline cracks that had once been sketched across my bedroom ceiling, widening and lengthening as the years progressed, the faintest of pressures spurring one anew, a tributary of the others, until the whole ceiling appeared ready to crumble upon me.

Finwë had returned to visiting the towns of northern Aman, and his departure seemed to leave the door open for something new and sinister to enter the House of Fëanáro. The sons no longer crackled with excessive, harmless energy but brimmed with destruction like a rain barrel after a lengthy storm, and at times, a careless shift in balance sent the whole mess sloshing over the sides.

Spring was upon us, and Nandolin had returned to plant his father’s fields, and Telvo was absent again, more often than not. Breakfasts were tense and nearly silent affairs, ending with the seven sons scattering in opposite directions like small, ricocheting missiles as soon as the minute was up, leaving Fëanáro and I mostly alone, except for Vingarië and Terentaulë, who spoke more with each other these days, it seemed, than with their husbands, and a squirming, impatient Tyelperinquar, who had begun to despise being cooped in the house with his mother when he could have been having adventures with his uncles.

I was content in my library, in the company of my books, and ignored again by the sons of Fëanáro, who seemed as perpetually frustrated and vicious as bulls. The silence of the house was punctured by scuffles: by voices raised in anger and fists meeting with flesh, even the gentle Macalaurë and charming Maitimo, whose faces had become pale with bruises beneath their eyes as though they were not sleeping at night.

I was in the library, finishing my final treatise on the Ardacarmë, when I heard the wrathful voice of Curufinwë, he whom I’d learned to fear the most, for it seemed that in his senseless violence, he was showing me of what his father was also capable: The apple and the tree; I must have learned this somewhere! The centers of his eyes like hot coals, charred and insensate outside but still burning within. More nights than not these days, I was kept awake by his relentless arguing with Terentaulë, for hours at a time, their arguments swirling in ever-narrowing, dizzying circles, while poor Tyelperinquar screamed, unacknowledged, in the background.

But the person that answered him that day wasn’t Terentaulë but the unexpected voice of Telvo. They volleyed back and forth for a long while with the stubborn persistence of Fëanorians, growing louder and more insistent, and I had risen to close the door to the library against their voices--for their argument was over something silly, a toy being given to Tyelperinquar for his begetting day by Telvo--when I heard the whipping crack of flesh meeting flesh, followed by a hard thud and the heavy, wrathful footfalls of Curufinwë taking himself out the front door.

I rushed down the hall and to the parlor, but Terentaulë and Vingarië had both reached Telvo first, and he was seated on the chaise with Vingarië pressing a cold rag to the bleeding corner of his mouth--unshaken but with his eyes smoldering--while Terentaulë paced and fairly gnashed her teeth in rage.

“Do not worry about it, Terentaulë,” Telvo was saying. “He did not mean it.”

“How can you say that? Are you as much a fool as the rest of them? As your father and your brothers? You are bleeding!”

“He hit me with an open hand. He needed to hit something is all, to release his anger. If he’d wanted to hurt me, it would have been with a closed fist.”

“That is madness, Telvo! I am sick of him, of his stupid anger and his violence.”

“We are all frustrated these days, you as well as he. Do not pretend that you do not start your share of the arguments that keep half of the house awake, Terentaulë. We are going mad in this exile, and if I must bleed a bit to relieve it, then so be it.”

But Terentaulë was not assuaged. Like a caged beast, she paced the length of the room; her hands twisting as though desperate to wound something, even if only herself. I watched her like I might watch a pendulum, standing half inside the door and so far unnoticed. “Our son does not realize that” came her sharp retort. “Our son is learning that to hit one’s brother is an acceptable way to assuage frustration and solve problems.” She paused and turned her gaze on Telvo. “The other day, I thought that I might be pregnant. I am not, but it made me think: What if I was? How am I raising my son? What would he have done to the infant, when it had been born? What kind of family have we become?”

“Terentaulë--“

“I am leaving him!” she shouted suddenly. Silence fell in the wake of her extraordinary exclamation. She swallowed hard and pushed her hair behind her ears with shaky hands. “I am going to my cousin; she lives near here. I am taking Tyelperinquar with me and leaving him.” Even from the doorway, I could see her lower lip quivering. “I cannot--will not--take this, nor will I force my son into the destiny that he is forging for us.” She sank to the chaise opposite Telvo and Vingarië and buried her face in her hands.

Telvo took the rag from his mouth and crossed the room to her. He dabbed her eyes with the un-bloodied half of it; he cradled her in his arms. “Why can’t they all be like you?” she sobbed. “Why couldn’t I have loved you, not him?”

“Because it would have been unrequited and your beautiful son never would have been. And if you leave on my account, Terentaulë, how can I forgive myself that?”

“It is not on your account! It is--“

“In response to a foolish fight between two foolish brothers who both wanted an excuse to unleash the hatred in their hearts, if only for a moment. It means nothing. Our exile is over in less than two years now, and I believe that our family will heal then. We have been wounded, but it is not the nature of our people to fester but to heal. When our mother sees our father again--sees us--she will know the mistake that she has made. She will glue us back together.”

Numbly, I watched Terentaulë nod and rise from Telvo’s arms, her shoulders as squared and proud as any lady of the Noldor. “Then I shall wait, and pray that your mother will save us.”

~oOo~

So if Nerdanel was to save them, then what was I wishing for?

For I liked Nerdanel where she was, sequestered neatly behind the walls of Tirion, more than a day’s ride on a fast horse away from us. It seemed appropriate, somehow, for Nerdanel to be confined within the stuffy city while Fëanáro’s exile had bought him freedom to roam all of Aman.

Except to her.

Since his exile--or so the rumor went--she’d not left Tirion, as though she expected that he would accost her on the plains that lay south of Túna or manifest from the shadows of the forest that marked the boundary of the hills to the north. Even to Alqualondë, it was said, she did not go, perhaps fearing that the seething sea itself would swell and expel him to lie at her feet, clutching her ankles, dooming her to love him forevermore.

To me, he never spoke of her, though I persisted in checking the closet--although not every day--and the icons within it still changed. So he thought of her, but those thoughts were not for sharing with me. At times, I wanted to mention her in an offhand way, to hear how his voice shaped her name in my presence, but I could never muster the courage, for what if it lingered like a caress or savored her like a fine wine? My own name was clipped and quick in his voice, efficient, even at the heights of passion, signifying an ending, a climax. “Ai! Eressetor!”

