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I. Berúthiel
Arphazêl was ripped from the arms of her family without so much as a ‘By your leave.’ Such was often the fate of ladies of great families, she knew, but she had believed, naïvely, that such a fate would never be hers.
Gondor was looking to expand its borders, Gondor was becoming a conquering horde, and Umbar, on its doorstep, could hardly keep it at bay for long. There was nothing that could be done to keep Gondor out forever, but perhaps its king could be placated for a time?
‘I have no daughters,’ Arphazêl’s uncle told the emissaries, men whose faces were as carven stone, unfeeling and implacable. ‘But here is my niece, the child of my beloved sister. She is unwed. Surely your master would not object to a peace wrought with a marriage…’
Arphazêl stood silent as her future was decided in front of her. She had been taught silence sine her earliest days, silence to aid her in her dealings with cats, with great men, with the sanctity of holy places. As much as she would have liked to protest, some lessons could not be shaken off easily, or at all.
Her situation would not have been enviable even if she was not what the Gondorians called a ‘Black Númenorean.’ Arphazêl was as much a hostage as she was a bride—the living pawn used to broker a peace treaty, held hostage for her family’s good behavior. She was allowed no retainers from her own people, not even a handmaiden with whom she could speak Adûnaic if she wished. Her husband was an over-proud man who seemed scarcely able to tolerate her presence. He was away often, and for that, Arphazêl was grateful, for she loved him less than he did her. At least she would not have to live in his palace by the wharfs of Pelargir, surrounded by the stench of brackish water and rotting fish.
But she was a ‘Black Númenorean. On top of all this, the people moved gingerly about her, as though they expected her to draw a sacrificial blade from her robes and drag a hapless maid to the altar by her hair. Never mind that the Adûnaim of Umbar had fled Anadûnê for much the same reasons as the Nimruzîrim—in the last days of Anadûnê, anyone who refused to worship Morgoth was in danger being dragged to the altar, not just the Nimruzîrim.
She heard the things they called her in whispered tones. ‘Witch,’ for whom but a witch could speak to cats (Never mind that their precious Elves were supposed to be renowned for understanding the speech of animals). ‘Spy’, though Arphazêl supposed it was inevitable that a hostage-bride would be labeled such, even one who was tripping over herself to make herself agreeable to her husband’s people, and Arphazêl had not exactly made such an effort. ‘Servant of Morgoth.’ It was to laugh.
They had even found a name for her: ‘Berúthiel.’
Angry Queen, eh?
It mattered not. Arphazêl smiled slightly as a white cat slunk into her chamber and crept onto her lap. “What have you to tell me?” she crooned.
Arphazêl was one of the Adûnaim. The Men of Gondor would find a woman of her people as hard and unyielding as stone. She would not be easy to break.
II. Vidumavi
Vidumavi had never thought overmuch about going to live in Gondor when she had married her Gondorian prince. Her mother and her older sisters had all warned her what it would mean for her to wed a great man from a distant land, but she had paid them little mind. Vidumavi had never been terribly given to contemplation of the future. If her present was a good one, that was enough. It always had been.
And indeed, the present had been good for many years. Vidumavi was married to a man she loved. She and Valacar taught each other their cradle-tongues, Vidumavi in a concerted effort to make Valacar’s dealings with her people easier, and Valacar more as a game, which Vidumavi would have to suppose was the reason he always had greater ease with her language than she did with Sindarin or Westron. She had Vinitharya, and taught him to sing to her in the tongue of her people. But those years could not last.
The face her husband’s people had shown her when she first came among them was one of acceptance. She was beautiful, they said, golden as the House of Hador of old. This was good, or so Valacar told her; if the people of Gondor considered her the equal of the Edain, then it was likely that they would accept her as one of their own. When he spoke those words, Vidumavi’s longing for her homeland was already growing keen as a knife in her heart, but she nodded and smiled. If this was to be her home, she hoped that she would be loved here as she had been in the North.
But acceptance was a façade that soon gave way like rotted floorboards. It seemed that her father-in-law had given his blessing to their marriage only to keep the peace between Gondor and Rhovanion. Rómendacil ever turned a jaundiced eye on his daughter-in-law, his lips thinning at the sight of her. Though he might never say it aloud, Vidumavi was well-aware that he considered a daughter of the North utterly unequal to the role of the Lady of Gondor. He wasn’t the only one.
