Chapter Text
At first, she thought the pounding at her door was simply the noise of the storm. The weather in Valinor was rarely tempestuous, but the last day had seen thunder and lightning, and also a truly horrific wind whose aftermath Nerdanel was certain she was going to be dealing with for weeks.
But the sound had not come from the storm. Instead, when she gave into temptation and checked, Nerdanel discovered a beautiful, dark-eyed, soaked elleth, standing dripping on the step with an expression of grief and fury on her face. They had never met, but it was impossible not to recognize her, perhaps the last of Valinor’s great beauties.
“Lady Elwing.”
From a satchel at her side – waxed to keep the contents dry – she withdrew a rumpled fistful of papers, which she shoved at Nerdanel.
Rebirth denied under S146, ‘The Statute of Finwë and Míriel’, the top document read.
“Three centuries ago,” Elwing said, “Eärendil looked down upon the world and saw our son married. Mere moments later, he witnessed the same thing again, and took joy in knowing that our child was loved. Within a month, he was dead at the hands of Sauron, defending his husband and his wife. We thought he might need time to heal. We were patient. But that wasn’t what kept him from us.”
“I am sorry to hear it.” And she was. She had seen the ruin of the Statute before.
“In his vows, both times, my son named four parents who had loved him and shaped his spirit.” For a moment, there was nothing but the noise of the storm. “You know why I am here now, I imagine.”
It had not been the reason Nerdanel was expecting. “You had better come in.”
“Yes,” Elwing agreed darkly, “I had better.”
Neither of them mentioned the unearthly light shining out from her satchel.
--
Nerdanel made tea. Elwing followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table there, like she was family instead of a guest deserving of a particularly high degree of respect. She stripped off most of her wet clothes, down to her shift, which was also soaked, and sat as close to the fire as she might while Nerdanel set the kettle above it, trembling slightly.
It was uncommon for grown elves to grow cold unless something had depleted their spirits, or they were exposed at great length to truly horrific temperatures rarely known in Valinor. Perhaps Elwing’s kind were different. Some long-buried maternal instinct forced itself up her throat.
“Let me get you a blanket. And perhaps something else to change into, though you will have to forgive an ill fit.” Nerdanel was not just taller than Elwing, but broader too, and fuller in the chest.
“I would not burden you unduly,” she said, but her hands did look quite pale, and her hair was still dripping a little.
“Nonsense,” Nerdanel told her, and did as she had promised. If she took the excuse to step out of the room as Elwing changed and take a few steadying breaths, that was her business.
It was not Elwing herself that was the trouble; it would not have been a terror if Elwing had presented herself as the avenging spirit Nerdanel had always half-expected. Nerdanel could have dealt with that. The problem was that she looked so small, and so young, huddled beneath her blanket. It was worse when Nerdanel came back in and saw her in her ill-fitting dress, like Curufinwë playing dress-up in his father’s clothes – or Carnistir in hers, come to that. Like a daughter Nerdanel had never had. Like the sons she should never have had.
And like Curufinwë, like Carnistir, she wore anger as a mask, under which Nerdanel could see a savage wound, still dripping fresh blood.
“They took my son,” Elwing said. “They as good as killed him, that day they chose to leave Sauron free. Just as they killed Celebrimbor, and Elros’s children, they killed Elrond too. And, having already hurt him so much, so many times, now they choose to keep him from life. For what? Because some king who knew no war thought he needed divine intervention to tell him whether or not he could fuck?”
It was a terrible summary of the Statute. “I think they felt themselves entitled to an opinion on the matter, whether or not they were asked.”
“Who gave them that authority? My family certainly never asked for such a thing! I can’t imagine the divine verdict on Thingol and Melian would have been particularly kind. Marriage vows might invoke Elbereth for our love of stars, or the trees and the earth for their love of each other, but it is to the All-father alone that we swear marriage. He is the creator of our spirits, not them, and no other has the right to decide if and how we bind them.”
She sounded like him. Nobody had dared to speak heresy to Nerdanel’s face in two ages. A lump of stone settled deep in her chest.
“ Your son defied them.”
“My son fell in love! With Ereinion Gil-galad, a handsome and good ellon, well-esteemed and well-appointed, a generous and courageous spirit. And so too with Celebrían Nerissë, a quick-witted and loving soul, fair as a moonbeam herself. In turn, they love him so deeply that even now, having taken an orphaned child into their home and their hearts these many years after the death of my son, they name him Elbrannon, in the fashion of our house.”