I passed the closed forged door--always locked--and thought of her. Of him. Of him and her.

But mostly her, this ugly woman glimpsed once from afar yet known now with almost a feeling of intimacy, as though in touching her statues I was touching her, in kissing her husband, I was entering her place in their marriage.

Or as though I was searching for an excuse to hate a stranger.

I sought Maitimo in the library once; he was still working on his “crystal roses” without success, his most recent experiments seeming to take him further from his goal. He and Fëanáro fought about it; Maitimo called it impossible and Fëanáro said that only impossible was impossible; Maitimo retorted that that did not make sense. “What if I’d called the Silmarils impossible? Do you think that was never the easiest thought to have?” and Maitimo’s reply, in a voice high and offended, “You belittle me? For being less than you and the impossible tasks you set before me?”

He was working upon the roses when I found him, but the words he was writing upon the paper were appearing in halting, ponderous gasps, as though he only wanted to give the appearance of an attempt, of working. His face was pale, the skin stretched tight beneath eyes that once glinted sharply but now stared dully, as though marred by dust.

I wanted the truth about Nerdanel, about their estrangement. The stories were numerous: that she had publicly repudiated him and it had been he who had insisted upon the separation. That she had given him conditions to meet and he had not and so she had been the one to leave. That the separation was for the duration of the exile only; that she had gone to the Valar with a plea to have their marriage ended; that they loved each other, hated each other, or weren’t sure what would happen between them when he walked again through the gates of Tirion; that they didn’t know if they wanted to or ever would see each other again; that the separation was part of the punishment, even, and she was keeping her part of the conditions.

Maitimo’s eyes were hard to look upon as I made my inquiry; they were red-rimmed and swollen with exhaustion, the benevolence and lucidity that contributed to his appeal veiled behind red veins and bits of grit left in the unwashed corners.

He sighed and raised an ink-smudged hand to clear his auburn hair from his face. “I suppose it is natural,” he said, “for you to wonder,” and I was relieved, wondering if he would perceive my true intentions. “You have been here nearly a year now, and the exile is less than two years from ending. You are of this family and yet not, and you must wonder about your fate.” He sighed again, as though he wondered about his fate too.

“Our mother argued with our father once, in public, and that’s where it came to be known that she had ‘publicly repudiated’ him. It was no secret that her thoughts of the Valar and his were wildly different, even when their marriage first began. Yet love,” he said with a smile, “can bridge nearly any gap. But the true story of their estrangement is not dramatic, and so even if people know it, they do not like to tell it. The truth is that our mother was supposed to come with us; she had all intentions and even had Tyelkormo and me bring her trunks to her chambers, a week before we left. But she never packed; she never came. On the day we left, she simply failed to appear, and we had to be beyond the city limits by mid-day, and we waited until we could afford to do so no longer … and she never came.” He shrugged. “That’s it. What that means for the future of our family, upon our return, I do not know. Neither our mother nor our father will say.”

My next words were difficult to summon and came in a near-whisper: “Do you--do you think that he still loves her?” and Maitimo smiled. “Of course he still loves her. He could love no other.”

That night, new among the icons of Nerdanel in the closet, I found a sketchbook. Only it was not a normal sketchbook: It had been bound in a band of copper and sealed with a lock.

When I returned to my chambers, somehow, the sketchbook was tucked beneath my arm.

The lock was more of an ornamental deterrence than anything, and it was easy to pick it open with a straight pin and a half-hour of patience. The cover was tooled leather with a design of two hearts bound by flowering vines, the background spangled with eight-pointed stars, and it smelled of aged paper and pungent ink. The spine was cracked and creased, as though it had been opened many times. A well-loved book on love, I thought, giddy with the discovery but also afraid.

When the lock fell open, I cracked the book and peered inside: drawings, hundreds of them. Of Nerdanel and Fëanáro, entwined in passion, with crimson hair tangling with midnight hair, with hands on flesh, lips on flesh, arms and legs tangled and mouths gaping, crying out in pleasure. The early sketches were old and faded with age; the later sketches still smelled of ink, as though they were no more than a few days old; I let the pages riffle through my fingers and watched them age--or rather, watched her age: her belly riddled with stretch marks from numerous pregnancies; her breasts growing fuller and heavier. He never changed.

Nerdanel had done some of the drawings at the beginning, but at a certain point, only Fëanáro had added to the book. And continued to add, from the look of things, even once Nerdanel was gone, drawing from what? Memory? Imagination? Fantasy?

I could have shut the book and thrown it across the room; the already-battered cover would have borne the abuse. But I did not. Starting from the beginning, I looked at every picture, staring until they became printed indelibly upon my memory, then turned back and started at the beginning, looking at them again and again until a faint golden light infused upon the horizon and I was awakened by my head tipping forward and falling into the book. Her arms twining his body: that was the first sight I saw.

~oOo~

The book was replaced in the closet, locked, as I had found it. Numb feet managed to find the steps, carrying me upward and down the hall without tripping, but they disobeyed me then and passed my chamber. It was the Mingling of the Lights, and Tyelkormo and Maitimo were usually stirring by now, but the house was silent. It felt suppressed, almost, as though there was life beneath it all, but it was being hidden from me. For I had a purpose.

For all the paranoia that people said that he had, Fëanáro never locked his bedroom door, always trusting that even while others coveted his treasure they would leave him--its artificer--unbothered in his dreams. It was easily to slip inside his suite without being heard, to pass soundlessly through the sitting room that was so familiar to me by now and into the bedroom that was even more so. Sleeping alone, Fëanáro stretched down the middle of the bed, as though trying to console its emptiness; he wrapped his arms around a pile of pillows. Who did those pillows represent in his dreams? Me? Or her?

The weather was warming into spring, and he slept naked, having kicked away the heavy quilt and leaving it to tumble to the floor, covered only by a thin silk sheet to his waist. It clung to the contours of his body: his rounded buttocks, his long legs, his narrow waist. I wondered if Nerdanel had ever looked upon her young husband in this way, having risen, perhaps, for a drink of water or to quell a restless baby; did she adore the spread of his hair upon the pillow as I did? His broad shoulders and naked back that would be warm to the touch, the way he half-curled his body like a small child? The way he tended to mumble and smile in his sleep, as though fortune visited him in dreams as it did not in life? Did she wake him, to tell him of her love, or did she let him sleep and keep it to herself until she thought she might burst with it?

I climbed the dais to better overlook the sleeping body of my lover, prone and somehow innocent, when his mind was busy in a world of dreams without hurt, betrayal, exile, and loss.

