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One, two, three.
Three knocks on the door. From the outside, not from the antechamber; quick, but controlled in their briskness, in the fashion of people who know well their manners and proprieties.
Not Curufinwë. Curufinwë would not knock.
He picks his hand up, off the pillows and off the blanket, rings the bell at his bedside.
Not Findaráto either, for the visitor walks over the carpet of the antechamber in light, measured steps, without the omnipresent clicking of jewellery and fine ornament. Not Laureo, whose brisk pace would cross the antechamber in half the time.
One, two, three.
Three knocks on his bedroom door.
Three breaths, watching the golden orioles painted between the stone arches over his head, dead birds with songless mouths and flightless wings. During the first, he hesitates; during the second, he ponders whether he couldn’t simply tell the visitor to turn around and go fuck himself with whatever trivial matter has been brought to his door in this grey un-dawn, in the twilight of marble. The third, he holds in his chest for a few seconds longer, feels out the tightness of the skin wrapping over his pectoral and down his ribcage, and then lets it go.
“Settle down, Árasúrë,” he commands the eagle perched by the other side of the bed, and to his squire behind the door -- because he knows it is him, new and eager and unfailingly polite in the way he tiptoes around the prince’s bed waiting to offer any kind of service that is demanded of him for a scrap of praise – he says, “Come in.”
And he closes his eyes, needing not to look to know how the scene unravels.
One, two, three steps.
It is pheasant, today, that arrives warm on the silver platter as Ennaringwë toes his way into the bedroom, and pastries flavoured with almonds, and oranges not yet sliced and hollowed out, for all he can smell on the air is their leathery skin fresh from the green-leaved branch. A little pepper and rosemary somewhere on the meat, though not as much as he’d like. A little porridge flavoured with figs, in case the almonds were not to his tastes. His faithful squire (he has been in his service for a sparse few months of mandatory, long-suffered bedrest, and he is faithful like a hound to heel, such are the children Valariandë has been birthing for their sake) arranges it all by his bedside so very carefully before he returns briefly to the antechamber to fill the carafe with fresh, cold water, although he is never gone for long and returns before Huan could fully awake to pace around the bed in languid curiosity of worldly affairs. He is no stranger to pheasant, of course.
Tyelkormo indulges the hound, though. His fingers don’t struggle with the skewer overmuch today.
He eats. Not because he is hungry, but because the rosemary smells good enough to entice him, and the pheasant is lean and crisp even though it is a bloodless kind of meat whose mildness betrays the snare, and he would much rather have deer or horse or a knife that can stab carving lines along the inside of his mouth which would sing, glutting themselves on life and the inevitable and the richness of their own existence. He eats, because Findaráto is hospitable enough to open his coffers and garland them with kingly offerings as though he was not the elder, as though it was not an insult to taste mercy among the almonds and have it turn bitter on his tongue.
Ennaringwë is talking about something, but he cannot will himself to pay any attention.
He eats. The orange drips with juice when it is carved in two. Inside, it is scarlet, and bleeds almost like real flesh when his teeth dig into it.
Later, Mírëasto arrives to aid him with Árasúrë’s meal, for the eagle might have lost his down, but he nonetheless becomes distraught at the first tender pangs of hunger. The huntsman slices lean rabbit meat into slivers while the prince slides a glove over the sleeve of his silk shirt and does not shudder, anymore, when the eyes see rough leather brushing skin and the skin itself feels none of it; he whistles and chirps reassurances in the raptor’s own voice, commending his growing strength as beak and talons rip eagerly into the raw meat, and watches the creature preen instead of watching the varied personage that mills through his rooms as the grey light turns to gold. Mírëasto alone catches his elbow when he notices his liege’s shoulder sagging beneath the weight and helps him guide Árasúrë back upon the perch. But Mírëasto cannot stay, even though at any other time he could not leave.
Maids come and go, pick up fallen pillows and empty dishes, wash the basins and carafes. The apothecary and the chirurgeon bring another silver platter, and Ennaringwë runs back and forth without pause as he summons black silks and velvets for the prince’s court dress, black braids flying in a continuous flurry of activity.
By the time the chirurgeon has him stretch his arms to work some give into the scar tissue, he is beginning to think this all quite tiresome.
