Work Text:
She keeps finding small reasons to delay. Her tools are not tied properly, and will slide and break on the journey - they must be taken out and repacked. Her clothes are misfolded - never mind that they are for the most part simple work smocks, she must start again. She has never cared for jewelry before, but suddenly it is of paramount importance that every clasp or chain is sorted. Fëanáre must have made her a hundred jewels. They are laid out on the bed, shining with the brilliant greens and soft blues that she loves, set in graceful silver branches or carefully worked nets of woven gold. In the end, she brings none. There will be no need for finery in Mahtan’s house. Finally, it is finished. Nerdanel fastens the clasps on her trunk and drags it into the garden of the empty house.
There are seven statues in that garden.
On a night like this one (though in the changeless peace of Aman, she reflects, all nights are like this one), Fëanáre had held her in her arms and whispered the forbidden words, ‘my wife’. True, she had often done so. But Telperion’s rays gleamed on her copper circlet and paled next to her eyes, and for the first time Nerdanel had not protested. They spoke the invocation almost furtively, alone in the half-light, and on the next day the image came to her. A year later it was finished, the first of her statues to decorate their new home. A tall, beautiful youth with silver eyes and hair of beaten copper.
They had loved to travel. They had crossed the length and breadth of Aman, when it was still possible for them to spend days and weeks in each other’s company, without Fëanáre’s black tempers and her own stony silences. Before the darkness came, she stopped herself from thinking. Because there was a darkness in Tirion, in the faces of the assembled lords when the saw their Princess and the craftsman’s daughter stand a little too close together.
Aman was beautiful, but they loved best its edges, the mountains of the North where the stars were still visible, and the void in the far West, whence voices could be heard from beyond the circles of the world. And the sea. Fëanáre had found for her a perfect shell on the beaches south of Alqualonde. It had a hundred chambers, and was the color of pearl, and sang as the air rushed through it. The next year was spent in working on a hollow figure, another youth who held a harp in his stone hands. He would sing in the slightest breeze, and Fëanáre’s father swore there was movement in his carven fingers.
They had their first real fight over the statues. Fëanáre wished for them to be displayed. “They deserve to be shown in Tirion, or the Halls of Aule, that the Valar themselves would know my wife for the greatest artist of our people.”
The statues (she almost thinks, the boys) are a delicate blend of their features. Her strong nose and sculptor’s hands, Fëanáre’s stature and her eyes, silver-bright and burning. “Yes, my love. And they would know me for your wife.”
Fëanáre recoils as if struck. Her voice is quick and fearful. “Are you ashamed of me, that you would not be known as such?” And as quickly as her anger turns to pity, her wife is gone.
No one could imagine her next statue anywhere but in the forest. A hunter, frozen in the instant before the kill. As a gesture of reconciliation, she gives him silver hair, for the woman she is starting to think of as his grandmother.
Her fourth statue is not beautiful. He is lifelike, of course. Coming on him unawares, even a sharp-eyed elda would think he breathed. But he has her coarse features and reddish skin. The only traces of Fëanáre are in his dark hair and long, clever fingers. She places him in a shadowy nook. Her mother complains that he is almost invisible. Her wife does not object. They are both far too used to hiding.
Her half-brother’s second son is born, and Fëanáre grows increasingly bitter. For all her brilliance, she has not yet contrived some device by which she might continue her father’s line. For the sake of his grandchildren, the king stays longer in Tirion. There is no sign he notices that his eldest daughter’s visits have become less and less frequent. Her fifth statue is of Fëanáre, had she been born a man. The result is not quite perfect - some of her own features are visible, having slipped in during the long year of labor. All the same, the effect is eerie. Fëanáre is delighted, and requests that she shape his hands to hold a hammer.
Fëanáre no longer argues that her works belong in Aulë’s halls. Their quarrels, now, are frequently on the subject of religion, and her wife’s fruitless rebellion. “They gave us light -” “And denied it to those who refused to become their thralls.”
“They brought our ancestors to safety.”
“Or to stagnation, and a slower death. Surely you do not believe - ”
And she does not. Nerdanel knows better than to argue that the Valar return their dead to life. But the playful, academic debates of their youth have attained a terrifying urgency. Fighting with Fëanáre is like picking at an open wound, just beginning to scab. A careless word will set the blood flowing, until she is delirious with pain and blind to the infuriating selfishness of her need. Fëanáre wondered why she would carve the exact same sculpture twice. It’s because she misses the feeling of one soul in two bodies.
She supposes it is too much to expect a civil parting. She is sullen. Fëanáre is blasphemous. Anger is easier than grief. “You should be grateful. They made your father a king.”
“We had no need for kings at Cuivienen. Or their sons.” Her voice becomes sharp, as it does whenever she speaks of her half-brother. And then it breaks. “Ai, Nerdanel. I feel no shame for what I did. I am my father’s heir. And I am your wife. I would announce it from the top of Taniquetil, and none would dare question me - if not for them.”
She thinks of what Mahtan would say. Her wise, pious father who loves the Valar and has asked her at every harvest festival for a century when she would give him grandchildren. She turns back to the house. “Have you no answer?” “No - I’ve forgotten something. Heavy clothes. I’ll need them in Formenos.”