An astute observer would note the dark hairs clinging to all of the pillows. An astute observer might wonder how a single man who always claimed his solitary dominion down the center of the bed came to cover all of the pillows with hair. An astute observer might conclude that Fëanáro did not always sleep alone; an astute observer might further postulate a fist closed in passionate aggression upon the length of the lover’s dark hair, holding him to the bed, exposing his throbbing pulse to the savagery of his kisses, leaving hairs cruelly torn from the scalp tangled amidst his fingers, falling free to spread across the pillows.

I wondered how astute Nerdanel would be, upon returning to his bed. Or would she be so grateful to have her husband restored to her that she would not dare to question? As I should not.

I slipped my shoes from my feet and my clothes from my body. Fëanáro did not stir; his breathing was heavy and even. Soundlessly, I lifted the sheet from him, baring his body to the knees, and knelt on the bed beside him.

He awakened then, blinking, the side of his face sticky with drool that he was swatting away even as he lifted himself onto an elbow. “Er-Eressetor?” He stretched and squinted at me. “Why are you here?”

His eyes widened as I knelt above him, turning him onto his back and pushing his thighs open with my knees. His legs were tangled in the sheets, and when I pressed his hands above his head, he was at my mercy, to do with as I pleased.

I could see his heart throbbing within his naked chest; the bones and sinews in his wrists--captured within my hands--were almost porcelain, delicate. Breakable. He was breakable, I saw; an Elf just like me, of flesh and bone, but how like a construction of steel he seemed, when he was in my place, kneeling above me, surmounting my will with his.

Nerdanel had known this, I suppose, and that had been her secret: to reduce him from the god that he wanted to be and to the status of a simple Elf like the rest of us, capable of pain, with weakness, and to hold him in thrall to this idea. To her.

Was that fear in his eyes? Surely not--but he wriggled beneath me as though he wanted to be free of the confines I’d placed upon him. Lowering my mouth to his, I kissed his fear--his doubt--away; I kissed him until both our chests ached for air and his eyes were half-lidded in a swoon. I kissed him until he stopped struggling.

Then, I made him mine.

~oOo~

It happened one day that I was walking past the forge on my way to the stables, to find Telvo (likely nestled in the hayloft with Nandolin) to tell him that Fëanáro was requesting his presence and his input on the Spring Hunt “as soon as he could spare himself”--meaning as soon as he’d finished what he was doing and managed to restore his appearance to a semblance of dignity so not to throw his brothers into an uproar--and I thought, as I passed, savoring the caress of the spring air upon my bare arms, for the sake of old habit, why not? And I tried the door to the forge.

And it was unlocked.

~oOo~

After I had visited Fëanáro that morning and claimed his body for my own--as many times, he’d claimed mine--his long hours in the forge had gradually dwindled. It was subtle and went unnoticed by his sons, but I noticed. His time instead was spent on research, on writing letters to people who had once sent him commissions. Slowly, he was bringing his household affairs into order; he’d even straightened his desk. He had even gone so far as to draft messages to send to neighboring towns, seeking an apprentice who would return to Tirion with him in a year-and-a-half, to study metallurgy and forge-craft.

But recently, his attentions were turned to the Spring Hunt, held on the day halfway between midsummer and midwinter, an ancient celebration of fertility and prosperity that had--according to Fëanáro--been sterilized since our arrival in Valinor. “It used to be,” he said, “that we would hunt from one mid-night zenith to another, not stopping, bringing home as much as we could, more than we could eat even, to cook on open fires in the fields, to celebrate the coming of Spring and the end of cold and starvation, the restoration of life.”

The Spring Hunt--by accounts of the early Eldar--had been a wild occasion, a celebration at once of new life and death, of survival amid the stink of blood of fallen prey. Naturally, the primitive Hunt had been tamed--domesticated--into a Festival once the Eldar arrived in Aman. In Valinor, there was no need for wild, bloody hunts for there was no winter, no hunger, no need to celebrate the changing of the seasons with the triumph of having lived to see another spring. In Valinor, it was different. In Valinor, at each season, new fruits ripened and were harvested, and there was always enough for everyone to eat; at each season, Manwë decreed a festival, perhaps to placate the newly-arrived Elves, who seemed almost to fall in desolation in their first years in their new home and its featureless seasons less cyclical than linear, a line without punctuation or hope of ending.

Where they’d once become frenzied with hunger and hope and desperation, now their energy was directed to song and dance and festooning the city with flowers. Fëanáro laughed at this and proclaimed that the Fëanorians would have no Spring Festival in Formenos; no, they would revert to the Spring Hunt.

“Of course, Eressetor, you will be going.”

We’d been in bed, watching the sky change hues in slow degrees--gold creeping from the southern edge to fill the sky--as we eased into morning, his chin upon my shoulder and his arms around me, and I’d laughed. “I hardly think so! I am not a hunter.”

“It does not matter. All of the men--some of the women even--go. Even Telvo is going. Even my father will be home for it. You certainly cannot stay here alone.”

“You mean to tell me that Vingarië and Terentaulë are going hunting?”

“No, but they are going into the city for the day, and so you will be alone. So you must go. Don’t worry,” he said with a grin, “you don’t have to kill anything.”

In the deep woods where no one would find us, he taught me to use a bow and kissed my lips when they grimaced in frustration until we didn’t get much archery done at all. “Just hold it and look impressive,” he instructed me. “You don’t even have to loose an arrow.” He, on the other hand, was a dead-shot. I asked him to demonstrate over and over again, to watch the way the golden midday light played upon the mist of sweat on his bare arms.

We didn’t get much archery done at all.

I stopped looking in the closet; he began returning to the forge and emerging with projects that he’d been commissioned years ago. The path to the house rang with hoofbeats of messengers, delivering pendants and railings and chandeliers to surprised recipients who had forsaken these items at his exile and his subsequent silence. The copper gate at the end of the path was perpetually open these days, and the first leaves poked from the trees--a shy, nascent green--as though the whole world had been given the chance to begin anew.

The Spring Hunt became the center of his activities with the rest--the commissions, the letters, the apprentice--whirling in orbit around it. He sought the superior knowledge of his sons on matters pertaining to tracking and hunting. “I knew enough,” he told me, “to keep fed a wife and myself, later two small children as well. Then Nelyo was old enough to help.” And so I had been sent to fetch Telvo, to join Pityo and Tyelkormo who had already assembled in Fëanáro’s study.