He could order them to leave, of course. He has the authority -- not only by seniority and rank, but by birthright itself. He could bark out a word of command and have them all scatter from his rooms like so many fretful mice, sending silver cups ringing as they fall in the wake of their robes trailing in flight, unable to resist the authority in which his very spirit wreaths itself. He could order his squire to drop the hose he has brought him and kick them to the side like a rag, to run to the council chambers and bring him Laureo at once so that he does not suffer another hand carding a brush through his hair. He could order them to cast the glassware to the ground just to hear it shatter, to bring him a real golden oriole from one of the subterranean orchards and slaughter it in his bed so he can eat a piece of raw flesh like his kept eagle did. It would not even be very difficult; he is a prince and a general; he is Beleriand’s deadliest rider, blessed of Oromë, Curufinwë Fëanáro’s brilliant son. He has bid Balrogs to halt and been obeyed.
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t care for the complaints of the court, for the servants that would have to crowd the room to replace his bloody blanket and sweep up the broken shards, the incessant human noise of concern where otherwise there would be song streaming in from the windows--
Of course, his room does not have windows. They are all only painted.
He considers the oriole for a long time while the chirurgeon instructs him to exercise his leg. It makes the aches a little more bearable.
They dress him for the court, today. Findaráto has requested it. Not demanded; he has not demanded anything since they arrived in Narrostoron, not when he first regained consciousness enough to keep his sight focused on a face that he can recognise for longer than a few moments and not after that. When his squire talks of the request, he can almost see his cousin’s blue eyes, downturned with an incalculable storm of half-admitted grief amid the black silk that suits him so well and yet so poorly. Tyelkormo decides to humour him, more out of boredom than genuine desire, and allows himself to be dressed.
The shirt is silk, embroidered with scrolls of laurels in so much intricate blackwork. One of those that Findaráto has ordered made for him; there are falcons perched among the leaves with beaks as pointed as a needle and wings lightly lifted in preparation for flight. Very light -- yet his squire and grooms manoeuvre it so delicately, so fearfully around his arms that he almost wants to lash them like he never would his stallion for the sin of unasked-for tenderness against skin that cannot sense an inch of it. It is times like these that he most direly misses his sword.
The hose are dark doeskin. He recognises the wool as one of Morifinwë’s imports, some of the best in all of Valariandë. The weave is tight and smooth, almost like satin. It feels like a knife against the lines of fresh scars on his leg, and he welcomes it eagerly.
The doublet, of course, is silk and scanty, sleeves barely hanging onto their points and a collar yawning like a ravine until it is pinned tentatively shut with the brooch of a mithril falcon and heart of ruby, bleeding dead, cold stone. They hesitate to lace even this meagre garment tight enough for comfort, but Tyelkormo commands them for once, and thus soon enough he sits in his chair, enduring the ministrations of Ennaringwë pulling his boots over the brace on his leg with its strings laced tightly enough to show exactly how much tough muscle the bed behind his back has stolen away from his stomach. Morbidly enough, the sight reminds him of his brother.
The robe is black velvet, roped with strands of delicate silver tracery around the slit sleeves, and soft black sable on the inside of its folds, on its large collar. It is the style the court has taken to wearing en masse in the past months -- Narrostoron is never cold, but something of the outside chill must have seeped in, something of the yawning emptiness of familiar chambers suddenly bare of life. As he permits the grooms to offer him its sleeves, Huan already perched by his left flank to catch him if his leg falters, he allows his mind to take him to sable-hunting instead, the fine work of curing such delicate leather without disturbing the fur’s volume and lustre, how the shrewd mustelids with their sibilant voices know to be on the lookout of the hunter who smells like leather and dead things, yet cannot escape the eagle’s grasp. In Þondórië, there were seasons when they used to hunt them with such ease that he had a cloak lined with ermine that trailed the floor by winter’s end, all his height notwithstanding--
“Herunya, Aran Findaráto has sent a missive just now,” Ennaringwë’s voice pierces through all that without warning, clear and youthful and very serious for a boy who could still slip through a moderately large murderhole if he weren’t wearing a rondel. “He requests that you join him in council to discuss allocating resources to the replenishing of Narrostoron’s armouries.”
Pushing his arm through the remainder of his sleeve, Tyelkormo nods, finding a little note of satisfaction in the fact that his distaste hasn’t immediately made him bare his teeth.
