Work Text:
IN WHICH KANAFINWË MAKALAURË, LAST OF THE SONS OF FËANOR, COMES UNINVITED TO A GARDEN LUNCHEON IN TIRION, AND THE KING'S BEST TEACUP IS BROKEN
Being a Further Chapter in the Unfinished Account of the Return of the Last Fëanorian to the Blessed Realm
PART I: THE GARDEN
To call the dwelling of Arafinwë Finarfin a castle would be to commit the sort of error that earns a Noldorin scholar's contempt with very little effort. A castle, after all, is a thing born of necessity — of arrow-slits and murder-holes and iron-banded gates that ring with the cold certainty of enemies who are coming and will come through the gate if the iron fails. In Middle-earth there were castles enough, and grimmer fortifications beside; but Valinor is not Middle-earth, and Tirion upon Túna is not Gondor, and the dwelling of the King of the remaining Noldor in the Blessed Realm is not — emphatically, categorically, and with some personal feeling on the matter — a castle.
It is a palace.
The difference, you will understand, is this: a castle says they shall not pass, whilst a palace says come in, and see what we have made. And what had been made upon the white hill of Tirion was, by any reckoning, worth the seeing. The White Palace of Finarfin — so named because its stone had been quarried from the pale limestone of the western mountains and dressed to a luminous smoothness that had once caught the mingled radiance of Laurelin and Telperion, and now caught instead the more ordinary light of sun and moon, and was beautiful for all that — rose in its towers and arching galleries in a manner that suggested not fortification but aspiration: as if the architects had wished not to keep the world out but to let the sky in through every possible opening.
But if the palace was the crown, then the gardens were the jewels, and no less carefully considered. Finarfin was the mildest of Finwë's sons and the one in whom the Noldorin love of making had turned most fully from craft to cultivation; and he had given himself to those gardens over the long centuries of the Second and Third Ages with the kind of devoted attention that other kings reserved for the training of armies and the balancing of treasury-ledgers. There were roses of every colour, great climbing things that had scaled the pale walls and spread to considerable heights; beds of alyssum and anemone and flowers of a blue so deep they were nearly violet, as if someone had folded up a piece of the evening sky and pressed it here amongst the green. There were hedges cut with elegant precision that suggested the shears had been guided by something more than ordinary patience, and fruit trees heavy with their season — cherry and pear and apple and those golden plums that are found nowhere east of the Sea and for which no Common Tongue has a name.
And deepest and most beloved of all the garden's places: a winding path that led through a screen of tall sweet-smelling shrubs to a still and shaded clearing by a stream — a stream that chattered quietly to itself over smooth pale stones before broadening into a pool, and in the pool swam fish of quite extraordinary colour, orange and white and a reddish gold that caught the afternoon light and seemed almost to burn with it.
It was here, under the dappled shade of old trees, beside the murmuring water, that Finarfin had set a table for his family.
He sat at the head of it, as was his custom: Finarfin, son of Finwë and Indis, husband of Eärwen of Alqualondë, King of what remained of the Noldor in the Blessed Realm. On that particular afternoon he looked, it must be confessed, considerably less like a king and more like a father who had not quite reconciled himself to the fact that his children were adults. His golden hair — the Vanyarin inheritance from his mother Indis that had passed from her to him and from him in turn to all his children — fell loose about his shoulders, for he had not troubled to bind it for a garden luncheon with his own family, and there were lines at the corners of his grey eyes that spoke not of age but of thought, of care, of the particular and unacknowledged weight that comes of governing for a very long time a people who remember everything, and will not let you forget what they were before you came to be king over them.
To his right sat Finrod — Findaráto Felagund, once Lord of Caves, Friend of Men, he whom the lore-masters say was the fairest and most well-beloved of all Finarfin's children — and he was eating. Or rather, he was engaged in that careful and deliberate activity that resembles eating and is not: the management of food upon a plate, the courteous arrangement of appetite. In the long ages of his sojourn in Middle-earth, Finrod had learned to eat little and sleep lightly and to keep always some quiet part of himself in readiness, the way a horse keeps its ears moving even in deep pasture; and though he had been returned now for some years to the golden ease of Valinor, the body remembers what the mind labours to forget. His plate was considerably less full than his father would have preferred.
"Eat some more, Finrod," said Finarfin. He placed upon his son's plate a second slice of cherry cake — a generous slice; the cherries from his own trees had been particularly fine this season — and followed it with a large spoonful of whipped cream that communicated plainly: I am aware this conversation will require repetition, and I have prepared myself accordingly.
Finrod looked at the cake. He looked at the cream. He looked at his father with the patient, golden-eyed expression of a man who has been having this precise argument for some years and has not yet located the version of it that ends satisfactorily for both parties.
"I am eating," he said.