The Northmen who had come to Gondor with Vidumavi had liberty to speak their cradle tongue. Not Vidumavi herself. If she so much as sang a simple tune in that tongue, staring eyes would turn on her; the servants whispered aloud behind their hands, the ladies tittered, and the lords and councilors shook their heads. She could not even speak to her child, now called Eldacar, in their shared tongue without drawing disapprobation down on them both. Her attempts at Westron and Sindarin met no warmer reception, even after years of constant effort, even after Vidumavi could manage Westron without much of an accent and could even hold a (halting) conversation in Sindarin, they still treated her as though a child had greater mastery of the language than she.
They said she had diluted the blood of the royal house. They said that, thanks to her, the line of Kings would be diminished, and become ignoble. Would that Vidumavi could return home, where no one cared at all about the ‘purity’ of someone’s blood. She missed the great forests of her home, she missed her mother and her sisters, she missed being able to move about without scrutiny. But Valacar and Eldacar bore their own share of troubles, so she would stay, for their sakes.
The people of Gondor named Vidumavi ‘Galadwen,’ ‘Wood-maiden.’ Even when they gave her a name that would make her fairer in their eyes, they would not give her a name that allowed her to shake off her past. Not in their eyes. They thirsted always for reminders.
Vidumavi stared north out of Gondor, and tried to forget the way this city had become a cage for her heart.
III. Arwen
For the love of a mortal Man, doomed to die, Lúthien gave up everything that she had held dear to be with him. Her family and friends, her people, her life as a princess of Doriath, even the final resting place of her soul. Arwen was not going to live with Aragorn in an isolated house, away from the eyes of all the people of the world, but otherwise, the comparison struck true in every way.
But it was said that her love was so glad, and her heart so sure, that Lúthien was able to lay aside any fear or uncertainty regarding the future. Being her descendant, Arwen thought it likely that she would find the same peace of mine. In time. So she hoped.
The people of Gondor were not her people. Arwen had no difficulty with them, not as she feared she might. She had feared the great men of Gondor might try to block the marriage, saying that their new king would do better to marry a Gondorian lady, if he wished to strengthen his ties with that land, but there had been no such opposition. As far as the Dúnedain of both North and South were concerned, Arwen, daughter of Elrond who was brother to Elros Tar-Minyatur, was not so much an Elven lady as she was a Númenorean princess.
Arwen found that, at times, the people of Gondor looked at her with round, awestruck eyes, the kin of awe that made her skin prickle uncomfortably. But on a whole, she found them a wise, honorable people, and everything that was kind and welcoming to her.
They were still not her people, and Arwen knew that the fault lay in her own mind. She had dwelled all her life in Imladris among the Eldar. The only place she ever traveled to was Lothlórien, yet another Eldarin realm. The closest contact Arwen had with mortal Men were the children of the Dúnedain chieftains whom her parents (and later, when her mother was gone, just her father) had fostered.
Mortal Men were strange to Arwen. They barely seemed rooted to the ground, fit to fly away, and when they did, who knew where their spirits would go? We call Men ‘Visitors’ in Arda, who dwell here for only a short time before departing beyond the Circles of the World. Indeed, they do not feel as though they are truly a part of the world at all.
It was her fate now as well, for her spirit to fly beyond the Circles of the World when she died. And then, where?
It really didn’t bear thinking about.
Meanwhile, the Eldar would depart to the West, or fade into shadows and star-stuff here. Arwen felt no less like an Elda now than she ever had. She could discern no change in her; she felt no less rooted to the earth than she ever had. But still, she knew that there would come a day when she would die, and she would go… somewhere. She felt as though she dwelled in a city of ghosts, for all that she was now no different from them in fate.
The name Arwen bore as Queen was ‘Undómiel,’ the Evening Star, the star of twilight. She did indeed feel as though she was standing at the edge of twilight. The Eldar were fading like daylight into dusk, and she was something fading all the time, and when she vanished, she would go to she knew not where.
But for now, she would learn to love the lands that now were hers.