“I suppose I cannot simply tell him to sell some of his gilded tack and saddles to resolve the issue,” he states dryly.
The sable rests softly against his shoulders, still supple, though there is a little staleness about the hairs on the split sleeves.
Ennaringwë notices this, and immediately rushes to dust him off. “I do not think it is disallowed--”
“Nothing is disallowed.” The prince looks him in the eye, knife-sharp with the tight, derisive line of his mouth making every word a thorn. “But Ingoldo will argue, as I have yet to see him fail to do. And if his councillors get into it, then we shall be standing there, not like soldiers but like cocks by a wedding bed, near until sunset. Perhaps past it.”
The squire says nothing to that, though he also does not bother to hide his grimace, and that speaks more than words could ever hope to.
Tyelkormo allows him to arrange the rondel and the beads on his belt in a satisfactory manner -- visible, but not ostentatious -- before sitting again, and does not press the issue. The squire will not dwell on it. Already, his hands are busy laying out Tyelkormo’s chain of office on the sable, and it does not take long for his eyes to gloss over with the harmless fascination for the material and the methodical that he so adores sinking his teeth into.
“Will you have gloves today, Herunya?” he asks, turning briefly to see the servants tidying up his liege’s blankets. “Hairnet, or braids?”
Considering the question as a matter of necessity, Tyelkormo runs his fingers down the sable lining. This is not a new robe, though the style is recent, merely one remade in new fashions in the absence of time. A few sparse hairs cling to the pad of his middle finger as he withdraws his hand, and then drags it down the velvet as though to compare, or else search for skin that isn’t yet senseless.
“I will have the gloves,” he hears himself say, pulling a long hair from the sharp folds.
It slips loose, glittering golden, and its end curls into a perfect ringlet two spans away from his grasp.
Tyelkormo’s hair does not curl. The robe is, has always been too long for Findaráto, who is shorter than he even in his finest pattens.
And he -- and he is a fool, for not recognising it sooner. Blessed, and blind, and deaf, and choked up on ash in spite of it--
Leaden, though his head spins as though weightless, the way he stumbles about for a place to fall into that would fit him. He covers his face with his sleeve and regrets like a chasm, because he can suddenly smell Angaráto on every inch of the fine velvet, and Angaráto is dead and he has thought nothing of it, languishing about in talks of royal coffers and suggestions of casual brutality, for all that he knows that there is not enough blood in the world to fill the holes hollowed out by the faces of the dead, as the pyre burns out a mark that cannot be mended. He has known it the moment the robe was presented to him, of course, his heart has known it, and his mind still turned away when it had no image of a pyre to find recourse in other than the strip of poisonous scarlet that lingered on the horizon for endless, lightless days like a new darkness, because the mind is in and of itself a coward that hearkens to rationality like a child to the protection of its mother, not yet knowing that her own world is a small and narrow thing. It cannot bear the existence of a precipice even as it builds its fortresses on cliffs.
And the mind is in and of itself so inherently fallible -- there is nothing that can rationalise away the hole of that absence, lies do not cover it, filthy things, apathy only distracts the eye. It would shred itself to ribbons rather than admit that it is falling, and yet fall regardless.
The uncertainty of certainty rises up and swallows him like a wave. It is a terrible time for the salty waters to rush forth and take him under in the riptide, though he has been bloody for centuries, but they have bound themselves to terrible things.
Narrostoron is a cage tighter around his lungs than broken ribs.
Someday, he’ll die in a cage, and he knows that he’ll die last. He did not know it was going to be such a heavy sacrifice in the moment of forfeiture. He did not know anything.
Someone is grabbing his shoulder. He shoves the body away, harshly.
“Leave me.” A breath wheezes through his barred teeth against the floor, against the dead weight of helpless mithril, against the worthless pallid hands that have no right to grasp after him unscarred and unbloodied and concerned, yet slick with the manufactured kindness of courtiers that can aid no more than it can wound, like hounds without teeth that yap and catch only air.
A thin voice is talking over his head, Sindarin, northern inflections, and there is another hand--
The eagle screeches behind his back, high and mournful--
“Herunya, are you well? Do you need--”
“Should we call for Nelmalós? I’ll go and--”
Shadows flit over him, scattered amidst the reflections--
“No, you should sit, Herunya--”
They grasp him by the shoulders, they push him to his chair, he does not want the chair, he does not want their hands, he would rip them apart if they did not dart out of the way.