"You are rearranging food," said Finarfin, "with great skill and evident concentration. It is a different thing entirely."
To Finarfin's left sat Galadriel — Artanis, Nerwen, Lady of Lothlórien that was, the greatest and most formidable of all Elven women who had ever walked upon Arda — and beside her sat Celeborn her husband, silver-haired and quiet in the manner of someone who has lived a very long time amongst the Noldor and has learned, through considerable patience and good sense, to let them argue amongst themselves about most things and to intervene only when the subject is one upon which his opinion will actually be heard. He had concluded, early in the afternoon, that the question of how much Finrod ate at a given meal was not such a subject, and had addressed himself to the cherry cake with the equanimity of a man entirely at peace with his surroundings.
At the opposite end of the table from Finarfin sat Eärwen his wife.
She had brought her sewing, as she invariably did when the family dined outdoors, and she looked up from it now with the small curved smile of a woman who has been listening to a particular conversation for a great many years and knows very precisely how it goes, and finds it, despite this knowledge, not entirely without its charm.
"He takes after you," she said to Finarfin.
"He does not," said Finarfin.
"He does. You are doing it this very moment." She nodded at his plate, where the cherry cake had been arranged considerably more than it had been consumed. "When something is troubling you, you organize your food. You have done it since before we were wed."
Finarfin looked down at his plate with the air of a man confronted with a truth he would have preferred to be spared.
The afternoon was mild and very golden, and the stream chattered, and the bright fish turned in the pool, and the cherries were excellent. There was peace in that garden — the kind of peace that is not merely the absence of calamity but is a thing in itself, built of long years and careful tending, like the hedges and the roses and the old trees whose shade they sat beneath.
It lasted until they heard the hoofbeats.
PART II: OF THE HOUSEHOLD OF FINWË
They came from far away at first — from somewhere below in the city, it seemed — a rhythm of iron-shod hooves against stone that grew, and grew, and did not slow. Finarfin lifted his head and listened. Finrod's hand stilled upon his glass. Galadriel set down her fork. Celeborn, who had survived a great many things in his long life and had developed a reliable instinct for the approach of matters that were about to require his attention, turned his head very slightly toward the garden wall.
The hoofbeats grew louder.
They came up the long white road that curved from the lower city to the palace hill — that road which had been made broad enough for ceremonial procession and upon which horses had no business galloping, on account of the steepness and the close-fitted cobbles and the gate at the top, which was, Finarfin was fairly certain, currently closed. They came up this road at a pace that left the distinct impression of a horse that had not been consulted on the question of steep cobbled hills with closed gates at the top; and closer they came, and closer, until even Celeborn had turned fully in his chair to look toward the hedges that ran behind Finarfin's seat, behind which the garden wall stood —
Then the hedge moved.
Not slowly; not with warning. In the space between one breath and the next, there was a tremendous rush of displaced air and a sound like the crack of a sail taking sudden wind, and over the perfectly tended crest of Finarfin's ornamental hedge — the one that had been six years in the growing and was shaped, with no small labour, into a clean and handsome line — there came, in a movement of violent and extraordinary grace, a horse.
It was a very large horse.
Indeed, to call it merely large would be to do the truth a disservice. It was a horse of such proportions that one might expect to find it in a battle-legend rather than a private garden; the sort of horse that gives the impression its ancestors had held strong opinions about Balrogs and had expressed those opinions physically and survived the experience. Its colour was black — not the comfortable black of a moonless autumn night but the absolute, consuming black of storm-heads massing over the mountains, of deep water in places where no light has ever reached — and it was enormous: tall, barrel-chested, with legs that were to ordinary horses' legs what the columns of Angband had been to fence-posts, and a mane that moved like a river in spate. It was foaming at the mouth. Its eyes were dark and wide and wild with the effort of having covered a great distance at great speed with no pause whatever for any consideration of rest, and it came down from the hedge and landed — with a crash that shook the earth under the table and rattled the china and sent a small silver spoon into the pool to be investigated with great interest by the fish — no more than three feet from where Finarfin sat.
The hot breath of the animal came across the back of Finarfin's neck: warm and wet and smelling of distances, of great effort, of a journey that had begun somewhere very far away and had ended, by deliberate choice, here.
Finarfin did not move.
He was, it must be said, entirely incapable of moving. Not because he was afraid of the horse — though he was, with excellent reason — but because of what sat upon it.
The rider was tall in the saddle; but tallness was not the thing. It was the bearing. One reads in the oldest accounts of the Noldor in their fullness of a quality they possessed in those days — a blazing and unconflicted certainty of self, a deep knowledge of what they were and what they were capable of, that expressed itself not in arrogance alone (though arrogance was often there beside it, as shadow is beside flame) but in a kind of absolute presence, as if the person before you had simply decided that the world would arrange itself around them, and was waiting, with patient confidence, for this to occur. Finarfin had read those accounts. He had thought, in his more private moments, that whatever that quality had been, much of it had been burned away in the long grief of exile and kinslaying and war and ruin.