“I am sorry.”
“That my son was loved? That my son loved so deeply and so well that he found a way to share his heart, to defy the strain on his spirit that the Valar said would be his undoing?”
“That you lost him twice, in the joy of sharing his life and in the finality of his death.”
She closed her eyes a second, ran a thumb around the rim of the teacup. “Yes. I suppose you do understand.”
“I do.”
“And will you help me?”
“I can’t imagine how I could. I have no influence over the Valar, though I suppose Aulë has been kind to me in his time. I have no vassals, no army, no weapons. And even if I did, whatever could I do with them?”
“How could you go to war for my son, when you wouldn’t even do it for your own?”
It wasn’t what she had meant, but it struck the centre of her heart as precisely as one of Tyelkormo’s arrows. She could not keep her breathing entirely even.
“You would not have wanted that.”
“No,” Elwing agreed, “but I think I would have understood it.”
“Do you understand why I did not?”
Nerdanel herself did not, some days. She should have gone and died there, with them or against them.
Elwing did not answer her. Instead, she slid her wet satchel across the stone floor of the kitchen towards Nerdanel. “I will not ask you to fight. I will ask you to keep this. It does satisfy the terms of the oath, I imagine, if I give it to you.”
“I had no part in that.”
“And yet you are Fëanor’s closest. I have wondered often if I could have settled it at Sirion by lobbing the accursed thing at Celebrimbor. He seemed alright, though he was always hiding from me when I went to Balar. He would have done me no injury. And yet at the time, it seemed as if it truly did belong to me, as if it was right that I have it and I alone.”
“They can have that effect.”
“The experience of giving it away every night helps mitigate it.” She nudged the bag. “Please, take it. Keep it. Do not give it up to the Valar.”
This was the toll she would extract for their theft of her son’s liberty. “It is not yours to give away, I recall, for you did offer it to the Valar freely once.”
“Some might say it was not mine to give away then either.” Her smile had too many teeth and too little light in her eyes to seem anything like sincere. “Some might say I am only returning it to its rightful owner. It would, surely, be very ill-advised to steal it again.”
“You know the effect this might have on my children, if I take it.”
They had held two. They did not have the others now, but they had held them. It was this third that slipped away, that by the terms of their oath consigned them forever to the darkness.
“I am counting on it,” she said, shark-like. “Go on, Lady Nerdanel. Set them free. Someone ought to be.”
She could not resist any longer. What broke her resolve was not the tree-light – though she had missed it so badly – nor the feeling of Fëanáro’s spirit around hers, a gentle touch the way their marriage had been in its earliest days, nor even the curious temptation the stones themselves inspired. She simply could not restrain herself from the thought of ending it.
Nerdanel took the stone in her hand, and she could have sworn that she heard a discordant sound, like the breaking of a string in the distance, and then a silence, the kind that comes when a noise you have long stopped noticing, like the chirping of birds or the crackling of the fire, abruptly ends.
“I am not sure I can keep it,” she said. “It did not end so well for the last soul on these shores who was tasked with their protection.”
This was paranoid, and foolish, but Elwing did not laugh. “Perhaps you had best come home with me,” she said. “My wards are not Melian’s, but they are not nothing on my own land, and that tower is mine, shaped by my song and my hands and my grief.”
When she extended her hand, not to reclaim the Silmaril but to take Nerdanel’s hand in her own, Nerdanel reached out to meet her in turn.
--
Nature was not quiet. Maglor had believed it was, once, when a walk in the woods was tranquil in comparison to home, with its noise of hammers and chisels and siblings. He knew better now. The sounds of sea and wind, of birds and beasts, were more intimately familiar to him, and more real, than the sounds of his own people had ever been. There was nothing that remained tying him to the world of elves.
People were quiet, and nature was loud. People were false, and the wilds were real.
As evidence, take the silence that came upon Maglor one morning in late spring, one of the loudest times of the year. The birds had not ceased their chirping, but the silence of civilization had rushed over Maglor, a suffocating thing, and for a moment he could hear nothing at all, and that moment lasted a lifetime. He screamed, and in the silence it was the loudest sound he had ever known. And then every other sound was, as by contrast with this silence, even the smallest scrape of a crab’s legs on stone was thunder.
