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Given how far to the north this particular stronghold lies, the later watches in Formenos are cold, and dark, and deep, beyond anything that Nerdanel knew from the climes closer to the Two Trees and their perpetual light. In actuality, she does not much mind these changes on her own account – an experienced craftswoman and keeper of households, she can work by lamplight or gem-light as well as by Tree-light, and the quiet here so far from Tirion is in fact quite welcome – but she does wonder, at times, about the effects experienced by others. Her sons seem resigned to the change, though some more than others – Nelyo in particular is pining deeply after his Findekano, trapped apart from each other by some days’ ride rather than an afternoon’s – but her husband’s father seems to tire more easily now, and Fëanáro himself can grow short-tempered as the darkness closes in.
And so, all things told, Nerdanel is not much surprised when the twins come to find her around supper time one eventide, all but tripping over one another to spill out some tale of a visitor at the gate – a visitor whom, to hear them tell it, Nerdanel’s own darling, beloved, sometimes thick-headed mate is apparently engaged in a yelling match with.
She sighs, already unstrapping her leather apron as she instructs Telufinwë run to the kitchens – bid Meryanildo to mind the stew and Ilvanya to begin baking fresh loaves – and Pityafinwë to find and remain with his grandfather, preferably somewhere further within the stronghold where he will not hear anything that might transpire until Nerdanel is prepared to allow it. Both boys run to obey with only minimal pleading and cajoling – well do her children know that their father is the soft touch, not their mother! – and then Nerdanel is free to shrug into the heavier furs that serve them all in place of even woolen cloaks here, and from there, to set out for the gate in search of her errant beloved.
For all that she takes a lantern, her eyes still adjust to the deep darkness with relative speed. And regardless, she can hear Fëanáro hollering long before she can see him. Aiya – her princeling has always had a set of lungs on him, and he has never been shy of using them! And while that can be quite fun in bed, it is less than optimal as a means of greeting guests.
Hmmm. Now that she is outside, too, she can feel the weight upon the air and smell the sharpness upon the wind. So, it seems, there is to be a storm tonight as well. That will make matters – interesting, if even half of Nerdanel’s current prickling suspicions are proven true.
“Fëanáro!” she calls, the moment she imagines that her husband might hear her, over the rising wind and his own bellowing. “Fëanáro!”
It is not long before his voice rises to greet her. Or, well, to acknowledge her, at any rate. “Beloved!” she hears him cry. “Return to the stronghold at once!”
Psh. Intractable princeling. They have been married long enough, Nerdanel thinks with a touch of weary amusement, that Fëanáro should know well by now that Nerdanel does not take to being addressed in this manner. At least he only defaults to the mode of their earliest meetings when he is under true stress, she thinks wryly.
“Absolute nonsense!” she calls back, tromping forward into the teeth of the wind with the lantern held higher still. “What is this that I am hearing about you browbeating a guest, my own?”
“Naught, my sweet!” Feanaro calls back, with a touch of alarm in his voice that leaves Nerdanel snorting. This last exclamation, in tandem with his own lantern that she soon catches sight of set upon the rocky ground by the front gate of their sprawling northern estate, is more than enough to guide Nerdanel right to her husband’s side.
“So I see,” she tells him, wryly, taking in his expression – equal parts distress, anger, and concern, from what she can see – before turning her light and her eyes forward to see their purported guest.
Ah. Well. Yes, Nerdanel had certainly wondered if this might be the case, even if no small part of her spirit quails within her now to see the Moringotto, the very Foe of the World, standing not an arms’ length before her husband, with only the iron of Formenos’s gates to separate them.
Still. Never let it be said that Nerdanel, heir of Mahtan the Smith, was one to turn down a challenge!
“So you are our guest,” she says brightly, sidestepping the outstretched arm by which Fëanáro seeks to prevent her from moving closer and raising her lantern to regard the being she has not yet met in person before this night.
Nerdanel has seen the Moringotto in passing before – at festivals, and holding forth in the square of Tirion, and even hanging about outside the university where Fëanáro is known to visit and consult with the most learned folk of all disciplines. More recently, this being has loomed dark and heavy in Feanaro’s own mind following his testimony at Máhanaxar. But none of these have fully prepared her for how tall he looms – over twice her height, she who stands a head taller than her mate! – or how imperceptible his material form is, repelling the incarnate eye with strange and wondrous shapes that are not fully of these shores.
