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The clay knife slips in her hand, and Nerdanel exclaims something unladylike.
“Feanor! What have I told you about interrupting my carving?”
“That it is wicked,” he says gravely, his arms tightening around her waist. “And unforgivable.”
“It is dangerous.”
“Very dangerous,” he agrees, kissing the hollow behind her ear.
Nerdanel is not such an old and hardened married woman, even at twenty-three, that she cannot let a girlish giggle escape now and then. The clay knife falls to the floor entirely, lost in the moment. Around them, morning sunlight trembles through the shutters like scattered golden leaves. It illuminates a surprisingly tidy workshop: the sudden, affectionate disarray at its center is the exception, not the rule.
Even when working, Nerdanel does not forget the places in which her tools and projects belong. There on one table is a family of charcoal sketches, out of the little ones’ reach; here is a small clay model of a baby, deliciously fat as Maglor was until lately, when he decided to sprout five inches overnight. Under her hands is the beginning of a carved and molded triptych. Scenes of holiness, rendered softly.
“I love to watch you work,” Feanor says.
“You love to interrupt my work,” Nerdanel says.
“Rupt?” demands a high voice from the doorway. “Want to ‘rupt.”
“Maglor, you should be napping, my sweet!” Nerdanel extricates herself from Feanor’s possessive embrace and hastens to scoop up the barefoot little creature before he can step on any sharp scrap of metal or dried clay that may be clinging, despite all her efforts at cleanliness, to the workshop floorboards. “You must sleep for a long time, and have sweet dreams.”
“No child of mine shall ever sleep their day away,” Feanor says, still stooping over her abandoned triptych. “This is cunning, dear one.”
“I should hope so. I have drawn the designs for it thrice, and broken two pencils.”
“Two pencils!” Feanor rakes his thick, rippling hair back from his brow with both hands. “Now, that will never do. Who is it for? Who is to be honored?”
“A friend of your father’s,” Nerdanel says. In truth, it is for a friend of his stepmother’s, but she cannot say that. “He commissioned me at Easter. It shall pay a tidy sum, if my husband does not spoil it before it is finished.”
“A commission.” His voice is proud, and though he will never acknowledge that she makes a fair point, he takes a respectful step back. “That is wonderful, Nerdanel.”
“It will help with the next one,” she says. “Maglor, don’t dig with your foot. The baby might feel it.”
The imp in her arm pouts. Since he learned there was a new brother or sister coming at the end of summer, he has been intrigued, skeptical, and hysterical by turns. Only Maedhros can comfort him.
Where is Maedhros now? He is four years old, and very even-tempered and complacent for a child of that age, even if sometimes he creeps into Nerdanel’s bed with nightmares.
Maedhros cannot always be certain of sweet dreams.
“Come along and we shall begin our supper,” Nerdanel says, deciding with what even she thinks is admirable equanimity that her work is over for now.
Feanor walks beside her, his hand curving comfortably under her hair, cradling the back of her neck. He is always especially tender when she is expecting, and really, that is as much a reason for his interruption as anything. He cannot bear to be separated from her for long.
At the kitchen table, Maedhros is hunched with his sun-gilded red head bent low over a scrap of paper and one of Nerdanel’s pencils. He starts, almost guiltily, at the sound of their steps.
“The young artist!” Feanor exclaims delightedly. Maglor says, pease, pease, without kicking, which is his politest way of asking to be let down.
“S’nothing,” Maedhros mumbles, but he is smiling at all the interest. Maglor wriggles up onto the bench beside him, and Nerdanel draws close.
What she sees touches her heart as surely as the baby swimming beneath it, as sure as Feanor touches her hair, her shoulder.
With careful yet shaking lines, Maedhros has reproduced a baby copy of her triptych.
“You must not tease,” Esther says, as severely as she can—a difficult task when two slim, strong hands are clasping her knees, and an entirely enchanting face hovers just above them.
Maedhros Feanorian is kneeling at her feet, resting his chin on his hands, and being, perhaps, a little indecorous in the name of closely examining the mending spread over her lap.
“I am not teasing. I am looking at your stiches.”
“It is hardly the Alençon lace, you see. Only a bit of simple embroidery to cover a tear.”
“Alençon.” He repeats it, smiling.
Esther says, “It is a region in France. The finest lace in the world comes from there, or did. There is less of it now, but once it was worn by kings. Given as gifts to courtiers.”
“I must find some for myself, then,” Maedhros says. The twinkle in his eye suggests that he is already familiar with her little history lesson. “It would look very fine spilling from my cuffs.”
“It is old-fashioned. I am old-fashioned to speak of it.” But she is imagining his lace-trimmed cuffs, just as he doubtless intended. His hands would be set off to advantage by such a design.