I’d done just that, and now I stood with my hand upon the unlocked forge door.

And walked away without opening it.

~oOo~ I was awakened the next morning by the sound of hoofbeats on the path. I was asleep in my own room, for Fëanáro had been up late the night before, discussing with Tyelkormo, Pityo, and Telvo the final details of the Spring Hunt, and my sleep had been restless, torn by dreams of doors that I refused to open. Only to succumb, open the door, and step inside, only to discover that by my treachery, I’d be sealed inside forever, able to watch Fëanáro from the windows but never to speak with him or touch him. I waited for him to search for me, but he never did, and when the two years remaining of his exile were up, he disappeared and left me alone.

From that, I awoke, with the weight of years of loneliness holding me fast to the bed, breathing hard and listening to the sound of an approaching messenger puncture the silence of the morning.

It was a strange hour for Fëanáro to call for a messenger. I wondered if he’d slept at all. The sky was pale--the Lights had just mingled--and I was wondering if I should seek him and scold him, maybe coax him to bed with me for an hour or two. I rose and walked to the window, to see which messenger had come today, trying to get a clue as to which of his many half-finished projects had come to fruition that night, smiling with pride at his accomplishment--and mine, for wasn’t I also partly to credit?

But I learned nothing, for the horse was strange, clad in colors and heraldry like none belonging to the lords of the Noldor: dazzling white and pale blue, the horse himself white and regal, with a high-arched neck, the devices upon the banners of wind wrapping a mountain.

Manwë.

Still in my nightclothes, I ran down the stairs, nearly tripping, to discover that the sons had assembled as well, half-dressed or in nightshirts and barefoot, peering through cracks in the drapes, trying not to be seen by the messenger outside, creating a mild roar with their mumbling.

“It’s Manwë’s heraldry!”

“I know that, but it’s not Manwë certainly.”

“Surely it’s not Eonwë!”

“Why not?”

“Why would Eonwë bother with Atar?”

“Because Manwë sent him!”

“We’re in exile. The Valar aren’t supposed to bother with us at all.”

“Well, Eonwë’s not a Vala.”

“Oh, you! You tricky rogue! But he’s the herald of a Vala and so he certainly wouldn’t come on his own accord.”

“You don’t think that he possesses free will?”

A derisive snort.

“Free will or not, he does Manwë’s bidding and we’re in exile and supposed to be ignored by Manwë.”

“And therefore Eonwë.”

“Exactly. Thank you!”

I pushed through the seething mass of their bodies and took my turn peering through the crack in the drapes. “I suppose you know what Eonwë looks like,” someone who sounded like Tyelkormo said behind me, followed my Maitimo quipping, “Oh, hush you! I know what Eonwë looks like so that’s hardly the issue!” and Tyelkormo sniffed and said, “You would.”

The messenger stood with his back to the window, his golden hair unbound but unbothered by the wind, lying like an unfurled bolt of silk to his waist. He wore the devices and colors of Manwë; maybe it was Eonwë?

Opposite him stood Fëanáro, his arms crossed on his chest and his mouth set in a resolute line, nodding but not speaking, a piece of parchment rolled and clenched in his hand. The messenger was speaking in a strange, harsh language; listening closer, I caught enough words to know that it was Valarin--and his voice was kept so intentionally subdued that I knew that he was also aware of us listening and wanted his words kept secret.

Fëanáro answered him then, also in Valarin, and I resisted the urge to cover my ears at the syllables banging and screeching against each other like metal on metal. I had studied some Valarin at Fëanáro’s insistence but found it as hard to read as it was to hear--like dust in my eyes, itchy and burning, maddening--and finally, mercifully, he’d allowed me to choose a new language instead, but Fëanáro’s words were simple enough that most of his sons, even, would have been able to decipher them: “It’s that simple, then? I am merely to go, without question.”

The messenger’s answer was even clearer than that: “Yes.” And Fëanáro’s nod was not one of resignation but rather of one who has received news long expected.

Fëanáro glanced at the window then, and his eyes caught mine, and I whipped the drapes shut, heart pounding. “He saw me.”

We all scattered and ran for our chambers, to assume normal activity, just in time to hear the front door slam. I waited for Fëanáro’s feet upon the stairs--lying in my bed, shivering with nervous sweat, an apology upon my lips for spying upon him--waited for him to come to me with an explanation, but he never did. His footsteps disappeared into the depths of the house, and I lay forgotten, shivering and afraid.

~oOo~

The door opened as easily beneath my hand as it had in my dream, and I felt the same defiant thrill of entering a forbidden place, alike in many ways to that first kiss shared with Ornisso, alike to an orgasm, of mystery suddenly evaporated into startling clarity.

When the door snicked shut behind me, a half-dozen lamps sizzled to life as though on command, casting the room with a murky blue pallor. Alongside the door were Fëanáro’s forge boots and his gloves hung on a hook above them. I slipped one onto my right hand and half-expected it to still bear the warmth of his hands. It did not.

Much of the room--the worktables and anvils long unused--lay shrouded. I walked among the tables and brushed the shrouds with my fingers, stirring them to life as might a breeze, and expected my fingers to come away with the dust of long years.

They did not.

The lumps beneath bore the vague shape of figures or of the hard angles of canvasses, and I did not need to lift the shrouds to know what he hid here, what he pulled anew from the closet at the end of the hall, subjecting them to his relentless scrutiny, attempting to approximate perfection. Perhaps, if he made enough images of her, she would know his love and return? Or perhaps with his hands creating a memory of her body, he would assuage his loneliness? As I--apparently--had not.

At the back of the forge, a worktable had been shoved hastily aside, betraying Fëanáro’s love for things organized in neat rows and perpendicular angles, to make room for a roll-top desk. The lid was shuttered like an eye, and I stood before it for a long while, twisting my fingers and pondering whether to open it. I had the irrational image of Fëanáro locked inside his study, staring into his crystals and seeing me here, but I could not see his face. Was he disappointed? Or did he wear a look like that which he’d given the messenger, his expression soft and acquiescent. I have known that it would be like this. It was only a matter of time.

I had come this far, I rationalized, and stepped forward and lifted the top of the desk.

There were piles of letters there, written upon parchments that had been sealed with a lump of blue wax and a familiar crest: wavering rays and four stars set between. I closed my eyes and saw the same device upon the lapel of my father’s robes. “The prince Nolofinwë has given this to me in recognition of my extraordinary service.” His narrow chest puffed out, my mother behind him, staring into her goblet and idly stirring her drink with her fingers.