He revised this opinion now.
The rider wore dark blue — the deep, saturated blue of the sky in that last hour before the dawn breaks — in cloth so fine it moved in the faintest stirring of air. Over it, the silver and gold of regalia that had no business being so immaculate after what was evidently a hard and very long ride. Not the regalia of a lord — the sons of Fëanor had never, in their brightest days, settled for any lesser word — but of a prince, in the full and ancient ceremonial weight that the title carried in the ages when there had still been Noldorin princes who were not the last of their line. His hair was the black of his horse, and straight: as straight as the edge of a new-forged blade. And this was the only small mercy, the only difference between the face above Finarfin's table now and the face that Finarfin carried in that part of his memory he visited least willingly. Fëanor's hair had moved in waves; Maglor's was straight. That was all. The strong line of jaw, the proud set of the head, the lean considered power in the shoulders that spoke of a people built not for ceremony alone — all of this was his father's, shaped by harder years than his father's had known into something that was not a copy but an echo, resonant in a different key.
Broader in the shoulder than Finrod, whom Vanyar blood had given a leanness that the children of Fëanor had never matched. Not so tall — the Vanyar height told, as it always did — but one did not, in looking at Maglor, think of want in any form.
Upon his brow was a silver circlet, narrow as a laurel crown, worked into linked leaves so fine they could not be seen individually until you were very close. And at the very centre of the circlet, like a burning eye held open on a forgotten age: a ruby, cut and set in the shape of the eight-pointed star of the House of Fëanor — the same star that had flown above Himring and Amon Ereb and all the lost strongholds of the First Age; that had burned above the Third Kinslaying at the Havens of Sirion; that had not been seen in the streets of Tirion in more ages of the world than many of the assembled household had been alive to count.
The star blazed in the afternoon light. The great black horse breathed its hot breath down the neck of the King of the Noldor.
Kanafinwë Makalaurë — Maglor, second son of Fëanor, last of the House of his father, greatest singer of all the Elves that had ever lived and moved upon the face of Arda — looked down at Finarfin.
For a long moment, he said nothing at all.
He was not looking at Finrod, whose golden face had gone very still. He was not looking at Galadriel, who was looking at him with an expression that her husband recognized as particular and that she herself would have described — had anyone been incautious enough to ask — as merely attentive. He was not looking at Celeborn, who had during the whole of the preceding minute adopted the expression of a man who has seen several things of this nature in the course of a long life and is recording this one for future reference. He looked only at Finarfin, with those eyes — and what was in them was something Finarfin could not quite name: not anger, or not anger alone; not contempt, or not contempt alone. Something older than either of those things, and colder, something that had had a very long time in which to cool and settle into the shape it now wore.
Then Maglor spoke.
"A Vanya warden," he said — and here, at last, was the voice: the voice that the poets called like the sea with deep voice singing, the voice that had been the wonder of the Elder Days, that had earned him the mother-name Makalaurë, the Gold-Cleaver, for the golden quality of it was woven into the very meaning of the name his mother gave him; a voice that carried even at conversational pitch a quality of resonance that suggests the speaker has never in their life had cause to wonder whether they might not be heard — "a Vanya warden ruling over what little remains of what we were, with his Telerin wife beside him."
He let the silence that followed sit for just a moment, with the ease of a man setting down a stone he has been carrying a long way and intends to pick up again presently.
"Doom of the Noldor, indeed."
He had not dismounted.
He had not, Finarfin observed with some distant portion of his mind, so much as glanced at the others at the table. He addressed Finarfin the way a man addresses a toll-keeper on a road he is not particularly pleased to find: acknowledging a presence without conceding to it any weight beyond the bare minimum that courtesy requires.
"Congratulations are in order, I think, uncle." The word — uncle — in Maglor's mouth held the specific quality of a word chosen with great care and placed exactly where it would be most instructive. "You have become, in the fullness of time, king-regent of the Noldor. Regent, mind you — for there are those of us who will come back from the Halls of Mandos yet, when the Valar please, and the line of Fëanor is not spent quite as entirely as it might be comfortable to suppose." He let this observation stand for a moment, easily and without apparent heat.
"I find myself wondering, however," he continued, in the same pleasant tone that a man might use to observe that the weather had been rather fine of late, "why a king so occupied with the administration of his own realm should have found time to arrange the removal of all my inherited possessions — my father's properties, the houses and hunting grounds and farmsteads and the whole of what descended to the last of Fëanor's line — the very long way across Aman. To Lord Elrond's lands, to be precise. Where I happened to be staying." The faintest emphasis on the last three words. "As a guest." A fractional pause. "You must have missed me very sorely, uncle, to have taken such a personal interest in my affairs."
