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There had been an expectation—Aravir’s own, she suspected—that when she became Chieftain of the Dúnedain, when she spent far more of her days in the wilds than in any house, certain things would stop bothering her. Her own mother had been so stalwart, after all, and the Elves did not feel the ravages of the elements as Men did. So Aravir had expected that these things would bother her less than they did: sleeping under open sky, eating meat charred black at the fire and utterly unseasoned, tending to her wounded after skirmishes with Orcs or human brigands. The others lived through these things with nary a complaint, stern faces showing only the barest hint of discomfort. Isildur’s scion could do no less. Aravir could do no less.
The wound her cousin had taken, a gash on her left leg, needed stitches, though Aravir could look at it and tell that it would not be life-threatening to wait a few hours for a proper surgeon to attend to it. All the same, they’d make better time returning to the settlement if the wound was properly attended to, and though Aravir had never received the totality of a healer’s training (she could well remember Elrond pressing his hand to her head and murmuring that they all had their weak points), Aravir could stitch straight.
“Hold still, Beldis,” she muttered, avoiding her cousin’s gaze. “Once I’ve stitched you up and bandaged your leg, we’ll head back for the settlement.”
Beldis laughed weakly. “Oh? From the look on your face, I had thought it would have to be chopped off.”
Aravir forced a smile. “Nothing that serious.”
Mercifully, Beldis didn’t pry any more deeply than that, but silence and cooperation meant that Aravir had to concentrate on the wound. On the—
Wearing gloves was out of the question. Aravir’s straight stitching turned sloppy when she had something between her fingers and the needle. Her hands had to be bare, or Beldis would be making the significantly slower, more laborious, more dangerous walk back to the settlement with an open, unstitched wound. There was no one else here who could do this; of their party, Aravir was the only one with any real knowledge of healing.
That pervasive copper odor clung to the roof of Aravir’s mouth as she made a closer inspection of Beldis’s wound. A sick lurch in her stomach, a sick heat in her throat, told Aravir to swallow hard, to take a deep breath and try to steady herself as best she could. Bright red wet clung to her fingertips, and her skin began to crawl, crawl, crawl.
At times like this, Aravir remembered being very small, and hearing the story of Amlaith from Elrond for the first time.
Amlaith, firstborn child of Eärendur who was the last king of a united Arnor. Eärendur did not think much of the capabilities of either of his sons, but Arnor had discontinued the Númenórean practice of allowing the firstborn daughter to inherit the Scepter if she had no older brothers. Eärendur did not think much of his sons, and though he discounted his daughter also, Amlaith thought she could be King, and certain of her father’s lords were of the same mind.
When Eärendur died, there was a reckoning, and that reckoning split Arnor in three. Amlaith ruled over Arthedain, and it was a diminished kingdom in comparison to the might and glory of Arnor, but in Arthedain alone was the dignity of the Dúnedain left undiminished. Amlaith’s brothers and their descendants let Rhudaur and Cardolan fall to ruin, but from Amlaith’s line would eventually come the hope of the Dúnedain.
It was a lovely story when told in full, and it never failed to lighten Amlaith’s heart, either as an uncertain child or an uncertain adult. But she could feel everyone looking at her now, waiting, and another story came to mind, far more clearly than the one Elrond had told to cheer up a young girl, so long ago.
Aravir had studied Númenórean genealogies extensively during her fosterage in Rivendell. It was only fitting that she do so; there were revelations aplenty to be found in the past, especially in the lives of her dead kin. The lines of the House of Elros, both the House of Andúnië and the line of the King.
Tar-Vanimeldë was the last Ruling Queen of Númenor. History remembered her as a joke made in decidedly bad taste: a Queen uninterested in ruling, who let her husband usurp her throne. The joke lost what little savor it had when one reached the part where Herucalmo usurped the throne from Tar-Alcarin after Vanimeldë’s death, and Alcarin spent nigh twenty years in exile in what was now Gondor.
There was no Ruling Queen after Vanimeldë. Míriel would have been the fourth, but she was overthrown. But that was not to say there were no firstborn daughters between Vanimeldë and Míriel. Alcarin’s first child had been his daughter, Lómendil, and she had never been Queen, but spent the majority of her life after her father’s ascension in the same colony—now Gondor—that Alcarin had whiled away exile in.
A handful of firstborn daughters could be found in the charts after Lómendil. They abdicated, or fell ill, or, in one case, died under mysterious circumstances. That was how it went. It just took one weak Queen, too easily usurped, and this was what happened afterwards.
Aravir drew another deep breath, and began to run her needle through flesh, schooling her face into the stern mask her people would expect. There would be shaking later, there would be scrubbing her hands and forearms until her flesh was pink and raw. When no one could see her, there would be that, and it took every ounce of self-control she possessed to keep ‘later’ from becoming ‘now.’ For now, Aravir was no Queen, no King, only a Chieftain, but she would be strong, nonetheless. The future deserved no less from her than that.