In a second pile beside the first were copies of letters that Fëanáro had sent in reply or maybe drafts; they were done in his neat, efficient “daily use” handwriting, lacking the flourishes and elegance of that which was carried by messengers to the world beyond our gates. I knew this handwriting, for it marked my best work as inadequate; my words bled with it, done in cruel red ink.

The letters dated back to the beginning of the exile, and I took the first--from Fëanáro to his half-brother--in my trembling fingers and read it: careful descriptions of the city, of the weather, of the well-being of various family members. It was stiff and formal; even the draft was punctuated neatly, written in palatable, concise sentences. It was deliberate. Scheming.

For the duration of the afternoon, I stood over Fëanáro’s desk--not taking the liberty of sitting at the rough workbench that he’d pulled over--and read the letters like a volley of arrows between enemy camps, carrying the possibility to wound, yes, but each also spearing a wad of paper that communicated and might indeed bring peace between those long at war.

The letters became more relaxed as the years passed, but I--who knew Fëanáro better even than he who named him “brother”--felt the deliberateness in that too. Fëanáro, a master of the written word, could conjure moods and atmospheres in his letters with the ease of a trained actor cajoling an audience, even changing his handwriting, his signature--stamping his seal sloppily or with deliberate care--to convey that which settled unnoticed upon a reader’s mind with the weight of a feather.

He’d bragged about this to me, once.

“Eressetor, communication is much more than what you say. It is how you say it, the type of parchment that you use, the quality and color of the ink, the liberty that you take in signing your name. Your work is all so … alike. So bland. It lacks personality.”

It had hurt then, in the early days of our affair when I’d yet to learn that he believed his unbridled, honest opinion was the highest compliment that he could give. Now, it said so much.

I watched a plan unfold. Nolofinwë--replying to match his half-brother’s newfound familiarity--probably hadn’t even realized it. Certainly hadn’t realized that he was being made accomplice in a plan to restore Fëanáro’s status in Tirioin … and his marriage. Her name was never mentioned, not once in the correspondence, but I saw her face taking shape in the white spaces between the letters, wrought of quill and ink by the skillful hand of Fëanáro.

“I have forgiven you your trespasses and hope that you shall forgive mine …”

“I remember that day now with horror, but I am helpless here in Formenos, to make my amends to you and our people …”

“Should I stand again in Tirion, then mayhap I could begin to make recompense …”

“The Kingship is deserved, brother, in your House; you who will help to reunite our people as I--even our father--could not …”

“Before the Valar and our people …”

“From the tallest tower of Tirion …”

“From the deepest unplunged depths of my heart, I would swear my allegiance to you …”

“But I am barred from the city.”

And so it had come to be: Fëanáro would return to Tirion.

He announced it to us that night at supper, standing at the head of the table with all faces inclined to him.

He looked at none of us as he spoke but rather over our heads, like a king addressing a crowd. Even I--his beloved--called such bare hours before, he would not meet my eyes.

“Manwë has deemed that I shall return to Tirion, to come among our people for the Spring Festival and make my recompense.” His voice was bold, as carefully constructed to be noble and unwavering as were the towers and spires that marked the Tirion skyline. We were not his family but his subjects, expected to accept his will without question.

I felt his sons shifting restively, a motion as subtle as the sound of a turning page. Curufinwë snorted. “Surely you won’t! Surely you won’t kneel before those who hold the keys to our cages!”

“Kneel? No. But I will go. I will go in the manner of one grieved, without festival raiment, to show our people the nature of the Valarin generosity. That they drive me from the gates of my own home, from the city where my father is king, and into the cold north; they leave my family the choice to suffer here or stand divided, and when their whim suits, they invite me back, not out of any concern for our well-being or our joy but because they hunger for the light of the Silmarils and desire to rekindle friendship as the exile draws to a close, to make a parody of diplomacy, so that they may always say--when the rebellion comes (and it will)--that they made worthy attempts with us, to treat us with kindness and dignity, that they have given us every choice to live free in this realm. How is there exile in freedom? A man who is free cannot be likewise banished, and it is captors--not friends--who seek to bar a man from happiness and home. But you know this, my daughters and sons, and our family has stood strong despite their attempts to do otherwise. We will become stronger still, in the weeks to come.”

We sat in silence and pondered this. I saw that he had at last let his gaze fall upon one of us: me.

Quickly, I looked away.

Then, I reconsidered: He did not know that I knew. He believed me to be as naïve as his sons, and who was I to destroy the illusion? Let him remain unaware of the power that he had created in me.

With the last bit of strength in my wounded heart, I lifted my chin to meet his eyes. And I smiled.

~oOo~

I was finishing my treatise that night on the evolution of the thorn into the s sound when he came for me. He’d been busy with his own work, preparing now for the journey to Tirion. The Spring Hunt had been abandoned, although I’d heard his sons’ unruly voices as they squeezed like a slow-moving clog of chaos down the narrow hallway to the family parlor; their voices, to my ears now grown accustomed--or maybe tired--of hearing them now sounded less like seven individuals and more like a single voice with all its range of intonations, as though they were a single being, from Telvo to Curufinwë. From that singular voice, I’d discerned that the Spring Hunt would still be held, even in Fëanáro’s absence.

But that which had, until this morning, meant so much to him: forgotten.

He sat on the corner of the table and watched me work. I said nothing to him, but this was not unusual: We each were scholars and knew the way of the trade, knew how easily inspiration could be stemmed, diverted, and never found again. He watched my quill scratch across the parchment, my handwriting sloppy, a dishonor to his beautiful alphabet, as the words poured forth: this, my final treatise in my year as his apprentice. “You will become my assistant,” he’d said, and there had been excitement in his voice. The merging of our ideas, I understood, would take the place of the merging of our spirits.

Which was impossible, of course, because he was already married.

“You will become my assistant, and when the apprentices arrive, you will oversee their academic work, and I will oversee their practical work.”

“Apprentices?” I’d asked. I’d supposed that this was how normal couples felt, circling the empty rooms of the house that would be theirs or planning the conception and naming of their firstborn child. “The word is plural now?”

“Yes. There shall be two, I have decided.” His eyes had sparked like the capricious fire licking at the sky, seeking to infect--and consume--more than what it had been given. I understood that his joy for learning and knowledge was such that it couldn’t be contained within just him or even within him and me. He needed to pass it on to others, until all of Aman was covered with those taught to think like he did.

Now, that seemed sinister.