It took him hours to adjust enough to peel himself off the ground, and hours more to realize, as the next day’s dawn was clearing the horizon, that the silence was real, the absence of a noise that had become so familiar that he had no longer even noticed it.
It was over. It was done. Maglor had not done it, nor could he now enjoy it. There was no one left in all this world to share his freedom with. If it could be called that.
Rising from the sands, he dusted himself off as best he could, and set forth for Lindon-on-the-Sea. There was no risk, now, that his death would consign his brothers to darkness. It was only Maglor at stake, and thus he was able to face his fate alone. He no longer needed to be his own warden.
For seven days and nights he walked north, neither resting nor eating. He was one of the ancients, and had little need for such things. Besides, he had no great need of strength, where he was going, and a great desire not to tarry, for the message he bore was urgent, and they would be searching for him soon enough.
The Star of High Hope had not risen at dusk or dawn through seven passes of each.
--
Lindon’s capital was really three cities, not one, with the Gulf of Lune in between, but in the centuries since Maglor had last seen them the cities had grown so large they had run together in a single swell, and the entire effect was an overwhelming one. Had Tirion ever been so large, he wondered, as he stood on the sands looking up at the walls. He could see one of the gates of the city from here, thrown open with dozens of people passing through freely, baskets and wagons laden with goods and hopes. Down on the water, he could see ships of all colours and shapes, flying flags unknown to him.
He had not thought there were this many elves left in the world, and, indeed, it soon became clear to him that many of Lindon’s inhabitants were not elves – or in some cases, not entirely elves. He saw men with a certain air of the extraordinary about them, and elves with a solid reality in them.
He walked up to the gate; none of the guards stopped him. One of them did look a bit concerned, and whispered to a young runner, but this could as easily have been motivated by his ragged appearance, for he saw the guards also send for assistance to be given to an old man struggling with a mule.
Should he go up and surrender himself to them? No doubt. But now that he was here, he could do aught but follow the storm of sound and smells in the same direction everyone else was moving, into a large market square.
He froze at the entrance to the market, forcing people to shove past him as they entered, but he could hardly be blamed for the fact.
In the centre of it, carved nearly as lifelike as his mother would have done it, was a statue of Elrond. They had remembered him not as a warrior, standing with a weapon or ahorse, but instead as a scholar, for this was a seated statue, robes spread around him, a book open on his lap, and a basket of herbs overflowing at his feet.
“My lord.”
A hand rested itself gently upon his shoulder, and Maglor turned to discover that the first person to have touched him in many centuries was an ellon with severe brows who in spite of them was looking at him with a gentle pity. There was something familiar about him.
“I’m sorry.” It seemed a reasonable greeting for most circumstances.
He nodded in acceptance of this. “We thought you might come. Will you walk with me?”
He extended an arm, like they were going into a ball together, like Maglor was a person. He was certainly familiar.
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
Those severe brows furrowed. “You don’t know it, I think. Erestor of Eregion, they call me. But you might be remembering my parents?”
A parent, maybe. He stared until he could see it, or hear it. There was a hint of the north in his Sindarin accent. That was what let him get there. “Berior? From Himring? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten their wife’s name.”
“Feriadhis,” he said, which did sound familiar. One of Caranthir’s people.
“...How are they?”
“Dead, these last centuries.” Preemptively, he said, “do not apologize again. That was Sauron’s doing, not yours.”
But would Sauron have been free to roam these lands if not for them? If they had gone and surrendered and talked, might they have persuaded Eönwë to a wiser course? If Maglor had kept an eye on Celebrimbor, on Elrond, might-
“Come,” Erestor said, not unkindly, and led him away from the market, up the broad kingsway towards the palace, and then through a series of narrow streets to a side gate, where he withdrew some sort of badge to prove his identity, though surely this was unnecessary, for he was greeted by name.
To another runner loitering near this gate, he said, “would you tell Mistress Forvenith that we need a room, please?” And they followed sedately after the runner down a set of stairs which lead not, as Maglor had expected, to a dungeon, but rather to a set of underground baths, where the aforementioned Mistress Forvenith escorted them down a hall to a private chamber, and left them be.
“Do you want any assistance?”