And it was then — precisely then — that Finarfin felt it.
He had been until that moment simply struck senseless: not yet angry, not yet hurt, merely stunned in the manner of a man who has taken a blow he did not see coming and has not yet arrived at the stage of knowing how serious a blow it is. But those words — his own careful and well-intentioned arrangements, held up to the light and shown as what they looked like from the wrong side of the glass — something moved in his chest.
It moved, and then it was very still.
He had last felt that particular quality of interior silence — that compressed and inward cold — at the moment just before he had turned back at the Doom, in the darkness of Araman on that terrible shore. Not the Doom itself; but the knowledge that had come upon him in the face of it, the knowledge of what he was and what he could and could not choose to follow into the dark. He had stood there and known himself, perhaps for the first and only time with complete clarity, and what he had known had sent him back.
He wanted, very badly, to speak.
He found that he could not.
Because it was precisely at that moment that Maglor's head shifted, and the afternoon light came through a gap in the canopy above and fell full and unobstructed upon his face — and Finarfin was no longer in a garden in the warmth of a Valinorean summer.
He was a small boy.
He was a very small boy in this same garden, on a day when it had still been his father's garden and not his own, when the fruit trees had been young and he had been playing with a set of musical toys — delicate things strung with small bells and fitted with tiny pipes that sang when the wind moved them, and he had been making them sing as loudly as he possibly could, in the great unthinking joy of a child who has no reason yet to be quiet for anyone. His mother Indis had been with him, and she had been laughing — laughing at something he had done, and the sound of that laughter was one of those sounds that Finarfin carried still in the deepest and least-touched chamber of himself, bright and entirely intact after all the ages of the world.
And then he had felt it. A gaze.
He had felt it before he saw it: a sudden cold, the way the air changes before a storm arrives. He had looked up from his toys and from his mother's laughter, looked up at the windows of the palace above the garden —
— and met a pair of dark eyes.
Young Fëanor had been in his study that day, with one of the innumerable tutors whom Finwë had engaged for his beloved eldest son and never stinted the coin for — the Valar themselves knew there were enough of them, the greatest minds Valinor had to offer, cycling through that study in steady rotation because not even the greatest minds of Valinor could hold Fëanor's attention for long before he had exhausted what they had to give him and was ready for the next. The lesson had perhaps just ended; or perhaps Fëanor had simply looked up from whatever occupied him — some design or calculation or new thing being born in his mind — because the sound of bells and a small half-brother's singing had come through the glass at the wrong moment. Whatever the reason, he had looked down at the garden. And Finarfin had looked up at the window. And for one long moment they had regarded each other across that distance: the small playing child in the garden below, and the brilliant and already-formidable youth who occupied the study above.
It had not been a cruel look. Finarfin was careful about this, even now, in the privacy of his own memory: it had not been cruel. It had simply been the look of someone noting the source of a disruption and calculating how it might be resolved. The look a craftsman gives a warped hinge, or a cracked tile.
Finarfin had run to his mother.
Indis had comforted him, because Indis had always comforted him, because Indis was made of warmth and light and the particular steadiness of those Vanyar who had lived longest in the sight of the Trees. She had soothed him, and he had gone back to his toys; and then, not long after, his father had come down into the garden.
Not to play with Finarfin.
Not to sit with Indis, who was his wife, who was there and who was happy and who had turned toward Finwë with the smile she always kept ready for him — the smile that said she was glad simply that he was there, and needed nothing more from him than that. Not for any of these things. Finwë had come into the garden to request, with the gentle and entirely unthinking courtesy of a man who does not consider himself to be doing anything that requires thought, that perhaps Indis might take the children to the further end of the garden. The far end. The end that could not be heard from the upper palace windows. Fëanor was working. He found the noise distracting.
As Fëanor was working.
Finarfin had not thought of that afternoon in a very long time. He was thinking of it now — all of it, the bells and the laughter and the cold at the window and the careful courtesy in his father's voice that had not known, had perhaps not been capable of knowing, what it was that it was doing — and the small frightened child behind his ribs, the one who had never quite grown all the way into adulthood, turned and looked and was very quiet.
For those were the same eyes, looking down at Finarfin now from Maglor's face.
Straight hair where Fëanor's had moved in waves. A voice shaped differently by different years. Harder lines in the face, because harder things had made them. But the bearing was the same, and the presence was the same, and those dark eyes held the same absolute and immovable certainty of their own worth — the certainty that was the Fëanorian birthright and no one else's — and the small frightened child in Finarfin's heart said nothing, and knew the feeling of that silence precisely, and had known it for a very long time.
"My lord Prince Maglor — you are back?!"
