Chapter Text
She moved through the hallways of the palace like a ghost, trailing after her husband, and her children, and her father-in-law, blood on her dress and face and hands, which belonged to a construct that had taken the face of her husband for years while she, the worst wife in Valinor, saw nothing at all.
They were deep in the family wing – not the one where Anairë lived now, but the old one, where Finwë’s children had been raised, where the nursery was hung with a bounty of tapestries, and the workshop in which they had been made sat still and empty.
The palace had been designed in the expectation that Míriel Serindë would raise many children here, and she had not.
Finwë brought Nolofinwë to his childhood bedroom, and the healers hurriedly clustered ‘round. The palace healers had two chiefs, both trained by Estë herself, one of whom had seen the birth of all Indis’s children, and all Anairë’s too, and the other of whom had been a dedicated follower of Míriel, and did not usually deign to speak to them. Tonight, both had emerged, and they worked in concert but in relative silence, as Finwë placed a hand on her husband’s shoulder and spoke on his behalf to their children.
Anairë caught the story of what had happened in bits and fragments, the implications of Fëanáro’s shouted words sinking in at last. He had tried to warn them, and none of them had believed him, and all the while, her husband had been out in the darkness, being tortured and clinging onto life in desperate hope.
“I wanted nothing more than to live to return among you,” Finwë said, on his son’s behalf. He seemed very natural in this, and Anairë wondered which of his children it was who had taken so long to learn the guarding of the mind for this skill to be innate. Fëanáro, probably. Nolvo always kept his mind very guarded.
And, of course, that was in part how she had failed to see it. If they had been the sort of couple to sink into each other and dissolve into a single person, like Fëanáro and Nerdanel had once been, he never could have gotten away with it.
Nolofinwë knew their children well, and as the healers began to examine him more closely, he caught which ones were most plainly distressed and ordered them away. Findekáno was sent first, for he had looked pale and wan since the valley, when Nolofinwë had looked between them, and could have opened his mind to either, and had correctly decided that Findekáno deserved more of his trust and faith than Anairë did. Írissë went next, sent to seek out Lalwen and determine what help she needed in arranging something resembling defences in Tirion. That was wise too; Írissë needed to feel useful, just as Findekáno needed to rest in the company of someone who could steady him.
“She ought to be put to bed,” Finwë said, which was no doubt Nolvo’s dismissal of Turukáno, who had been nearly as quiet as Anairë all this time.
“Of course,” Elenwë said, agreeably, which was never a good sign, “but you should hold her first.”
“If you feel able,” Turukáno amended, moderatingly, but Elenwë hardly waited for Nolofinwë’s tentative nod before passing Itarillë into her grandfather’s waiting arms.
He looked down at her like she was the most precious thing he had ever seen, the way he had looked at all their children, and her mind overlaid it with the image of Sauron, with just the same expression on his face, but he’d been wearing jewels, not scarred and naked save for the unadorned shift he had been wearing under his borrowed robes. Sauron’s hair was not limp and greying, and he had spoken beautifully of his joy at being a grandfather.
Her husband said nothing, would never say anything again, unless he sought the comforts of death for some time, but Finwë said, “thank you,” with a distinct tearfulness in his voice.
“Of course,” said Turukáno, matching it despite the stoicism of his expression. Elenwë squeezed his arm comfortingly.
“I can take Itarillë if you want to stay, love.”
“If I may,” interrupted Fúmellanis, the Indissian healer, “I think it might be best if I could speak with Prince Nolofinwë in private a moment. Please feel free to invite whichever person or people you would like to stay and interpret for you, if you so desire, or else I may fetch a slate. I would like to discuss some more private matters you may not wish heard by all ears.”
That was a wife’s duty, and yet her husband looked to his father, and she could hardly blame him.
“I will wait outside,” she heard herself say, but the other chief healer said,
“It might be best if you would come with us, Lady Rehtaniel. There are also some things we should discuss in private.”
She looked to Nolvo, trying to gauge if he wanted her to stay, but he would not meet her eyes.
There was still blood on her, dried now. Perhaps she was not well at all. “As you say,” she agreed, and followed her out.
--
Another healer met them in the healer’s wing proper, her seniority to everyone save the two chiefs marked in red at her collar. Her name, she told Anairë before she began, was Elenis, and she did what needed to be done while her superior paid little mind, taking her dirty clothes and cleaning away the blood, checking for any signs of injury, or, worse, pregnancy.