I’d chosen this topic--the thorn, that which certain scholars teasingly claimed to be the cause of the breach between the Houses of Fëanáro and Nolofinwë, not knowing the truth behind their claims--with particular care, for it would be the treatise that I would write with the most passion, perhaps putting into better, more rational words than even Fëanáro had. Perhaps I would sway the Noldor to his side in this matter, and the rest would follow.

That had been my hope, unspoken, but he’d known, and he’d approved my topic with a pleased smile teasing his lips.

Now, my quill faltered and stopped in mid-sentence.

His hand slipped along my cheek and tucked my unfettered hair behind my ear, lingering there, the thumb tracing the delicate whorl, the sensitive tip, as though memorizing it for one of his sculptures. “I remember when you first came to me,” he said, “and you would not appear outside your chambers without your hair braided so severely that I feared it might pull from your scalp. And your raiment! Those robes, even in the heat of summer, with the embroidery so itchy … I thought, ‘Here is a man who likes to torture himself.’ " He lifted my chin and searched my eyes. Maybe he was looking for truth in that? “But I discovered that you like pleasure too, though you were long in succumbing to me. And now, I wonder, what happened to the robes and the braids that must have taken you an hour each morning?”

They had. But I had discovered an enthusiasm for something greater than appearance and decorum, the diligent manners of the elite. I glanced at the stack of papers beneath my hands pressed flat against them.

“I still have them,” I said. “The robes, that is. The braids also can return at any time.”

He leaned close to my face, his breath a whisper upon trembling lips. “I never want to see them again.” He kissed me with lips parted, tongue sliding against my stubborn mouth. But I could not resist him. From the night we began as lovers--by the glow of the roses--I had not been able to resist him.

He led me to his bedroom though his sons were still in noisy council in the family parlor, led me past closed doors and empty rooms, and had my clothes off before we’d even reached his bedroom. Yet neither of us took the other, and it was a strange kind of pleasure--flesh pressing flesh and our lips plying gentle kisses--deliberate, without the sudden violence of orgasm. As water will come to a slow boil atop a fire, so pleasure infused us, until it could not be contained by body alone, and the room--all of Arda, maybe--seemed to center on two bodies lying side by side, as equals, with arms and legs tangled and indiscernible as to which belonged to whom. We were pressed so close that our breaths matched--I inhaled for his exhale--and we were opposites, yes, but also with inevitable synchronicity: Laurelin and Telperion, each separate and different but unable to escape the other, our fates likewise entwined.

The silver light in the skylight overhead faded until there was only darkness punctured by a thousand scattered stars. I lay with my back in the curve of Fëanáro’s body, his breath moving my hair and warming my flesh as though his nourishment, his life was mine as well.

“Eressetor,” he said, “I love you.”

His palm was pressing my belly over my navel. I lifted his hand in mine, fingers twined, and kissed his palm that tasted of salt, the skin as soft and resolute as suede; the hand from which greatness had been derived: two loves, seven sons, and countless treasures. Why was I given the power to see through his love, to know that I had taken the second place in his heart, yet I was not given the will to resist, to wrench away? Why did I take comfort in his heartbeat at my back and his hand content to lie in mine?

Why did my voice whisper, with the inevitability of an echo, my voice subordinate and dependent upon his: “I love you too?”

For I did.

~oOo~

Finwë returned three days before the heralding of spring, and Fëanáro left the next morning upon his fastest horse, riding for Tirion.

Upon his back, he carried nothing but his clothes, those of the plainest craftsman: a white tunic over fawn-colored breeches and sturdy boots to his knees, his hair tied back in an unflattering horsetail. “I will drink of rivers and eat of the land,” he’d said to his father’s concerns, and when Finwë asked, “But how, son, shall you wash your teeth? Comb your hair?” he only laughed.

The sons scorned seeing him off--“Pity the day that I give my time to some frivolity devised by the Valar!”--but yet they all appeared and stood for once in silence, in a reverent half-ring. Finwë and I stood aside.

Fëanáro laughed at our formality, “I shall be returned to you in five days! Do not act as though I am exiled yet again!” yet he bade each of us farewell in turn. Tyelperinquar kissed his grandfather’s cheek, and his daughters-in-law embraced him. To each son, he said something that none of the others heard, and he made a show of clapping Finwë into hearty embrace, then held him long, unspeaking, eyes opened and unblinking, while Finwë whispered in his ear.

He came to me last and took my hand in his. “Eressetor,” he said and nothing else, for what remained to be said could not--not here--and had already been said the night before anyway. I nodded. “Fëanáro.”

Swinging onto his horse, he heeled him through the gate and was gone.

~oOo~

The next evening, I made my excuses to retire early to bed. I’d been sitting with the sons, all of us silent but attentive, as though we expected to hear something rising from beyond the horizon. I dared glance up from my book once and sneaked a look around the room: We resembled a warren of rabbits with ears pointed at the sky, awaiting a sign of trouble. Giggles burbled to my lips, and I covered them with a cough, to which only Maitimo had the manners to reply, “Blessings.”

“Thank you,” I replied, and made my excuses not long after.

I was halfway up the stairs, pondering another sleepless night in my lonely bed, when I heard footsteps behind me and Maitimo called, “Eressetor?” I turned. “We are still going on the Spring Hunt, leaving at the zenith of Telperion and … we would like you to come.”

“ ‘We,’ Maitimo? Or ‘you’ feel that it is polite and decorous to ask me, the apprentice of your father?” I said, surprising myself with my own insolence, sounding more like Fëanáro than I’d intended.

Maitimo, though, was unfazed, but then, he would have to be, growing up and surviving in the House of Fëanáro. “ ‘We,’ “ he said, “feel that since our father wished you to come, then you should. It will do none of us any good to sit about the house for another night and day, wondering how things are faring and when he will return to us.” The word when was deliberately pronounced. I’d heard him and Macalaurë arguing earlier that day; Macalaurë seemed to believe that if Fëanáro reunited with his wife, then he would not return to Formenos, even driven out upon the blades of the Valar. “It does you no good either,” he added, and his glance skipped from mine then, and I knew that he knew.

Heart hammering in my chest, I said nothing.

“We all love him,” said Maitimo, “each in our own way, and we shall ride in his honor.”

“Then I shall come,” I said.

~oOo~

With Maitimo, we went to the private study of Finwë, and Maitimo knocked once upon the door. “Enter,” came the stern voice, followed by a softer, gentler, “please.”