The voice came from somewhere behind them all: high with effort and incredulous joy, the particular joy of a man who has not permitted himself to hope for a thing and is now standing in front of it. Finarfin recognized it before he turned, because one does not forget a voice that has been part of a household for longer than one has been alive.
Nandurion.
Nandurion, who was the son of a farmer's house from the lower city, and who had been caught three separate times as a boy sneaking into the palace library before King Finwë — who had possessed a sense of humour, whatever else might be said of him — had simply paid for the boy's education and kept him on instead. Nandurion, who was older than Finarfin by more years than Finarfin had ever troubled to count, who had served the House of Finwë all that long time with the faithful and particular devotion of those who have been given some great and unexpected gift and have spent every subsequent day in the serious work of being worthy of it. He was thin now, as old Elves can be thin — not weakened, but refined, the way good metal is refined, everything that is not essential having been slowly given away in service over the centuries — and he had evidently heard the commotion from somewhere in the inner halls and had run to it with the determination of a man who does not consult his years when the occasion is important enough.
He pushed through the small gathering of younger servants who had also arrived at the noise — wide-eyed, bewildered, most of them trying with limited success to appear as though they had happened past for entirely unrelated reasons — and stopped. He looked up at the black horse and its rider with an expression of such unguarded, uncomplicated pleasure that Finarfin, watching, felt it as something very close to a wound.
Maglor looked down at him.
And here was the thing — here was the thing that Finarfin had not anticipated and could not have accounted for: the quality in Maglor's bearing that had been so entirely and deliberately cold shifted. Not vanished; it had too deep a foundation in him for that, carved by too many years of too many losses. But it moved aside, in the way that hard weather moves when a door is opened from a warm room, and when Maglor smiled at Nandurion the smile was genuine, and it reached his eyes, and it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the look he had turned upon the King.
"Nandurion," he said. The warmth in the name was unperformed. "It does me good to see you. Tell me how you find yourself."
Nandurion, who had served the House of Finwë long enough to understand that direct questions deserve direct answers, said: "Well enough that I have nothing of interest to report, my lord prince. Though I will say that my heart is glad beyond any skill I have in expressing it that our lord Finwë — Eru bless his soul and keep him safe — will not be meeting you in the Halls of Mandos."
Something moved across Maglor's face at those words — briefly, like cloud-shadow over still water — and was gone before it could be read.
"As is mine," he said. And then: "You are here and willing, and I find I have need of a reliable man. Might I ask a service of you?"
"Anything within my power, my lord, though I confess that a humble scribe's power does not extend much further than the organization of old papers."
"My father," said Maglor pleasantly, "was of the view that the organization of old papers is among the cornerstones upon which civilization rests, and he would not have wished to hear his most trusted servants speak of themselves with such insufficiency. So you must not."
Nandurion straightened. He was too old and too practised for tears; but he straightened, and the straightening was its own language, and Maglor read it.
He reached behind him then, with the ease of long habit, to the red leather of his saddle — the red was deliberate, Finarfin thought, the red against the dark blue against the black, the Fëanorian instinct for being unmistakable, present and undiminished in the son as it had been in the father — and unfastened from it a pouch. It was a very large pouch. It was, in point of fact, a pouch of the maximum size that any saddle could reasonably be expected to carry without complaint; its leather was thick and very good, and it sagged with the unmistakable sag of a great quantity of coin, and when Maglor held it out toward Nandurion the scroll-keeper took it with both hands, with the grip of a man who is prepared for weight — and was, regardless, surprised. He managed it. He was already holding the reins of the black horse in his other hand, and the horse had its own opinions about standing still, and for a moment the matter of managing all three things at once absorbed his full attention.
"Take that to Chamberlain Canyarion," said Maglor, with the unruffled manner of a man for whom the distribution of substantial coin is a domestic matter requiring no particular comment. "Tell him that his prince Maglor Fëanorion is come home, and that I intend both to engage his services and to begin settling what is owed him for his long stewardship of my father's properties. This amount," he added, with the briefest and most precise glance toward the table, toward Finarfin, "does not represent the whole of the debt — the remainder of my possessions, my full inheritance as Fëanor's last son, having made the considerable journey to the far edge of Aman at my uncle's kind initiative." The look was held for precisely as long as it needed to be and no longer. "Lord Elrond was generous enough to offer me his hospitality, and I remain grateful to him; but as my own lands and the greater part of what my father held lie here in and about Tirion, I find I have no further reason to remain a guest where I might instead be home."
He said home without emphasis, which made it considerably heavier than emphasis would have done.
"Further," he continued, producing from the inner pocket of his riding coat a second purse — lighter, by the sound of it, but by no means inconsiderable — "when your errand takes you through the central market, I would be grateful if you could find the Marshal of Tournaments for me. Roquenion, it was, when last I was acquainted with the matter. Is he still the one responsible for the jousting?"