This was all very surreal. Maybe it was a dream. “No. Why…”
“I suspected you might not want to use the public baths today.” To Maglor’s bafflement, he added, “it’s not an uncommon problem here, which is why we have these rooms. You can book one at any time, if you speak to Forvenith or one of her assistants. You’re expected to bring your own soaps, but under the circumstances I think I can make a requisition from the common stores. Are there any smells you particularly dislike?”
Some long-dead part of his brain, surely killed by centuries of rough living, revived itself like a desert in the rain to say, “musk. I know men like it, but the deer…”
“I know,” Erestor agreed, sympathetically. “I’ll fetch you something kinder.”
And he went and did so, leaving Maglor to figure out the system of pumps that brought hot water from the main baths to this room, where he could scrub salt and dust from his skin, and submit to the indignity of nearly moaning as he sank his body into hot water. When Erestor returned, with honeycomb soap and lavender oil, he thought he might as well have been back in Tirion. There was no place in the round world like this.
Some part of him yearned to fall asleep there, to rest as he had not been able to rest in so many years. But he did not deserve that. He had not come here for a reward, to receive this strange kindness. He had come to surrender, and he would do that in the fashion Fingon’s heir deserved.
Maglor dressed in the robes Erestor had left him, soft grey like he was already dead, with a lavender stole embroidered with flowers, which he hung over his shoulders. He wondered whose clothes these were, or if this was simply a place designed to welcome guests kindly. There was nothing to be done about the knots in his hair, but nevertheless Maglor did as much as he could, and then tied the rest of the mess up, holding it in place with the comb that had been laid atop the robes, a fine thing of gold and abalone in the shape of an eight-point star.
This, unlike the robes, showed clear signs of frequent wear, and Maglor traced a finger across the surface a moment, trying to identify the owner or the maker by the gold’s memory of them, but it felt, more than anything, like Galadriel, which was as good as useless to him.
Erestor was waiting for him outside, and he nodded approvingly at his work.
“Will you take me to the king now?” Maglor asked him.
“And to the Queen,” Erestor said, which was how Maglor learned that, for the first time on these shores, there was a Queen of the Noldor.
--
Maglor had never met Fingon’s son, had only known him across a battlefield and in Maedhros’s memory. He had an image in his mind, of an awkward, determined youth, but there was no air of childhood hanging about him any longer. This was a calm, brilliant figure whose amber hair was held back by a band of gold and sapphires. He was too at ease to seem truly dangerous, though Maglor was sure that, if he was not armed, he must have had a weapon close to hand. For some strange reason, he had chosen to receive Maglor not from his throne, but in a sitting room, with luxurious furniture, a warm woven carpet on the floor, and ostentatious glass doors out onto a balcony that overlooked the sea.
At his side, looking deceptively casual with her feet tucked underneath her, was his fair queen, silver haired and gracefully attired in wide trousers of deep green and a grey shirt. Oddly enough, she looked more Finwëan than her husband did.
Maglor went down on one knee for fealty’s sake, as he had come to do, and then reconsidered and went down on both. “Your Majesty.”
The King held up a hand, and his queen said, “perhaps not in front of Elbrannon?” She drew Maglor’s attention then to the small boy, dedicatedly rolling a tiny cart and wooden horse back and forth on the carpet before her. He was darker-featured than them both, with an adorable round face and ears that stuck out at awkward angles.
“Darling,” she said to her son, “would you like to meet your Grandpa Maglor?”
Maglor stared at her, for she was evidently quite mad. Nobody else in the room reacted as if this was strange behaviour, though little Elbrannon, quite sensibly, shook his head.
Coaxingly, she said, “this is Ada Elrond’s ada.”
He finally looked up from his cart. “A regular ada or a special ada?”
“A special ada, like Grandpa Círdan is your Ada Gil’s special ada.”
Elbrannon looked tremulously up at Maglor, and then, in a further display of good instincts, buried his face in his mother’s side. She stroked his hair gently and told Maglor conversationally, “we’re feeling a little shy today.”
“That is perfectly alright,” Maglor told the child, feeling once again that none of this could be real. “I feel shy sometimes too. And I sometimes like singing more than I like talking to people.”
He couldn’t hear what Elbrannon mumbled in response, but the queen repeated, “Elbrannon sometimes likes to sing too, but singing in front of people is too scary.”