“Well met, my lord!” Nerdanel greets this incomprehensible One. “You have come a long way to dine with us, it seems, and I do hope that my dear husband has not kept you waiting over-long with his exuberance. Fëanáro, darling, will you hold my lantern?”
“My own?” he asks, but her mate does not take the lantern she holds out to him: he merely stands, stock-still and staring, until she huffs and hooks it into the inner bars of the gate herself, that she has enough light to begin working apart the locks.
“What are you doing?” he hisses, when he seems to have gathered together enough of his wits to say more. “Nerdanel! He is the Enemy! He has not come here for, just, supper!”
Nerdanel can smell the incoming storm upon the wind, and she can feel the tumult brewing across the gate from her and her husband. They are not dissimilar, she thinks: most importantly, it is easy to prepare for and to survive them both, so long as you have a plan.
“Psh.” The first set of the gates opens before her: through them Nerdanel steps, out unto the second. “Fëanáro, my love, our guest is first and mightiest among the Valar. If he wanted to do you so great a harm as you seem to imagine, do you not think he could simply step between these bars and commit it? But instead, he has waited here and endured your ill-tempered shouting for long enough that your youngest children could come and alert me of the fissure in your manners. What should that tell you, hmmm?”
There is always the chance she has read this incorrectly, of course. But Nerdanel has an eye for stone and other materials unlike her own, and she knows the signs that warn when they are stressed to the point of breakage – as well as those that promise a few further taps will reveal great wonders. And so she opens the second set of locks, then sets her heels to the ground and her shoulder to the bars, and pushes.
The great double gates of Formenos swing open with far less commotion than the wind about them, still rising steadily ahead of the snows to come. And then the great mass of shape and shadow that is the Moringotto moves – one moment, he is without the borders of Nerdanel’s home and kingdom, and then the next, he is within them.
Fëanáro squawks, but Nerdanel disregards him for just this moment, instead inclining her head to their guest in a courteous nod. She is no statesman, no princess, no courtier, and she does not bow – that will not change for Elda or Vala, whoever they might be – but there are other forms of courtesy that mean just as much and more from a woman of her rank, and she is well aware of it.
“Be welcome at Formenos, so long as you come in peace and depart in the same fashion,” Nerdanel Mahtaniel tells the Moringotto, as pretty as any politician might please, only adding then: “I am certain I need not tell you that we expect the same courtesy of our guests as that which we extend unto them, my lord?”
NO INDEED, the Moringotto rumbles. And there, before Nerdanel’s very eyes, the shades and the smoke that seem to constitute the greatest among the Valar swirl away into themselves, coalescing instead into a form much more like unto a man of her own people. In this way, the Moringotto now stands of a height with Nerdanel herself – still taller than Fëanáro, she cannot help but notice with an internal chuckle – and he is clad in deep royal purple, with a great dark cloak, all evidently of the finest make even to an eye more trained to stone than textiles.
“Thou art a brazen creature,” he says, and his voice is a rumble as deep as the earth itself.
Nerdanel snorts, taking up her lantern again and motioning for her still-dumbstruck husband to lift his own. “That’s the kind of talk I expect from men who think a woman is out of line but do not care to say it in so many words,” she tells him, already wending her way toward the path that will take them to the great main house. “I am rather disappointed in you, my lord.”
The Moringotto huffs in what Nerdanel decides – firmly – is amusement. “We regret offering thee any perception of insolence, lady. Say rather, then, that thou art perceptive and hath surprised Us with thine trust.”
“Psh. Say rather,” she repeats him, “that I will not suffer to have supper either burn or run late because my husband is a dear creature but prone to letting his emotions run roughshod over his intellect, and the one is as great as the other. Is that not so, my own?”
“N-no?” Feanaro responds weakly, looking from her to their guest and then back to her again as if he cannot believe the sight before him. “Nerdanel, what are we doing?”
“We are going to have supper,” Nerdanel says firmly, adjusting her lantern to guide them home. “And then I will review what the boys have been working on today, and you two can continue your conversation – which I am certain will remain calm and civil, given the many topics in which you hold a mutual interest and investment – in the study with some cocoa. Are we quite clear?”
And, Nerdanel is pleased to note, neither her husband, prince among the Noldor, nor their guest, first among the Valar, seem to disagree.