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The sun rises. She seems to know her path, now; her first journey had seemed to go off course but in the days afterwards she has kept steady. Is she so carefree as she seems, playing in the sea?
She is a strange little thing, that sun; so far and yet so full of light. Under the water she is carmine red and horribly pretty. Nerdanel watches her openly, though her eyes burn to look for too long.
There is a new hue of light, now, one that before had come only through colored glass. It is that red-orange hue at the start of each day and at its end, the delicate blush now on the walls of the great white palace. It is so pretty that none should guess it is born of sorrow.
And then the palace itself. Tirion upon Túna.
Unmarred white walls and slender towers, beauty fashioned and sharpened over centuries. Hundreds of craftsmen, undying, working only for the love of the craft; crowning glory of the Vanyar and the Noldor.
There is blood under Nerdanel’s fingernails and her hands are so raw the air chafes. Nerdanel had scrubbed blood from brick, though no one had asked her to. Had scrubbed and scrubbed long past the point of comfort, watching rivulets of faintly brown water trickle away.
She is not sure now it had been blood at all. It has seemed so, when she had started.
The servants of Aranfinwë watch her as she steps inside, but none stop her. She cannot tell caution from pity in their eyes. She sees plenty of both, now.
But it is not the king she seeks.
Indis is in the gardens. She is horribly predictable that way; Nerdanel finds her sitting in the swing by the rose-bushes, one foot in the grass rocking her slowly forwards and backwards. Her dark robes make her pale, thinner and fainter than she ought to be. Thirty years have passed, and she is still dressed in mourning-clothes. Her eyes are stained with tears — Nerdanel wonders how she has tears left to cry.
And yet of course she is beautiful. It is a delicate, bone-sharp beauty; a fragile, hurt beauty. The beauty of a poet. The beauty a ceramic statue. She looks up sharply at her guest, her little coral-red mouth a perfect o of surprise. Ever she is easy to read, her face showing emotion as easily as light passing through glass. In another life she had been awful at cards.
Nerdanel wants now to touch her. It is not a gradual awakening, though her heart has pulled gently at her since the moment of their parting; it is the sudden roar of starved beast. She can feel the ghosts of Indis under her fingers; her silken hair, her soft cheeks, the curve of her ribcage just above her waist. She can taste the cherry-sweetness of those days, when the little affair between them had been the worst transgression either of them could imagine. If she shuts her eyes she will see Indis nude and lounging on the marital bed her husband had abandoned, provocation and statement and folly.
Good morning, that Indis says. Nerdanel does not answer her.
The Indis in front of her does not bother with such things. “I saw smoke,” she says, “in the north.”
“I came to Formenos,” Nerdanel steps forward, drawing level to the roses. Scarlet and red. They smell lovely, of course. Everything here must. “I cleaned the old house. All their rooms. The forge. The treasury. The great doors.”
Finwë had fallen there, by the doors, broken and cast down cruelly onto the ground. And there he had bled out, and when his body was taken the blood had stayed, and none retuned to the fortress. That blood Nerdanel thought she had seen, a great shadow on the brick foundation. That blood she had washed out with water enough to rival the tears of Nienna.
“And then,” Indis says, softly.
“And then,” Nerdanel says, “I burned it.”
“You were not inside,” Indis says. She blinks hard and seems to swallow around something in her throat, and Nerdanel sees, suddenly, another cause for her tears. Such a thought had not even entered her mind, though now she sees its power; sees her own wanderings as a sign of some ill thing to come, some new ruin. Of her own departure, burning with her house.
But something about it sits bitter, sits lonely. She had seen Indis only sporadically this past year; had left of her own choice, her heart weary and heavy with sorrow, to chase after answers that would not satisfy her. And yet—
“You did not go,” she accuses.
Indis laughs, and it is sharp. Hollow. “Who am I,” she says, “to keep free elves from making their own choices? Who am I quench any fire at all?”
The wave of Nerdanel’s own bitterness crashes against the shore and recedes, leaving behind only guilt. It is a stupid little feeling; it wiggles pitifully as fish stranded behind on the stand. Her throat burns, and she tells herself that it had only been the smoke.
“Indis,” she says, and Indis cries.
It is a practiced cry. She hunches in on herself, her thin shoulders held high and rigid as though to trap it inside of her ribcage. Her hands are fists, holding on tightly to the wires of the swing.
“Indis,” Nerdanel says again. She herself cannot cry, but now she falls onto her knees. In her hands she takes Indis’s ankle, her slender, pale calf, perfectly soft to the touch. Indis’s little cold foot presses against her hip, the toes curled in.
“Go if you must,” Indis chokes out, and repeats, as though stuck on the words, their pride ruined by her tears and the fragility of her posture, “who am I to keep you?”
“Love,” Nerdanel says, unsure of the word even as she hears it in her own voice, “I needed it clean. I needed it gone.”
Indis wipes her face with the back of her hand. A stray eyelash, dark golden-brown, sticks to her knuckles.
“Is it better,” she asks, softening, “did it bring you what you sought?”
Nerdanel breathes in deep. The scent of roses hangs sweet in the air. Indis’s skin, so close now to her face, smells of sea-salt and oil. Soft. How soft she is.
“I know not,” she says, “but I am back, if you shall have me.”
Indis looks down at her. The corner of her lips twists up, caught between tenderness and irony. The turn of her thoughts is so plain Nerdanel wonders if she hears it in truth, through echoes their intimacy had once left in their minds. Have you! Have you! I would have had you then, but what is it to have and not to keep?
“I did not go then,” she reminds her, “and I shan’t go now.”
Then Indis bends and kisses her. It is an awkward bend, an awkward kiss. The swing sways and nearly parts them. She tastes of tears, of salt — for all her grace there is entirely too much snot in it. She winds Nerdanel’s hair around her fingers, and deep scarlet on lily-white. Nerdanel strokes her calf.
Indis leans closer, and the swing slips out from under her, careening backwards— she half-falls on top of Nerdanel, and the seat hits her on the shoulder. “Yes,” she says, through something that is either a laugh or a sob, “fool I may be, but not fool to let go.”