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Sometimes, Finrod was taken aback by just how dark Andreth’s house was at night. Nargothrond was a city of lamps (one of which sat on a table in her study, even now) that shone white, golden, green, blue at all hours of the day and night, illuminating tapestries and murals and carvings. Not once did total darkness ever touch the halls of Nargothrond.
And there were times, times when Rána was full and the skies cloudless, times when Vása unveiled her noontide splendor, when Finrod was deceived, and thought himself somewhere else, transported to a time before grief first touched him. The deception was momentary, of course. No one who had seen the Trees, and loved them, could be deceived thus for long. Finrod did not deceive easily.
(Once, when she was small, Finduilas had asked him what the difference was between Treelight and the light she knew. “The difference between a candle flame and a fire,” he told her. Finduilas nodded seriously, satisfied with the answer. Andreth asked him the same thing, many years later, and Finrod’s answer—the same as he’d given to his niece—only provoked a hailstorm of questions that occupied them both for hours.)
But here, take away the daylight and there was only candles, the fire in the hearth, the lamp he had given her gleaming blue and red and gold, just that to keep the darkness at bay. It was the same feeling Finrod got when Rána vanished from sight, obscured by its waning or by clouds—he was foundering in a sea of night. He knew few among the Calaquendi who were fond of such deep shadows.
Andreth, though, Andreth navigated the dusk of her home with ease, though her eyes were the weaker. She who had never known either eternal light or that darkness that seems without reprieve, the night brought her no unease. “Danger comes for us in both day and night,” Andreth once told him, her lips pursed in a considering look. “I’ve never seen much use in being warier of the night than the day.” It was still a little startling to be reminded of.
He watched her search round the room, looking for some book or scroll, and caught himself smiling slightly. She seemed happier than she did when they spoke of the Valar or of Aegnor (the latter could not be helped, and neither could the former, sometimes, when she persisted in believing lies and half-truths, but he would have spared her distress, if he could), untroubled as he had almost forgotten she could be. These were happier times, when they debated topics that did not hurt either of them, and Andreth debated with a lively gleam in her eyes instead of a defensive note ringing desperate and sharp in her voice.
It would have been interesting to sit her down with the sages of Tirion, even if only to debate the most mundane of topics. She had asked, once or twice, about the sages, Rúmil and his compatriots. Sometimes, unguarded, Finrod imagined her there, but there he was, imagining things he had no power to grant, things that could not be. What place, he asked himself, did one of the Edain have in the lands of the deathless?
But then, she turned, her loose, dark hair swaying in the air. A smile sat poised upon her lips. The lamplight caught on her, washing over her skin, shining in her brown eyes until they seemed to burn like a candle flame, and Finrod’s mouth ran dry.
There it was, again. She always looked the same, her face lined or smooth, her hair graying or untouched by frost, she looked time-worn and deathless all at once, and…
Andreth’s smile turned to a frown. She crossed the room swiftly, pressed her warm fingertips to the back of his hand. “My Lord?” she prompted, her voice sharp even in uncertainty. “My Lord, are you well?”
Finrod waved her off, shaking his head jerkily back and forth. “I am well, Andreth. The road was hard; that is all.”
Andreth quirked an eyebrow as she sat down in the chair opposite him. “I wasn’t aware Elves could get saddle-sore. Especially Elven kings,” she said dryly.
Finrod smiled brightly back, grateful for the out. “An affliction none can escape, I am afraid. You had said you had a question?”
“Yes,” she murmured, poring over her book. “You told me that when you first encountered my people, you learned their language by reading the language of their hearts. What, exactly…” She paused, running her finger over some line. Finrod leaned closer, trying to see what it was she saw there, but a few loose tendrils of his hair brushed her forehead, and she leaned back and snapped the book shut. “What, exactly,” and her deep voice was just a touch choked, “did you mean by that?”
Finrod tilted his head to one side. “Exactly what I said. When we strove for common words and faltered, I read in their minds what they could not put into speech.”
She smiled, and it wasn’t a smile he’d seen there before, more remote than angry, inquisitive, always too-close Andreth seemed capable of. It pulled jagged round the edges. “How easy it must have been for you.”