"He is, my lord."
"Register me for the next event." A pause. "What breeds are currently permitted?"
Nandurion's eyes, briefly and with great caution, touched the black horse. He was a man who had spent a long life choosing his words with care and saw no reason to abandon the practice now. "There are restrictions on certain breeds, my lord prince. This stallion is — if I may say so with full respect to what is clearly an exceptional animal — not, as far as I can judge, of the sort the marshals are likely to approve. His size alone —"
"Quite," said Maglor, without any visible distress. "He is a horse of strong views and a considerable history of doing precisely what he pleases, and I respect him for it. Very well — buy me a mare for the tournament. Something that will do well in the lists. You will know the current standards better than I do." He drew from his coat pocket, with the unhurried precision of a man accustomed to carrying rather more coin about his person than most would think practical, a quantity of gold pieces and placed them not in Nandurion's hand but into his coat pocket, quietly and without the ceremony of presentation. "For the purchase, and for your trouble today."
Nandurion opened his mouth.
"Think nothing of it," said Maglor. He dismounted in one movement — the kind that is made to look effortless by someone who has had a great many years in the saddle and finds no occasion for theatre in the ordinary — and landed, and stood; and standing, he was what he had appeared on horseback and something more. Not so tall as Finrod beside him, for the Vanyar blood in Finarfin's children gave them a height that the sons of Fëanor, however imposing, had never quite matched — but broader in the chest and shoulder than any of Finarfin's sons, built in the full Noldorin manner of his father's line, the kind of build that one notices as a quality of presence rather than of measurement. He set his hand briefly upon Nandurion's right shoulder — a light and deliberate contact, the gesture of someone who learned warmth young and has not forgotten all of it, even after all the ages of forgetting other things — and said, quieter now, for Nandurion alone: "You are more useful than you believe, and I am glad to find you here. My father thought highly of you. As do I."
He had spoken, throughout all of this, as if Finarfin were a decorative feature of the garden, of no more immediate significance than the fish in the pool or the state of the hedges. He had not addressed Finrod. He had not acknowledged Galadriel, in whose grey eyes something was collecting itself with the deliberate patience of a storm deciding whether it will be necessary to break. He had not looked at Celeborn, who had during the whole proceeding maintained the expression of a man who has witnessed several things of this nature in the course of a long life and is carefully recording this particular one for future reference. He had not, since his first address to the King, spoken one further word to anyone at the table.
He stood now among a growing crowd of servants in the garden that had once been his grandfather's, in the palace that had once been his grandfather's, and said to no one in particular: "Prepare my father's chambers. I will be staying."
The servants looked at one another.
There descended upon a gathered household staff the very specific silence that falls when they have received a direct instruction from a person of indisputable authority, in the plain hearing of another person of equal or greater authority who has not yet spoken and may have strong opinions about the matter. Several pairs of eyes moved between Maglor and Finarfin. Several pairs of eyes moved away again, quickly, in the manner of fish that have encountered something alarming and have elected to be in a different part of the pool.
"What is the matter?" said Maglor. He seemed genuinely perplexed, and perhaps he was; a man who has spent the better part of three Ages in the service of an unstoppable doom may develop a certain difficulty in perceiving what the difficulty is. "You look as though you have been visited by a barrow-wight in the afternoon. Or," a thought appearing to present itself, "has my father's wing been dismantled entirely? Has my uncle had the furniture sent after me in additional carriages that have not yet arrived? Is there nothing left but bare stone?"
No answer came.
"Very well — where is Chatelain Halaithion? He will have the keys."
"Away, my lord," said one of the braver servants, in a voice considerably smaller than the situation seemed to call for. "His wife is near her time. He is with her on the coast."
"And who holds the keys in his absence?"
The name was launched in several urgent undertones at once — Cemmariliel — and produced from the back of the gathered household a girl: young, plainly dressed, with the slightly harried expression of someone who has been given a responsibility she did not anticipate and is not altogether certain she is equal to. She carried a wooden chest, and the chest was full of keys — a clattering, considerable wealth of them in iron and bronze and a few of old silver, the accumulated access to every locked door in the palace — and she made her way to the front of the crowd, stopped before Maglor, and looked up at him.
And blushed.
One cannot blame her entirely. Maglor — like his father before him, like all the House of Finwë when they were most themselves — possessed the sort of face and bearing that memory holds onto without being asked; what the Eldar call telperin, silver-made, bright-wrought. And his voice was the worst of it, or the best of it, depending on where you stood. A voice that had been called the greatest in all the First Age, that had carried over land and sea until the stones seemed to lean toward it, does not require any particular effort to make an impression upon a young servant encountering it for the first time at close quarters.
Cemmariliel looked at her chest of keys. She looked at Maglor. She opened her mouth, and then found that what she had intended to ask had escaped her.