“I would know,” Anairë said, but who knew of such things? They said Elwë-king had married a maia, by will or ensorcellement, but if he had any children by her, no word had been delivered.
“I see no sign of it,” Elenis agreed, in the end, “but there are certain herbs used to clear the womb when pregnancies go awry, which we knew of at Cuiviénen, if you wish to be certain.”
She did not seem old enough to remember Cuiviénen, but such things could be deceiving. Perhaps she was simply reborn rather than journeyed.
“Must I decide tonight?”
“Sooner is better,” Elenis said, “but no, not tonight. I will consult you again under Laurëlin.”
The chief healer came back then. Anairë wished she could remember her name, but they had rarely met. Her usual duties included the health of the city, and probably Fëanáro’s boys, but not anyone else in the royal family.
“I have some questions for you,” she said, and they were hard, but at first they were necessary, Anairë knew, even if the shame of it made her want to sink into the ground.
“If there was any compulsion,” Elenis said, from where she now perched on a stool at the back of the room, “I find no trace of it now.” Though they were far apart, she was running the gentle fingers of her spirit across Anairë’s mind, as Anairë might have combed her fingers through Nolofinwë’s smooth hair, before.
That should have been good news, but the chief healer only looked on Anairë with terrible suspicion. “And you say you sensed no change in your marriage bond? None at all?”
“He was more closed off when he was away, but nothing when he returned – when Sauron came. Nothing was different.”
“I see,” she said. “And was the sex different?”
That wasn’t worth picturing. Elenis, whose mind was still close to hers, said, “hold to this moment, Princess Anairë. You are not there.”
And the chief said, “It is known by the will of the Valar that níssi who experience sexual contact outside the marriage bond in this way may fade, as is perfectly normal.”
“Is this what fading feels like? I do not feel entirely well, but I do not want to go.”
“No,” Elenis began, but the chief raised her hand.
“I should have said fading is common amongst those who do not wish or allow the conduct. One who willed this touch would not fade. Of course, if you do feel the call, Lórien is an option.”
There was something vaguely sickening about her words, about the implication that if Anairë did not wish to die, then she must have been a willing confederate, and even gentle Elenis shot a glance at her supervisor.
“I do not want to go,” Anairë repeated, rather helplessly.
“I see,” said the chief, and there was a cruelty in her smile then. “In that case, I do think we should continue our examination.”
“I-”
The knock at the door was polite but demanding, and the chief held up a hand, stepping out and shutting the examination room door to speak to whoever had come to ask her help at this time of night.
Or perhaps they had not come for help. Perhaps they had come to see about Anairë, and were speaking of her even now. She met the eyes of the remaining healer, and her mind along with them.
“My amilessë is Hyalindë,” Elenis said, paper-hearted, over-sensitive, too easily wounded by others. It was a name for the sort of person who felt suffering very deeply. Then, pressing a finger to her lips, she cracked the door open.
“No, I have not seen him,” the chief said. “I trust he will turn up; this is a strange evening for us all.”
“You have left my brother for now?”
Fëanáro, come to have a report from the healer who would tell him things he should not know, no doubt.
“I have stepped out with Rehtaniel.”
“And is she well?” Was that a touch of genuine concern in his voice? Not concern for her privacy, certainly.
With a similar lack of concern, the chief said, “these are difficult circumstances for all the Indissians, of course. Particularly those in Aracáno’s family. Those who were not aware of the creature in their midst will no doubt be deeply wounded by its presence. And we must yet eliminate the possibility that there are some who were aware.”
This was not merely a cruelty directed at her. This was a coup. They would send her away, and her children, and probably Nolvo too, and Fëanáro would have everything he had ever wanted and be the hero of the story too. Anairë was going to kill them.
“How could you find out?” Fëanáro asked, apparently willing to engage in this fiction that any of them had known. Damn him.
“I could not be definitive,” the chief said. “It would be best, perhaps, for those most affected to be sent to Lórien preemptively, to be assessed there.”
This was a bad mis-play. Even Anairë knew it, by the dangerous power that lingered in Fëanáro’s voice when he said, “you mean to send her away to Lórien?”
He was being offered everything he had ever wanted on a platter, and he didn’t appear to have noticed. Nolvo – and Sauron, she supposed – had always said that Fëanáro had terrible political instincts. Just now, she was horribly grateful for them.