There had been the shadow in their minds and their hearts, in Bëor’s, just as there was in the Noldor. Finrod had not laid hands on his mother’s kin, would not set foot on those ill-gotten ships, but somehow the shadow had dove within him and taken root in the hollow of his chest, spreading tendrils outwards. To see the same thing in them, he had recoiled, and only with great effort could he carry on uniting word with meaning. “You disapprove?”
“Such knowledge stays with you better when it is earned.”
“Perhaps, but your people were hungry and frightened and over-awed, and the Laiquendi clamored for me to remove them, and surely you can see the need for haste, Andreth.”
She raised a hand to her forehead, to smooth out the lines that would surely returned when she frowned or laughed or wept. Her fingernails paused over her hairline, worrying at the strands. “But do you understand the lesson?” she asked insistently, while all the while dappled light played over her face.
There was something else there, something underneath it. The minds of the Edain were like open doors even when they sought to close them and the Eldalië sought not to walk through. Her distress was like iron on his tongue. Finrod reached forwards, grasped Andreth’s hand in his own. “Andreth, what is in your heart to leave you so unsettled?”
Distress was forgotten for a moment as bright, angry inquisitiveness took its place. Finrod remembered—he’d not paid her much mind when she had been his brother’s lover, had not thought much except to pity her the pain he knew she must have felt. It had been years later, when they called her wise, that he had sought her out in curiosity, and she had worn this face when he first spoke to her, years past. For a moment, she looked young and old all at once. “You cannot search my mind to learn it yourself?” she challenged.
She was angry; no amount of mind-walking was needed to see that. Anger came on Andreth suddenly, or at least it did when she was with him. “Andreth…” Tones that were meant to be gentle came out weary, weary, perhaps, of not knowing what to do to ease that anger. “…Not when it is not necessary.”
She let out a strangled laugh. “Then tell me, at least, what you learned when you looked within my forbearer’s minds—beyond speech.”
He was spirit bound to flesh, bound to the earth, doomed to linger there until the earth broke, and beyond that, Finrod did not know what would become of him. The years would grow so long, and he so tired of them all, that perhaps when Arda finally split in two, he would welcome the chance to slide into nothingness, just to escape his weariness. But she was flesh and spirit bound together, bound to nothing, a stranger to the world, there but not a part of it, and when she died, that was it. She would be gone. They would all be gone, and go to a place Finrod could not name, could not see, could not reach. Sometimes, he wished he knew. He wished that, so that he could end her fear (and his, barely acknowledged even to himself), and maybe, so he could see her there, again.
The Quendi did not love but once, or so they said, but that had turned out not to be true, and it was no more true of the Edain. The Edain lived short lives often cut even shorter, and there you found often one bereft of their mate. Some pined for the rest of their days; some flitted to their next lover like a butterfly; many mourned for a good long time, then put their mourning away and lived again. Perhaps, he and her… But no. There was Amarië, leaning back against Laurelin’s golden trunk, laughing, goading him, suffused with light under the Trees. There was Aegnor, body withering while his spirit flared, wrath overtaking reason, screaming ‘til his voice ran out, hacking at enemies as though each one he felled was the phantom that had dogged Andreth all her life. There was Andreth, lips curling in a snarl when he overstepped his bounds, eyes gleaming over-bright and a lump forming in her throat when he touched upon some subject that cut her to the quick. There were his own words—high purpose of Doom, high purpose of Doom—those words that he still believed, he must believe, and even if he did not, how could he deny Andreth Aegnor and then offer himself in his brother’s stead? There was the Doom, that shadow that touched all the Noldor, and his knowing that if he entangled her in it any more than she already was, he was no friend of hers, not at all.
A child of Bëor’s people taught him a song not after they met. The words escaped Finrod, one by one by one, but there was a line that stuck, in amidst the jumble—the light is waning far too fast.
And finally, there was the image in his mind’s eye, that which first came to him as a dream and then returned again and again at odd moments, when the wind blew over Talath Dirnen at night or when a distant strain of song was heard—her, of no age in particular, sitting alone in a soot-black house while shadows swirled at her feet, and wolves howled at her door.
He smiled, and said thickly, “Much that passes beyond understanding.”