“You never need an audience to sing. You can do it for yourself, or for the clouds, or the waves. Or for your pony.”
This raised his courage enough for a brave, “I like ponies.”
“Perhaps Uncle Erestor can take you to see them,” Gil-galad suggested, prompting a slight frown from Erestor, but no objection. “Would you like that?”
“Okay,” Elbrannon agreed, and he went obediently with Erestor.
Thus, at last, Maglor was alone with Gil-galad and his queen, and instead of any of the things he had meant to say, he said, “that cannot be Elrond’s son. He’s far too young.”
They both looked wounded by this, and the queen said, “he is not Elbrannon’s father by blood, any more than we are. But Elbrannon should have been his son as ours, and we will not raise him ignorant of that. It would have been easier, if we had more of Elrond’s family around to share that with him, but for now, we muddle by.”
She said it as if somehow, Maglor should have been there to educate this small child about Elrond, who he hadn’t seen since Elrond was hardly a few decades older.
Clearly, she was mad, so instead he said to Gil-galad, “I did not take it. I never left these shores.”
“And the oath?”
“Gone.”
He nodded thoughtfully, and his mad queen said, “good.”
And it was good. It was more good than he had known to feel that quiet in his own mind again, to have the space that he could fill it with music without warring with the oath over it.
Gil-galad asked, “do you know who fulfilled it? Or who in Valinor could have, I should say.”
They had never defined it as clearly as they might have liked. Was it only they who had sworn it? Or did it encompass others? “I don’t know. My mother, perhaps, or Liltallë Sarnaxanis. If they are permitting rebirths now… Celebrimbor almost certainly could have, before he renounced us. Perhaps if he recanted?”
The pair of them exchanged a look, and the queen asked, “could Elrond?”
Now that was a possibility. If his mother and Liltallë hadn’t before now, they were unlikely to, and Celebrimbor had chosen to reject them years ago. But Elrond was unpredictable. And Elrond would have an easy time getting his hands on the Silmaril, if he tried.
“Perhaps.”
“Could I have?” Gil-galad asked him. There was an ache underlying the words.
“Likely not. If we had won the Nirnaeth, maybe, and Maedhros had been free to choose.”
If Maedhros had had a hand in raising the boy, as Maglor knew he had wanted so badly.
Gil-galad nodded. “I had always wondered what I might have averted, if I had tried.”
It was a horrible thought. And worse to imagine Maedhros’s blade at his throat had he tried and failed. “The blame for that lies entirely on our heads, and none of it on yours.”
“We’re getting off topic,” said the queen. “The point remains; Elrond could have done it, and probably did. What now?”
It was a kind thought, in truth. A terrible thing, that they had shaped Elrond so, and yet there was a brightness in the knowledge that he counted himself as theirs. Some part of Maglor could not allow that, and it was not difficult to find a counterargument to latch onto.
“Why would Elrond not have put it back? He knows as well as any the power of Gil-Estel.”
“He might have feared that giving it back would reignite the oath.”
“Then the whole thing would have been pointless, since the other two are lost forever. No, it cannot have been Elrond.” An unlikely but unpleasant thought occurred. “Did Amdirdis ever win permission to sail?” Caranthir's wife had been as bloody as the rest of them, by the end.
“Not as far as we know, though she hasn’t been seen since Eregion fell. But I find it unlikely.”
Gil-galad sighed, sounding as bone tired as any High King ever had. “Best to call the banners, then. I won’t have us caught unawares by some catastrophe. There is always an outside chance that this is a sign of the end times. Have you heard from your parents yet?”
The queen nodded. “Naneth pushed Amroth to begin arming as soon as Eärendil deviated from the usual cycle. Her mirror has revealed nothing of use, yet, but Ada will ride for the Greenwood in the morning to see they're preparing as well.”
Gil-galad looked directly at Maglor, with a sharpness his father had never entirely mastered, and said, “you were a skilled general, once. What would you do, in my position?”
Ah, but history’s whims were strange. “I was a terrible general; I just followed orders and tried not to die. If you are arming for the end of days, you surely need a better advisor than me.”
“The end of days,” said the queen, “or perhaps an invasion from the West with rather less good intentions than the one led by my grandfather. We should dig out the plans for Númenorean invasion, Ereinion. They can be modified easily enough.”