“Hmm. Is it?” He is smiling, proud of his own cleverness before she even knows fully what that cleverness has wrought. “Perhaps I shall commit myself entirely to ideas of the past. Shall I powder my hair, too?”
“No.” She gives in, just a little, and reaches out to twine her fingers in his curls. Gently, he shuts his eyes. The danger is very great.
“Go back and sit in your chair,” Esther scolds, releasing him.
Meekly, he gathers up his long limbs and returns to his seat a few paces away. Her quarters are very small; two chairs and a bed are almost too much for them.
“You could show me how,” Maedhros says, after he has watched her a moment more. “To embroider, I mean. I’ve never learned.”
“You would just prick your fingers,” she says, and for some reason that makes him laugh, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand as if he is tired.
“Ah, darling. I’ve a tough hide, I assure you.”
“Bring your chair beside me, then,” she says. “That is a better angle for watching, anyway, than...”
“Is it? I thought I had an excellent angle.” But he obliges, crossing his legs and clasping his hands around his knees so that his rings twinkle in the light of her little candles. Then he leans forward attentively as she demonstrates a few simple stitches.
“Lovely colors,” he murmurs, as if that is what matters most.
“You try,” she says. “Just the little knot one that I have showed you.”
He mirrors her movements nimbly. She meant to take back the chemise after one or two attempts, but Maedhros has learned the lesson uncannily well.
She recalls, almost guiltily, and almost for the first time, that his mother is an artist and his father a craftsman.
“That is very good,” she says, but she forgets herself in this regard, too, and says it in German. He turns his radiant smile on her: very near.
“Is it?”
“It will do. I shall hire you and sleep the day away like a fine lady.”
“I only desire one form of payment,” he says, setting the sewing aside, and reaching to cup her face in his too-clever hands.
Even now, when she draws, Estrela finds herself squinting her remaining eye as if that will open the other. It is discomfiting, to forget and remember, if only for an instant.
Perhaps this little trick is played because the practice of drawing is newly restored to her. So too, then, is the habit. She sighs and rakes her fingers through her hair.
There is ink on her fingers, but her hair is just as black.
“You ought to have more colors,” Russandol says, appearing beside her. As if walking on two still-strengthening legs were not challenge enough, he has now apparently mastered the art of moving silently.
“More colors?” she asks, pausing in her work to smile up at him.
(She no longer worries that her smile repels him.)
There is a lock of hair curling distractingly over his brow. “For your inks. Rivers should be blue, or red, I suppose, if one is in a gruesome mood.”
“I am grateful that there is any ink at all.” Estrela picks up her pen again, turning it in her fingers. “What with all the recent post, I expected it to run low.”
His turn to smile, but only to himself, his eyes half-shut. This confirms something she guessed: that Celegorm’s delivery of inks specially to her was, in some part, Russandol’s doing.
This makes her turn her gaze to her paper.
But Russandol is not so easily dismissed, it seems. He lowers himself to the bench beside her, and props his right elbow on the table, the wrist drawn to his chest so that, amidst the folds of his loose shirt, the loss of his hand is not so visible.
“That’s the camp,” he says, after a moment. “No need for rivers.”
“I am practicing my lines, in truth,” she says. “I have made a copy of your friend Rumil’s map of the Mountain, but I don’t want to spoil it with details before I have a steadier hand.”
“Ah.” He watches in silence a little longer, but then he is pointing. “The stables? The men’s barracks?” His fingertip smudges the ink, and he flinches. “Oh, fu—Lord. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Estrela says quickly. “I told you. It is only a practice.”
“Ah, if you had only seen how seriously my moth—how seriously some artists take their practices,” he says, recovering himself a little shakily. “I did not mean to intrude. I’ll go now.”
“But you could be a help.” It is the simplest thing in an otherwise-tangled world, finding reasons for him to stay. “You remember the lay of the camp, though you were there only a little while.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You planned out how to destroy it.”
“So I did. But one needn’t know much about a place, to light it on fire. Only whether or not it will burn.”
Estrela reflects on this sobering prospect. Then she says, “The field was just there, I think. Where we used to paint the ties.”
“You’ve left out the whipping post.” But his voice is amused.
“This was a dreadful exercise.” Estrela throws down her pen again—this time, the smudges are hers. “I should not be so ready to return, in memory.”
“It is better than pretending to forget,” he says quietly.
“I suppose. I think if I could forget—or pretend convincingly—I would do it, sometimes.”
“And I would oblige you,” he says, “By playing along. Give me your direction, then, Miss Estrela, and I will be the only one of us to remember where the tar-vats were.”
