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“Run and play with Turcafinwë,” Amil says. “He is close to your age.”
Aunt Nerdanel opens her mouth and shuts it again. Írissë wonders if she was about to say, No, it is Carnistir who is closest to Írissë, but Írissë doesn’t want to play with Carnistir anyway, so she runs before there can be any further discussion.
She finds Tyelko in the cabbage-patch, minding Atarinkë. Aunt Nerdanel grows much of the family’s food, and the cabbages are plump and shining green. If they all lived in Tirion proper—as Atar calls it—they would not have the need to root up their own vegetables.
Atar says that, too.
“What are you doing here?”
Írissë considers her cousins. Tyelko’s hair—a color almost too rich to be golden, when compared to the paler strands of their half Teleri-cousins—is all in fronds around his ears. Atarinkë has made it so with his little clawlike hands.
“You look like a fern,” Írissë says, savoring the glare she gets in return. “A whole bed of ferns.”
“You look like a skull and picked bones,” Tyelko growls, and Írissë may still be slender in girlhood, but she is also beautiful, and so she only laughs.
“Why do you have to watch over him?”
“Because he only likes me,” Tyelko says. His voice is gloomy but his eyes are bright as he looks at little Atarinkë, who stoops over a bed of river-stones. Arakáno is much rounder than he; Írissë wonders if what Nurse says is true, that Uncle Fëanáro does not feed his children.
“Arakáno likes all of us well enough,” Írissë says. Since Atarinkë pays their conversation no mind, they have talked as he led them down the path, towards the creek, away from the house. “But when I was small, I only wanted Findekáno to hold me. Turukáno complains about it still.”
“Nelyo never dropped me,” Tyelko says, seeming to agree on the trustworthiness of eldests. “Káno sometimes did.” He grimaces.
“Riss!”
Her cousins’ voices boom across the field and Turukáno wrinkles his nose. “They shouldn’t call you by such a shortened name. It sounds common.”
“Oh, run along,” Írissë sniffs. She leaps off her horse, ignoring Makalaurë’s proffered hand, and hikes up her skirts.
“She is so uncouth, I apologize,” Turukáno is saying to Makalaurë, like he himself isn’t perfectly capable of being wild, and then Írissë thinks no more of her brother because she has joined Tyelko.
By joined, it might be more accurate to say: tackled him by a running leap.
He struggles and sputters, but she pins him, jabbing him in the throat with the flat blade of her hand. “Snick, that was an arterial vein. You’re dead.”
“But I shot you in the back in vengeance for my brother’s life,” drawls a voice, and she cranes her neck round to see Atarinkë smirking down at her.
“Pity you couldn’t hit a turkey if it spread its tail in your face,” she says, and rolls off Tyelko. “Get up, loaf! Where’s Huan?”
“Sleeping.” Tyelko wipes sweat from his brow, leaving a streak of dirt. “He’s sluggish at noon.”
“As are both of you. What were you doing, wandering the fields?”
“Waiting for you,” they say in one voice, and she is gratified.
Together, they cross the fields until Laurelin’s light softens a little and Huan comes bounding out after them, his joyful barks and wet tongue as familiar a greeting to Írissë as the peaks of Uncle Fëanáro’s roofs. When night falls, they are still far from home, and so Tyelko shoots and skins a few rabbits. Atarinkë builds a fire with his one-handed flint, which sparks a blue-green flame, and which he will not let them look at very closely.
“It is a secret.”
“You are a snake.”
He elbows her, and Írissë elbows him back, and Tyelko scolds them. “I’m so hungry I’ll eat it raw, if you don’t hurry.”
After, they wash their hands in a brook and let Huan carefully mouth the bones. Írissë loosens her hair from its matted braids.
“It is your begetting day in two weeks’ time,” she says, to Tyelko. “You will be fifty. What will you do?”
He shrugs. “Eat. Drink. Eat some more.”
She rolls her eyes. “I mean—what do you think you are destined to do—to be?”
“Let me answer for him.” Atarinkë’s eyes are bent on the embers, but his voice rings clear like his father’s. A little shiver of anticipation runs through Írissë. “He will be the greatest hunter of an age,” Atarinkë says, so gravely that they do not laugh at the words as they otherwise might. For isn’t obvious that Tyelko will be a hunter? “And he will be more ruthless, and thus more remembered, than anyone expects.” He lifts his gaze. “And I shall follow in my father’s footsteps and craft works of such cunning that mouths will hang open like keyholes.”
“You sound like a seer,” Tyelko says. “The most conceited seer in all of Aman.”
Atarinkë shakes off the cloak of mystery and grins. He has the sharpest grin Írissë knows. “And you, fair cousin? What are you destined to be?”
“I care not.” Írissë tosses her hair. “So long as I am free.”