Ingwion had a granddaughter on these shores? That was a scandal. And wait- “you cannot go to war with the Valar!”
They looked at each other, an entire debate held between their souls, before the queen turned to him and said, “the timing is too coincidental for us not to suspect Elrond’s involvement. But you are right. If Elrond is involved, and the star is not returned… something else must have happened. And if that something else is harm to Elrond, or the shedding of his blood, I will not be held responsible for my actions.”
Magor could say nothing to that.
Gil-galad said, “we are decided, then. Thank you for attending on us, Maglor. It is more help than you know to be certain that the stone was, at least for a time, in the hands of Fëanor’s house, and that those hands were not your own. Your presence here will remain something of a secret, for now. It would not be advisable to play our hand too far from the chest. But I would ask that you remain. Whatever my feelings may be, Elrond would not think too kindly of us if we allowed any harm to come to you. There will have to be some sort of verdict delivered, but wartime affords us a delay for exceptional circumstances, I should think. And whatever it is shall have to be more constructive than destructive – I’ll not account myself a kinslayer while other choices are before me.”
“So we are agreed,” his queen intoned, and she rose gracefully to her feet. She was exceptionally tall, and strongly built too, someone who knew craft and work well. It was no difficulty for her to reach down and haul Maglor to his feet. “I will bring you to your room, if you will follow me. And perhaps find a comb with the strength to stand up to your hair. If it comes to it, I can always make one.”
She was remarkably beautiful. There was something so familiar about her. It wasn’t Ingwion, he was sure. Perhaps the other side of her family? “Forgive me, my queen, I fear your name slipped past me."
“Master Celebrían Nerissë,” she told him, wickedly, “by my marriages, Queen of the Noldor, Lady of Imladris, and of Tol Himring.” A small curtsey. “At your service, of course.”
Ah. That explained the rather fanatical devotion to Elrond. And the looks, and the height.
Artanis was going to kill him.
“At yours,” he replied, since it seemed the polite thing to say, and let her lead him away.
--
Thunder rolled across the sky and wind whistled above the stormy seas below. Any other night, Idril would have gone out to remind Ossë to spare their ships as well as those of the well-loved Teleri, but she could not stand the idea of asking divine favour tonight. She felt sick at the thought.
In the morning, before the storm had struck, Idril's son had come home to her. She always saw too little of him, frequently drawn away as he was to sail the stars, and so every visit was a delight. This one, however, had swiftly turned to horror. All these years, Idril had thought of Eärendil's mission, the blessing she had named him for, as a grand duty, though a difficult one. She had not seen, as he confessed now, the ways in which it could be wielded against him.
"People pray to me," he had said, hands clutched tight in his lap and teacup abandoned on the table. "And I hear their prayers. My mind is not built for such things, and I can offer them no more than a glimpse of hope, but I hear nonetheless."
Idril's own prayers flowed into the sea, to that most unknowable of the holy ones, and yet she could divine the sort of things Eärendil was called to witness. Even in times of peace, many were unkind, and that could not compare to what they were in times of war. This confession alone would, therefore, have been enough to raise Idril's temper, in the knowledge that her treasured boy had suffered a thing he could not speak.
But that had not been the end of it, of course.
"He called for me," Eärendil had said, "my son called my name, a cry of war or of desperation as he stepped between his husband and the world's enemy, and I saw him die, and there was nothing I could do."
"His husband?" Idril had asked, for she had never heard before that her distant grandson was married. That was when the rest of it had come out, the tale of Elwing and Eärendil's plea to the Valar for answers and the revelation that it was the Statute of Míriel that bound their only remaining child to death without hope of respite.
"I had watched him marry," Eärendil had said. "He did not pray then, not as you or I would understand prayer, but in a moment of ritual he spoke my name, in naming himself as my son. He spoke it so rarely, did not see me as a divine thing as others did, I think, but in that moment he said it, and I saw him happy."
"Moment," Tuor had inquired, "or moments?"
"Moment. He married both of them together, all three party to the affair."
Eärendil was perhaps one of the only parents in elvendom who was unphased by this, for he had known the hearts of his own parents were the same. And so he had taken joy in his son's happiness and won horrible sorrow by it.
"He's asleep," Tuor reported, having made his way quietly down the stairs to join Idril and Voronwë in their sitting room. “We should let him rest as long as we can, I think. Once he let himself relax, he seemed so very tired.”