"The old closed wing," hissed a colleague, in a whisper comprehensible to everyone present. "Go quickly — there are half a dozen rooms at least that want airing!"
You did not think, did you, that the king's most favoured son had only the one room to his name?
Cemmariliel went. With her went most of the other servants, in the grateful efficiency of people who have been given a destination and a task, which is all most people require to be content and purposeful. They went — and the garden was suddenly much quieter — and the great black horse was led away by a stable-boy — and Maglor surveyed the garden and the pool and the untouched remains of a luncheon for a moment, with an expression that gave nothing away at all.
Then, without a word addressed to the table or any of those who sat at it, he turned, and walked, and followed his servants inside.
Finarfin watched him go.
He sat for rather a long time.
"Father," said Finrod, very carefully, at last.
"I know," said Finarfin.
He did not say what he knew. He rose instead, set his napkin upon the table beside the cherry cake, and said: "Come, Eärwen."
Eärwen came.
PART III: THE CHAMBER
The walk from the garden to the king's private chambers had never taken less time.
This was not a matter of distance — the distance was precisely what it had always been. It was rather that Finarfin covered it with the close mechanical concentration of a man who is thinking very carefully about the act of walking in order to avoid thinking about everything else until he has arrived somewhere that it is permissible to stop. He had said nothing in the garden, and nothing on the stairs, and nothing in the long western gallery where the evening light was beginning to come through the windows in slow gold bars across the pale stone floor. He said nothing when he opened the door of the private chamber and stood aside for Eärwen to enter, and nothing when the door closed behind them both and the latch dropped.
Then he paced.
Eärwen set down her sewing bag on the table beside the window and chose the chair she always chose when they were alone in this room with something between them that needed to be said: the chair that was the right distance, close enough to be entirely present, far enough to leave him room. She had learned the precise measurement of that distance in the early years of their marriage, and she had never found occasion to revise it.
His golden hair, still loose from the luncheon, was disordered now; he had run his hand through it at some point on the walk without noticing. His hands moved at his sides in short, clipped gestures — controlled; always controlled in Finarfin, who had governed his considerable feelings with great care for a very long time — but there was something different in them today, something wound too tight.
"He thinks I have done it deliberately." The voice came out level, and it cost him something to keep it so. "He looks at what I arranged — what I arranged because it was practical, because he was there and the possessions were here and I wished simply to see his inheritance safely with him, in his keeping — and he sees calculation. He sees a man who heard that the last of his nephew's line lay sick at the edge of Aman and thought: here is my opportunity. Here is the moment to sweep through Fëanor's holdings and make them mine while the last Fëanorian cannot watch. As if I were a crow. As if I would wait for a man to be brought low and then pick over what was his, and ship it all away before he recovers himself, so that when he finally comes to Tirion he finds the cupboard bare and nothing left to him but the four walls of his father's exile-house in Formenos." His voice shook, very slightly, on the last word; he mastered it. "That is what he believes I am. That is the man he believes himself to be speaking to."
He turned. He paced back.
"And the worst of it," he said, lower, "the worst of it is that I can see it. I can see exactly how it looks, from where he stands, with what he knows and what he does not. He did not ask. Why would he ask? He grew up in his father's house hearing that the sons of Indis would snatch whatever they could reach the moment the greater sons were not there to stop them — Fëanor believed it, deep in his bones, and Fëanor's sons were raised upon that belief the way other children are raised upon songs and stories. And here sits the proof of it, Finarfin the mild, Finarfin the overlooked, sitting at the head of a table in his grandfather's garden with the best china and the cherry cake, and all of Fëanor's possessions rolled neatly away on carts to somewhere Maglor would not easily come to collect them." He made a short and precise gesture. "The picture is not flattering."
Eärwen said nothing yet. This was not the time for words, and she knew precisely what time it was.
"And then there is our father," said Finarfin.
He said it quietly. But our father — the two words together, in this room, today — sat with the weight of everything that had accumulated around them across the Ages: every occasion on which Finwë's gaze had moved past Finarfin in a room without quite landing on him; every luncheon at which the children of Indis had been asked to be a little quieter, a little further, a little less present; the long unspoken grammar of a family that had one name among its members which carried a weight none of the others carried, and never would. Finarfin had loved his father. He loved him still; the knowledge of Finwë in the Halls of Mandos was a permanent and low ache, like a missing tooth that the tongue finds and finds again without intending to. But love does not preclude the truth. It only makes it harder to put into words.