Finwë was hunched over his desk, working avidly over some papers that--when I peered closer--seemed to have no purpose aside from distraction. Maitimo was careful not to look. He made the same speech to Finwë as he’d made to me about riding in honor of Fëanáro. Finwë turned to listen to him with the amused smile of a grandfather hearing his grandson’s first recitation of his numerals, leaning his head upon his fingertips, but Finwë did not likewise concede.

“Nelyo,” he said, using Maitimo’s ancient childhood epessë with such ease that I knew it was deliberate, “what your father failed to understand about my willingness to participate in this--what you, perhaps, will understand, being of more pliable mind than is he--is that the life we left behind in the Outer Lands is not something of mystery and romance for me; it is not even myth or history or tradition. It was something that I did not live so much as survive, and I understand--as your father does not--that the events surrounding the Spring Hunt that have earned the euphemistic title of ‘traditions’ were not celebrations. They were essential, then, to our survival; they were brutal and they were cruel. It was a blood-soaked day that we all longed to forget upon our arrival here, for we were no better than the beasts that we hunted on that day … or the beasts that hunted us. What you father does not understand is that I do not want to go back, to that time or that place, and that I brought my people here and wed my wife in the Light of Valinor because I wanted my son never to know it either.

“And now, I do what I must to ensure that our people remain here, where we need not usurp festivals for bloodshed ever again.

“I will not stop you, Maitimo, for each celebrates this day in the way that he pleases, in the way that has the most meaning for him. And perhaps, had I not lived the reality of it centuries ago, then I too would find significance in resurrecting that which is best left buried. But I will not join you, and I hope that you will explain my reasons to your brothers as you see best fit so that they understand that this is not a divisive choice on my part but rather one that I must make.”

Maitimo bowed neatly and said not another word, and we went on the hunt without Finwë, leaving him alone in his study, sitting in the faint glow of stone lamps with his hands pressed upon the desk before him, staring into the night in the direction of Tirion.

~oOo~

In the shadows of the forest, we did not realize immediately that the Lights had gone out. It was the Mingling--the softest light of the day--and the light that reached us in Formenos under the best of conditions was thin and diluted by distance. In the depths of the forest, crashing headlong through the trees after a stag dancing just out of reach, we rode by the light of the stars overhead--as had our ancestors--and with our thoughts turned to the spillage of blood, several minutes had passed before we noticed the darkness as though it--as Finwë had portended--had also invaded our hearts.

Tyelkormo had just cut the throat of the struggling quarry--sawing through sinew and hide to spill its blood across his hands in an act of what we called “mercy”--when Telvo chanced to look up, a queer look upon his face, and I followed his gaze to the stars, shards of light whetted by the darkness, as sharp now as needles upon the bed of night.

It happened not long after: a roiling blackness, pestilent, and even the stars went dark, and I thought that the end of Arda had come--that which is portended in the myths--without ever having felt the ache of endless life in my bones, and I wondered, Where would Fëanáro’s spirit go? To me? Or to his wife?

But the darkness was not the ending of Arda: It was grief and madness, sickness and despair, borne upon the wind like a cloud of locusts; it stuffed itself down our throats until we could not scream or call for each other; it buzzed in our ears like one thousand flies feeding on rot. I screamed and screamed but no sound came out. I thrashed in the darkness and collided with trees, tripped over a root, groping the comfort of warm flesh, at last finding it, only to discover that I had not found one of the sons of Fëanáro but the slain deer, still warm with tenacious life, and I had stuck my hands in his blood.

I screamed and screamed but no sound came out. My voice would not rise above a whisper for days after.

Mercy we’d been delivering, although we hadn’t truly believed it at the time: delivering the creature beneath my sticky hands from life before he was consumed by Darkness, as we were now consumed.

The humid mouth of Darkness, closing upon us.

I envied the stag, for the swiftness of his death.

I screamed until all of the air was wrung from my lungs and I fainted, my mind curled upon its own private darkness before I even felt the slap of my face falling into the pool of blood.

~oOo~

Light triumphs over darkness. It is one of the rules of Eä.

That was Fëanáro’s voice, the day in his study that he’d closed all of the drapes--even tacking them at the sides to prevent the entrance of light--and had opened and shut a lamp upon the darkness. Yet even from around the seams, light crept forth; even when his hand clutched and covered it, the light went through his fingers, as though his blood and bone were of no consequence.

See?

The blackness that had come upon us dissipated like smoke on the wind, and we walked home, our mounts having fled. We searched a while for them, calling and whistling, and came to a ravine and found Macalaurë’s gray mare at the bottom, her neck twisted and broken beneath her and a froth of agony upon her lips. He’d vomited into the leaves, and we’d all looked away, lest we did the same.

We hadn’t searched after that.

It took us the better part of the day to walk back to Formenos, and after a while, we realized that the light wasn’t coming back.

We walked in circles for a while; without the light to guide us to the south, we knew not in which direction we moved. At last, I made out the patterns of the stars above us, as I’d seen them so many times through the skylight above Fëanáro’s bed. “This way,” I said, pointing at the bright blue star at the apex of a perfect equilateral triangle, my voice hoarse, torn by screaming. But in the absence of light, all birdsong had ceased; even the rivers had fallen mute, and my voice was heard. That those perfect moments of my life, spent in his arms and gazing upon the stars, should come to such dark fruition, I knew then that I would never again know such joy. “This way is south.”

No one questioned me. In the darkness, our fear made us equals.

After a while, we came upon other Elves, also walking south. They had fled Formenos, when the darkness had come, running blindly across the plain and toward the forest. Many were injured--having tripped or collided with things, dragging injured limbs--and all were wide-eyed and silent. Sometimes, I would see one blinking, as though waiting for the shroud upon his eyes to be lifted, or maybe waiting to wake from a dream. Macalaurë and Telvo circled among them, calling for their spouses; Curufinwë whirled every woman with pale brown hair toward him, even those who could not possibly be mistaken for Terentaulë. I dared not think of my own lover and what might be his fate.

We arrived at the estate. The copper gate had been twisted open, wrenched aside.

We all spent a long time standing on the path, looking at that.

It was Telvo who whimpered, “Grandfather?” and propelled us all forward, Maitimo in the lead with his arm around the shoulders of his youngest brother. The front door to the house had been shattered into splinters, but we moved with the impetus of fear now and did not bother to stop and ponder it. The house echoed with footfalls, upon stairs that doubled upon themselves and senseless, twisting hallways, a house filled with voices. Grandfather! Grandfather! Grandfather! All along the hallways were strange, bright patches upon the walls where treasures and paintings had hung; that which could not be taken had been smashed into thousands of irreparable pieces.