He sounded tired too, as broken by the day’s revelations as Idril felt herself.
Voronwë, if it was possible, sounded worse when he said, "this is my fault. If I had agreed to marry you after the Fall, when you asked me, it would have been us who learned the statute held in cases of equal partnership."
Voronwë had had good reasons for declining their request, tied up in the Noldorin views of marriage and of sex. Now, it proved, there had been better reasons than he knew.
"Or they would not have told us," Tuor said, "because none of us have ever died. Or perhaps they would not count our marriage at all, because it is the spirits of elves, not of men, that have ever troubled the Valar in this regard." Still, he went to kiss Voronwë's forehead before taking his own seat by the fire.
Idril said, "I blame the Valar and them alone. Even if it were not for this, the Statute was always stupid, and even if it were not for the statute, there would still be the matter of them chaining our baby. To make a man watch the deaths of his children, unable to intervene? That is one of the great wickednesses."
There was a streak of the family madness in her. It paled before the more notorious figures in their history perhaps – she was neither Fëanor nor Artanis nor even Aunt Aredhel – but it had never been more stark than it was now. What cause had they to compare to the righteousness of her own? She wanted a weapon, a tool to bring them low for the thing they had done to her son. She wanted to be Lúthien, marching into death itself to demand justice, or at least to be Fëanor, with all the words to whip up an army. She wanted the sword she had long laid aside, a gift from someone she would rather have wielded it against. Right at this very moment, she even wanted him at her side.
It was this thought that led her to utter certainty of what Eärendil and Elwing must have done, of the reason the star was not in the sky this night.
“We need to do something,” Voronwë declared, for he was not her husband and was not privy to her innermost thoughts unless she spoke them aloud. “We must not let them call him back there. I would rather do it myself than let him go back.”
"He cannot be called back. Not without a war." To Tuor's look of concern – he was a man and likewise could not share her thoughts – Idril clarified, "I am not starting a war yet, beloved. Only, the Silmaril is not here, and Elwing loathes to carry it herself. I do not think she would choose to do so without a reason. And I, for one, can think of a very good reason. I know what I would do in her place."
Idril had much cause to hate Fëanor's sons. But unlike most who hated them, she also knew them. She remembered when her father, her aunt, and Uncle Finrod had been three members of a reliable quintet rounded out by two of them. She remembered Celegorm's playful spirit, and Curufin's lashing tongue, and Finrod laughing at them both. In the thing she imagined doing now, she could have wanted no ally more than them. They would not have restrained her fury.
Elwing did not know them, had more cause than any yet living to hate them, but she, of all people, knew the power of Fëanor's sons, and of their oath. She would know, as well as anyone other than them could, what it meant to see it fulfilled. Perhaps the only thing more dangerous to the peace of Valinor than stealing the Silmaril was giving it back to the last innocent in Fëanor’s house.
Idril explained this line of thought as best she could, after which Voronwë said, "that bodes ill for any attempt by the Valar to reclaim the thing. There are enough Fëanorians on these shores that if any was to take it from Nerdanel, or to harm her in an attempt… war would follow, like as not.”
“Nerdanel is a peaceful soul by all accounts,” Tuor remarked, “More than Fëanorians would find action taken against her disgraceful.”
Even as they spoke, Idril's mind was already racing on, recalling those tense days before the last outbreak of violence in Valinor, the days of shouting she had not yet fully understood. Was Mandos as Fëanor had said then, but another thralldom? Was Elrond the only prisoner? Where was Celebrimbor, who had been so dear to Idril and was accounted to have died well, if horribly? Where was her mother, who had never even set foot upon the far shore?
Though neither Voronwë nor Tuor could follow her coursing thoughts, they knew her. Voronwë rose, abandoning his quilt, and came to kneel before Idril, taking her restless hands in his own.
"Beloved, we will stand with you, and with our son. If you ask it, I will stand with Nerdanel and the whole unworthy crowd of her husband's folk, and raise a sword. But first, let us try the peaceful route and begin with a wedding?"
Any other day that Voronwë had agreed to wed would have been among the happiest of Idril's life. As it was, the tears she had been resisting all day rose at last in her eyes. When Tuor came and took them both in his arms, she wept for the suffering of her child, and of so many others.