"When Father returns from Mandos — when he is finally released and comes home, however far away that day may be — Maglor will tell him this." He stopped pacing. He stood in the middle of the room and looked at nothing in particular. "Of course he will. He believes it. Why would he not tell it? And Father will hear it, and he will —" He swallowed. "He will not ask me. He will not think it necessary to ask, because he will already know what the sons of Indis are capable of; he has always known what we are capable of, and the only remaining question was ever whether any of us would be so vulgar as to act upon it. And he will look at me with that face he used to make, the saddened face, the face of a man who had hoped — who had almost, almost managed to believe — and who now has been shown that the hope was misplaced. He will not be angry. Father was never angry with me." Something very dry and very quiet moved through the words. "With me there was never cause for anger. One does not get angry at a thing that does not rise high enough to be a threat. There is only the disappointment, and the sadness, and the face that does not say you are not Fëanor because everyone in the room has always already known it, and the saying of it would be merely redundant."
The chamber was silent.
Outside, in the streets below, someone was singing — a high, clear, simple melody, a song made for a pleasant afternoon rather than anything weightier than that, the kind of song that exists simply because the sun is still out and the city is alive and Valinor is Valinor and some things have not changed. The sound came through the window and was perfectly indifferent to the room it was entering.
Finarfin's hand found the small table beside the window.
There was a teacup on it. It had been placed there before the luncheon, on Eärwen's quiet word to the kitchen; calming tea, made with the small pale flowers that grew in Nandurion's wife's window boxes and that were said to be of use on days that looked as though they might require calming. Finarfin had not drunk a single drop of it.
He looked at the cup.
He looked at the wall opposite: the plaster, the paintings, the wall of a room he had made into a home over many years of careful making, a room in a palace that had been his father's and his grandfather's and that had never quite become, whatever he had done to it, entirely and only his.
And then — without deliberation, without the characteristic Finarfin pause between impulse and action, in the motion of something that has held a very long time and is holding no longer —
He threw it.
The cup struck the plaster and shattered: a sharp, clean, entirely decisive sound, the sound of a thing that is no longer what it was. The tea followed in a dark arc, still warm, still smelling of pale flowers and calming herbs, and hit the wall and ran down it in slow brown lines; and hit, also, in its outward sweep, the small watercolour that hung beside the window.
Eärwen's watercolour.
It was not an expensive picture. It had been painted by a friend — a friend whose name Finarfin could not, at this particular moment, have produced under any pressure — who painted for the pleasure of it and gave paintings away as gifts. It depicted a sea harbour: soft greys and blues, the low stone breakwater, the fishing boats at their evening ease, the particular quality of light that falls in the hour when the sun has gone behind the clouds but not yet set, when the sky is neither day nor dusk but some third thing made of both, the light that lives above coastal towns in the West and belongs to the sea and to nowhere else. It was the light of Alqualondë, or very nearly; the light of the harbour Eärwen had grown up knowing before she came inland to Tirion to become the wife of a king and the mother of children who went away.
The painting had hung in this room for longer than Finarfin could readily account for. He had stopped seeing it, the way one stops seeing the things that have always been present. He was seeing it now — was seeing it with great clarity, in fact — because the tea was spreading across its lower quarter in a slow brown bloom, seeping into the watercolour paper with the horrible, purposeful creep of a thing that cannot be unspilled.
The breakwater was stained. The boats were stained. The grey and particular light over the water was stained.
Finarfin stood and looked at what he had done.
The shards of the cup lay white against the pale stone floor, scattered where the wall had thrown them back. Outside, the singing continued, high and clear, knowing nothing of the room it floated past.
He could not yet look at Eärwen. He could not quite manage it.
Eärwen rose from her chair without hurry. She crossed the room and came to stand beside him — not touching him, not reaching for his hand; she knew what this moment wanted and it was not that. She stood beside him and looked, as he looked, at the stained painting and the scattered fragments of the cup, the way one stands with a person at the edge of something difficult and simply stands there, which is very often the most that can be offered and is, sometimes, the most that is needed.
The tea ran down the wall. The last light of the evening lay across the floor between them in long quiet bars.
Eärwen looked at the painting for a moment longer. And the expression on her face — just for that one moment, before she turned away from it — was not only a wife's concern for her husband, and not only a queen's calculation of what would need to be done next. It was something else: something older and more private, that had its own long residence in her, its own shore and its own harbour, to do with the sea and the particular quality of its light and what happens to the places you have known and loved when you have been away from them for a very long time, and have come back to find that the distance has left its mark on things you had not expected it to touch.
She turned to Finarfin.
"Well," said Eärwen.
Her voice was quite steady, with a steadiness that had nothing of compression in it — not packed tight, not held by force, but deep and unhurried, the steadiness of water that is cold because it is very deep and has never been required to be anything else.
"You had better tell me all of it," she said. "From the beginning."
Here ends this chapter of the account. What was said in the chamber of the king that evening, and what followed between them, and what followed between Maglor and the House of Finarfin in the days and weeks thereafter, are matters for another telling.