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The waves lick at the rocky, grass-clad shoreline. Though the ocean’s rhythm is the same ancient push-and-pull, push-and-pull, to Lalwen the waves today are tentative, like a child tasting something new. This is not the land they are used to.
“You are a hero now,” says Lalwen.
“You know that I never wanted to be one,” says the High King of the Noldor.
A smile slides up the side of his face closest to her, and his eyes seek hers, but she does not turn to him. She thinks of teasing, “So you do not deny it!” That is what she would have said were he her other brother, and Fingolfin would have laughed and rolled his eyes and flicked his finger against his thumb in dismissal. Then he might have looked at her fondly and said, “Thank you, sister, for never allowing me to grow too proud.”
But Lalwen does not know what to say to Arafinwë. Finarfin—so his firstborn styled him when Fingolfin fell, and so he is known now to all: Finwë Arafinwë, Noldoran. Lalwen laughed, then cried, when first she heard it. Her little brother Ingo, High King of the Noldor!
Lalwen does not know who to be with Finarfin.
“I don’t think I did know that,” Lalwen says.
Finarfin’s golden eyelashes land on his cheeks and ensnare the sunlight.
“Lalwen.” He tilts his head back up. His eyes catch hers. They are swimming with disappointment. “Are you certain?”
She cannot keep her face from twisting into a frown. Must he make her say it twice! Has the thought of returning ever scraped across her mind, when all else falls quiet? Yes; and it moves her to little more than resentment at the Valar for offering them the choice.
“It has never been a question, Arafinwë,” she says. A half-truth.
Lalwen feels Finarfin’s spirit crumple beside her, and she supposes her words had been meant to flatten hope. She expects tears, is prepared for tears; she is surprised when her brother’s fingers coill beneath his palm on the rock; surprised when he grimaces and sucks a sharp, watery breath between his teeth.
“Why?” Despite the emotion, his voice does not tremble. His voice never trembles. “Do I not at least deserve to know why? What message shall I take back to our mother? Your daughter lives, I will tell her, and she will weep for joy. She is not coming, I will say, and she will fall back into that black unknowing, the endless wondering, ‘Will I ever see my child again?’”
“Is she alone in that?” Lalwen nearly spits the question. Her blood is hot. “Do you speak of our mother or of yourself? I am sorry for your pain, brother—I am. I am sorry your sons have not returned; I am sorry Artanis is too far off to see her father again. She would have wanted to. But what of the centuries of unknowing we endured while Valinor was fenced against us?
“And do we know that it is not, still? If I followed my brothers—yes, him too, two brothers—into exile, without remorse, and if I do not regret it now, what reason do the Valar have to welcome me back into comfort and ease?
“You may tell our mother that there are people I love, here, in Beleriand.” Lalwen gestures at the broken rocks, the great trunks of trees torn up and tossed about by the sea. ”What remains of it. Our people have been severed. That was your choice as much as it was ours. Victory does not undo it. It was brave and noble of you to come here, but if you believed you would simply be able to gather together your scattered kin and bring us back with you, you are a fool.”
Lalwen pauses, expecting a rebuke from this new Arafinwë, hardened by kingship and sharpened by war, but Finarfin has gilded himself in gentleness once more.
In no more than a whisper, he says, “I did not even know if I would return.”
It is as though a great heap of sand has been cast over the heat of Lalwen’s heart. She is all ash. The wind is cold on her bare arms.
After a long silence, she says, “I am sorry,” and shivers.
“That may be.” A smile cracks Finarfin’s composure, and he sets his hand over hers, curling his fingers around it. “But you are right. I do wish I could bring you back, slot you into one of the empty spaces that have surrounded me these many hundreds of years. But you would no longer fit, would you, sister? I have known it. Oh, I have known it all along, though I wished it were otherwise. If anything, this victory has set us yet further apart. There is no returning to the past.” He squeezes her hand, and Lalwen is aware of tears brimming over the rims of her eyes. “I should not have asked you to forsake this life, and I won’t again.”
Her throat tightens, and Finarfin circles her shoulders with one arm; she falls against his chest, tugging at the fabric on his robe to cover her face as she weeps.
“There is yet some time,” Finarfin says, “and you have a brother here who loves you.”