He bares his teeth like a wild, mad thing until something in his windpipe crackles.
“Leave! Get out, get the fuck out!” he says -- his throat thrums as though he were shouting, he is shouting, the hands withdraw and the carpet against his bare skin ought to be rougher than the nothing he finds. “Get the fuck out, now!”
And they scatter, hard pattens and soft-soled boots clamouring on the ground like a troop at a rout, like the cacophony of Angamando’s drumming legions, shaking that terrible, silent earth in their wake.
When the ground has stopped shivering, he sinks to his knees.
The earth is hard. It hurts.
And it doesn’t.
He has sworn--
He has sworn so many oaths. He cannot keep them all.
The golden oriole painted upon the ceiling continues to spread its wings for a flight it’ll never take, eyes glittering, poised over scattered oranges and broken pastries it will never see. It does not even know what it is missing, never having been.
There was a lake in the west of the highlands in which they used to swim, Rimil’s heart-spring, and it had the coldest, clearest waters in all of Valariandë -- not mist-haunted and not glass-black, but bright in starlight and blue under the sunlit sky. If the summer was warm, they could spend the entire morning diving back and forth between foreboding depth and breaking surface, and if they could not forgive each other they could at least forget their barbed enmities for as long as it takes cold-seized lungs to unfurl again and breathe, and that was more than all the promises of eventuality in the world. If they all lay on the green grass in the sun afterwards, looking up, they could forget for a few moments more. Tyelkormo had never been one much given to forgiveness and omission, but in a moment of strange mercy he would not deny it to his cousin if it meant that they would close their eyes to the light and listen to the Rimil singing, flush with the youthful gratitude that engraves every memory upon the fëa twice as deep. He would not deny him the briefest world in which they were not deadly, blasphemous, bitter, doomed.
In the end, he hadn’t visited Angaráto for twenty years before the fire.
He would not deny him anything ever again, save perhaps the forgiveness he cannot ever have.
Can one resent the dead for their absence?
Curufinwë had asked him that, once, too wine-drunk for sound reason or fair mood. He had meant Ilcalanis, for he had been turning the ring hanging on his neck with nervous fingers at the time, but he could have as well meant anyone else -- Fëanáro, Finwë, Ambarto, Írissë, all those they’ve left for the fire to swallow and hoped their arms and accoutrements would be enough of an offering for the pyre. Tyelkormo cannot remember what he had answered.
Can he dig his fingers any deeper into the black earth? Can he demand a knife sharp enough to cut a hole around his heart so he could excise the tar from the flame like seeds from a pomegranate, like arrowheads from red aching flesh, to cauterise the edges around filthy regret that seeps like poison through every conspicuous empty space in every crowd?
He clasps the sable tighter to his chest and breathes into the collar until the air seems ice-cold against the back of his throat and his head begins to spin. He rips into it with his teeth until velvet and fur cling to his tongue in disgusting wet clumps, and the taste of death is so heavy in his mouth that he wants to retch.
There is no knife sharp enough for what he needs it to do. The veins and arteries, the delicate nerves are too tangled up in each other, and his hands too heavy and nerveless to try. There has never been such a knife.
There is only the cold ground, and the little warmth of Huan’s back pressing into his, and the silence pounding in great rushing waves through the gaping hole he has torn through his ribs in a desperate plea to let it go somewhere, anywhere, anywhere in the world but here.
A long time passes.
Tyelkormo’s hands get tired. Not quickly, but the muscle is wasted and cannot clutch at the robe until nightfall. He lets it go.
The taste of dead fur and silk moulders on his tongue. He spits out the wet, ruined collar.
The ground gets cold. He rises, one limb after another, and crawls towards the chair to rest his head against the upholstered seat, where the hard ground doesn’t knock against his skull with every shiver.
He rings the silver bell and summons Laureo from whatever provincial council he is picking his teeth in in his own place and he does not care for the complaints sure to follow from the court. He will go to Findaráto and his chamberlain -- he will go, gaunt and stiff and red-eyed with his hair strewn loose over his shoulders, in crumpled silks direly in need of steaming, without adornment save the brooch of the falcon and the golden eagle carried on his captain’s arm, but he will go, he will go. He must go.
It is the only thing he knows.
He’s never been good at grief.