“It would be best for her, I think.”
Now was the time to make her move, before Fëanáro could be talked around into realizing that he wanted Anairë to meet Míriel’s fate. Her clothes were gone, even her shift, but she wrapped the sheet hurriedly about herself and stepped out into the room and said, as if she had not been listening in, “Fëanáro, what are you doing here at this time of night? You must be exhausted.”
He looked… relieved to see her? Beyond a quick confused darting of his eyes, he didn’t pay much mind to her state of undress. At some other time, she might have laughed at the revelation that Fëanáro cared as little about her garb as he did about his own, showing up to meetings in soot-stained aprons as he often had.
“I seem to have misplaced Tyelkormo. The other boys are all in their rooms – and your Findekáno too, Maitimo got him to sleep.”
They had done this before, years and years ago, when all three families came to stay in the palace for special occasions and at the end of the night all the adults – and later Maitimo, Findekáno and Makalaurë too – would be running around trying to pin down where all their troublesome and overtired children had wandered off to. Anairë was sure at least once she had come to Fëanáro to announce that Telufinwë was asleep on top of Arakáno, or some such thing, and she was going to leave them there for the night, because they looked too precious not to. He had not been kind to her, even then, but there had been a certain solidarity between them. All that had fallen away later.
All that had fallen away after Melkor began inserting himself as a friend among their people, and none of them had even noticed.
“Nolvo sent Írissë to occupy herself helping Lalwen. I would not be shocked to find Tyelkormo had tagged along.”
He nodded in acknowledgement, tense shoulders relaxing. “And how are you? Hwindissë was suggesting you were considering Lórien?”
Here was the play. Bold, normally he would take offense, but these were strange times. Already this day, she had seen him stand to defend Nolvo, not only from Sauron but also from Finwë. “And leave this house short a weaver? Not tonight, I think.”
He did not look immediately furious, which was good, but his actual response was not entirely what she had been hoping for either. “You weave?”
Only Fëanáro. “Who do you think taught Nolvo? For that matter, who do you think made the birth tapestries for your eldest three?” Maitimo, who was a weaver by hobby though not by craft, had done the rest. Anairë had taught him some things too, though that had been something of a secret, even then.
He stared at her.
“You never actually looked at them, did you?” They had been a gift from Indis, after all. “That’s a shame; you would have liked them. I thought my likeness of Queen Míriel was quite good, though I was working mostly from memory.” It had been an unconventional thing, to weave someone absent into a birth tapestry, but Anairë had thought it more true than the alternative.
“You knew my mother?” It was honestly as if he had never met Anairë at all, like she had not been entirely a person to him, all this time.
“Not for long. I am not so much older than you, but I spent my first few years in Tirion, and wanted to be a weaver even then – all the children who did trailed around after her like ducklings. I do regret it now. I would have gone mad if half a dozen children had followed me all the time I was pregnant with Findekáno. But she was kind to us.”
He shuttered his eyes a second, as if trying to see the image she had offered on the back of his eyelids. Perhaps she should weave it; she could still remember how Míriel the Queen had sat at the loom in her pregnancy dresses, working on tapestries for the nursery. She had never stopped weaving, even as her spirit gave up. She had apparently said, by the end, that it was the only time she found anything meaningful at all. And then the weakness and the rest of Lórien had taken even that.
“Perhaps we should return to our examination,” Hwindissë said, apparently aware she was losing her audience.
“Is there anything left to do?” Anairë asked Elenis Hyalindë, who was still loitering by the door to the examination room.
“Nothing that must be done tonight,” she said. “If you would not like Lórien, we could ask they send a healer-maia here. Perhaps even Estë would come, under the circumstances. I do not think you are the only one who might prefer that, and so many of us could use it that I do not think it would be an unreasonable demand. Do you want a draught for sleep?”
“Not tonight, I think. Though I could use an escort, if Prince Fëanáro would oblige me?”
“I really must insist that you return to the examination room, Lady Rehtaniel.”
“Princess Anairë,” Fëanáro said, and it was not immediately clear which of them he was speaking to until he offered her his arm with the courtesy he so rarely showed any sign of.
“Thank you,” she said, to him and to Elenis, and, gathering her sheet with what dignity she could muster, led Fëanáro away from this place at a clip.