Grandfather!

My own voice, barely a croak, shouting in a whisper: Finwë!

I found myself at Maitimo’s side, barreling down the hallway that led to the study where we’d left him. There were two doors at the end: one leading to his study, the other to the garden and the strange, luminescent roses. Maitimo plunged into the study, shouting his grandfather’s name, but I did not follow. I stood with my hand upon the knob to the other door.

Beneath my hand, it slipped open, and I saw that it--like so many other things in the house--had been broken. Like a dead limb, it flopped open.

Amid the softly glowing roses lay the broken body of Finwë, the reek of blood and death mixing with the plushy-sweet smell of wine, of sap spilled from broken stems and falling like tears, upon the fleshy red faces of the roses, dripping onto the face, body--and wounds--of the King.

By the light of roses--the only light in the endless dark--the fate of the Noldor changed.

I reached for the door before Maitimo could see, but it was too late: He was at my back, his voice rising in a wail, fingers tearing at his own hair and his face a mask of agony, his screams punctuating the endless, swirling, hopeless and hope-filled calls of Grandfather? still circulating in the endless catacomb-hallways of the house behind us.

~oOo~

None of us could bear to be inside of the ruined house, and so we assembled in a small buzzing mass on the wide walkway leading to the broken front door. The sons cloistered themselves from all others--wives, children, me--in the burnt, broken grass beside the path: Ambarussa, embracing; Maitimo consoling Tyelkormo as he himself wept; Carnistir railing senselessly while Curufinwë listened--making mud with his tears--and Macalaurë stroked his hair.

Terentaulë and Vingarië had come up from Formenos. I stood to the side with them; they were whispering furtively. “We must return to Tirion! To Fëanáro!” Vingarië was saying, but Terentaulë swiped the tears from her eyes and said, “I--I shall not.”

“You shall not?” Vingarië’s voice: incredulous.

“No, for--for my husband--I shall not remain with him. This is the end of their--of our--family.” She began sobbing, hiding her face in Tyelperinquar’s flaxen hair.

I felt it too: It was only the beginning of madness. I felt it radiating from the small cluster of Fëanáro’s sons like heat from a crucible of molten metal, that which is solid and whole reduced to feeble liquid, able to be remade into shapes both mad and dangerous.

In my mind, a thousand connections were coming together, as I knew that they would in Fëanáro’s, and the net that they made would ensnare us all.

Unless we remained here, pledging allegiance to no one.

Terentaulë was crying. “I will take Tyelperinquar, I have a cousin in the north, I shall raise him in peace and he shall never know the hurt of war--” Her voice was rising but the sons of Fëanáro--not even her husband--heard her to pay her any mind.

The beginning of madness.

In the midst of it all, I wondered: What would become of me?

I wept for the lost King and the darkness upon the world, but also for Fëanáro, for surely he was lost to me now as well, and I would never know love again for the whole of my endless life.

Selfishly, I wept most for this.

From the darkness at the end of the path, a shape emerged; the shape had broad shoulders and a wide, beautiful face with amber-colored eyes. There was dirt on his hands, for he’d been sowing new life within the earth even as his husband had been taking it within the forest: Nandolin. He carried an old tin lamp, the kind that held a candle quivering within it. All of the lamps of the house had been smashed and their stones taken, and we blinked in surprise at the light.

No one paid him any mind, least of all the sons of Fëanáro. Telvo’s face was buried in his twin’s shoulder; his back heaved with gulping sobs and grief that had no voice. And Nandolin, incredibly, did not heed the sons of Fëanáro either but came to us: Terentaulë, Vingarië, and me.

“We must take the road with greatest haste to Tirion,” he said. “My father will lend us horses, and if we do not sleep, we shall make it by--” he hesitated, for none of us knew the time of day, not without the Trees. “We shall make it by tomorrow.”

None of us answered him. Vingarië was gently rocking Terentaulë in her arms. I looked at the ground.

“Do you see them?” Nandolin asked, pointing to the sons of Fëanáro. He spoke awkwardly, always as though there was a chunk of granite beneath his tongue. “Do you see their unquestioning solidarity? Why is it that we--the ones they love--stand aside? Is it because they can smell our doubt upon us like blood?”

“We cannot--” Terentaulë began, her voice like a cracking whip, but Nandolin interrupted her. “We can. And will. How dare we call ourselves family if we forsake them now? Our family?” His voice was driving like a fist, and we all winced.

Our doubt: it reeked upon us like blood.

“We will make our excuses in the years to come, that it was for the best, that we lacked the strength for what is to come … or maybe we will put the fault on them, on fights that we had and pain that they gave us. But really, it is simple: We are family, and we must go with them.”

He turned then and strode into the insular cluster of Fëanáro’s sons. He went to Telvo and stroked his back while Pityo held his twin in his arms.

Vingarië’s arm slipped from Terentaulë’s shoulders.

She nodded at me as she passed. “Eressetor. If I do not--” Smiling to cover her fear. “Best wishes.” And she went to slip her hand into Macalaurë’s, the hand that was not consoling Carnistir.

And from the path then came a surprising sight: the pretty, impatient face of Pityo’s betrothed eased into focus from the shadows. She paused and looked upon us--Terentaulë and me--before moving to stand solidly at Pityo’s side. In a reflection of Nandolin, her hand lifted to rest upon his shoulder, and she looked at us no more.

Curufinwë stood alone in the circle of brothers and Terentaulë also. She bounced Tyelperinquar and wept without end--but her feet slowly carried her to him, and he alone of the brothers caught his wife into his embrace, and the wept together, with Tyelperinquar held between them.

They began to move toward the path, and I watched them go. Nandolin was speaking again of horses in a voice awkward but strong, leading with the battered tin lamp held high in his hand as a beacon, and Maitimo was nodding through his tears. Amid the chaos, frail order was beginning to take hold.

I waited for Nandolin to turn back, to beckon me one last time to follow. I watched his lamp dancing down the path, growing smaller as he moved from me and left me in the darkness.

We are their family …

But it was Telvo, his gray eyes bright in the darkness, red-rimmed and swollen with tears, his hand caught in his brother’s on one side and his husband’s on the other, who turned and looked back at me. Eressetor?

Jogging to catch up with them, together, we began the walk to Tirion with the lamp held high, the tiny twist of fire striving bravely against the darkness.

~THE END~