She laughs. Why not laugh? At least her laugh was not carved and reshaped like her mouth was. It is a little hoarse, perhaps, from underuse…but whose laugh is not, these days?
“May I ask you something forward?” Russandol ventures, which could mean a dozen dangers, with him.
Estrela nods, wondering at her own courage.
“Is that one of Judith’s dresses that you have on?”
All told, not as forward as she might have expected. “It is,” she says. “An old one with a tear under the arm—she did not mind it being cut down.”
“Now I have a riddle for you,” he says, “More pressing, I think, than the question of where Gothmog liked best to eat his breakfast. How is it that I am waltzing about in cambric and linen and silk, all new, and you are wearing Judith’s dress with the tear under the arm?”
“The tear is mended,” she says, steadily. “And I don’t know that I’ve seen you waltzing. Maybe when my back is turned?”
“Spinning like a top, I am,” he counters, falsely grave. Then—“But truly, Essie. I told Celegorm—damn, I might as well have it out in the open—I told Celegorm to fetch you something pretty. Something to wear. Sticks, too,” he adds, quickly, as if it is important to clarify the point. “And our little Frog-boy. I hate to see you all in rags and cast-offs.”
“Celegorm brought me back sprigged calico,” Estrela says. “But I—to be forward myself, I have not yet regained my figure, and there is no telling what it will be like when I have. I am twenty-eight, not eighteen, and I…” She loses her nerve and fixes her eye on her paper again. “It is better to wait until I know how to cut the pattern.”
“Oh.” He digests this. “I did not think of that.”
Now he is thinking of it, and Estrela’s ears are burning.
“Well,” Russandol says at last, “I do not know what my figure shall be, either, so I thank you for cutting my shirts generously. For all you know I might have been stout as a barrel before they whittled me down.”
“I do not think so,” she says, biting her lip.
“Ah, well,” Russandol says. “I will be the first one to admire your calico, at any rate. When it is time.”
Estrela tries her hand at drawing the concentric, folding lines of rising ground. This was always a skill she struggled with: one didn’t have to draw mountains at sea.
He rests his chin on his hand and is quiet. With time, her lines become surer, more even.
“I used to watch my father work,” Estrela says, delicate because she heard him shape half the word mother and then flee from it, a moment ago. “From him, I learned everything I know...or knew. I had to make my own lessons for a while, of course.”
“How did you stay so kind?” Russandol asks, almost mumbling through his fingers, which half-cover his lips.
She shrugs. “Was it in rebellion, maybe? I still don’t know. I have often wondered who I was meant to be...the self that could be free and bold. So maybe it is not kindness, always, but fear. I did not want to stop loving. There was Tawanna, Amlach, then Gwindor...I still had to live in my own head. I did not want it to be an ugly place.”
He is silent.
“That was a nonsense answer, wasn’t it?” she asks, sighing a little. “I don’t speak well when I’m working.”
“No, I understand. Or if I don’t, it is my own fault.”
“You love to talk of fault.”
“I was raised Catholic. It’s in all our prayers.”
“I am Catholic, too,” Estrela says, unable to keep from smiling again. “I always preferred prayers to the Madonna... She is very gentle.”
More silence. Too close to mother.
“Would you like to draw?” Estrela asks, holding out the pen. “Sometimes drawing is easier than writing.”
He considers for a moment and then takes it from her grasp. She pretends not to see the half-moon nail-marks on his face, where he must have pressed his fingers while she spoke.
“I liked to draw when I was young,” he says, as if he isn’t still. “But even my right hand was less than skilled.”
“That’s not what Fingon told me.”
“Fingon flatters me. He was barely out of skirts when I was making little portraits and giving them to anyone who would take them. I stopped not long afterwards.” He doesn’t say why. His fingers crook awkwardly around the pen as he positions it in his grip.
“Hideous,” he murmurs, grimacing at nothing in particular.
“Now, now,” Estrela chides softly. She knows he’s been writing—words, names, sometimes just letters, over and over. But he likes to do so secretly: he so rarely lets anyone see that he is trying.
Gwindor has observed the same.
“May I?” she asks, and he jolts a little, offering the pen to her at once. “No,” she says. “I meant—” and with the lightest touch she can muster, she arranges his clenching fingers, shifting them to more comfortable angles. “I have been practicing with both hands myself, since my eye wearies me, and I have found what suits,” she says. The skin of his hand is delicate where it is uncalloused, and warm.
“Thank you,” he murmurs.
She lets go. “Comfort is better than not, when we can have it.” She nudges him with her shoulder, surprising herself with such boldness. “There. I have said only what is baldly true, and you cannot argue with it.”
The corner of his lips quirks. He is copying the concentric lines she was making a moment ago. “I would not dream of arguing,” he says. “When I have so much to learn.”