The Fëanorians Send Their Regards

It was possible, if not wise, to trace the path Ungoliant and Melkor had scorched across the Helcaraxe as they left. Not wise, because her footprints left deep, sharp abysses in the rock. The fog around their trail was thick and muddy and clung low to the ground and made it impossible to see if your next step would land on solid rock or slice you into ribbons against one of her footprints.

We followed it fifty miles. I wondered often if he was mad. I wondered occasionally if we were perhaps going to cross the ice ourselves and try to fight Melkor alone, just the two of us, my father and the one person who’d been there when the impulse struck him.

It wasn’t how I wanted to die but I suppose that way we wouldn’t have taken a whole people down with us.

And then the tracks changed. The smoky mire rose higher, chest-deep, then taller than we were, the razors cut into the ice lost the pattern of hasty flight and squared themselves off. Miles around, scarred rock and ice.

“There are powers in this world, ones not known to the Valar, that can destroy Melkor,” he said. 

“Maybe he’s already dead,” I said. It was a weak joke in the best of circumstances and the circumstances made it entirely humorless. My father shook his head, gravely.

“He’s still alive. But he called for help, look -”

And I strained my eyes against the ice and dark and mire. “Tyelcormo found this?”

“Yes.”

“And told you?”

“Ambarto,” my father chided, “stop being dense.”

Father, I wanted to say, stop being so lost that you bend the trails around you, so angry that you stir the hearts around you, so oblique that even the people who hold their whole selves up to you cannot see in - “All right. So we secretly followed him out onto the Helcaraxe and we learned that Ungoliant came very close to killing him, so close that he needed to call for help. And you want to - what, make her a deal, ask her to finish the job, I suppose we do have something we could use to pay a spider who eats light -”

He was shaking his head. 

“ - figure out what she is, and where she came from, and if there’s more, there?”

“Closer.”

“Figure out her magic and harness it yourself.”

He was already rocking back and forth impatiently, which means I was right. “Beyond the Void, they said. What’s beyond the Void? The stars. What are the stars? I asked Varda once, you know - the stars are the building dust of the universe, swept up together into an enormous furnace, slowly burning themselves out. Did you know that? She doesn’t emphasize it. I think she thinks we’ll adore her less. Star-kindler, you know. It’s not as impressive a title if they will not endure forever - and they will endure very very long, even as the Ainur count time, it is not as if she will soon be exposed as a liar -”

Grief had not driven him mad, I thought. Grief had taken him and drawn him inwards towards himself, so now the core was at the surface, and the core had always been unstable, brilliant, quick to seize things and quick to discard them and capable of valuing them only when they were part of the present blazing chain of inference. Grief had whittled away everything else and left this.

“Beyond the Void,” he said, “there came Ungoliant, and who knows what else, and someday we will find it all but it will be a long time even as the Ainur count it, for the stars are very far away. No, I can’t do that yet. I don’t even know the things I need to know - but oh, Ambarto, I will learn them -”

“I believe you.”

“So we need to harness her power. She lives, I think, but it might be a mistake to confront her directly.”

I shuddered. I’d been in Formenos when the darkness had come. He hadn’t. 

He was watching me intently. “Yes, your brothers said that too.”

I managed not to protest that I hadn’t even said anything. “We - ran towards it,” I murmured instead. “But I would not do so for any lesser stakes, and if we’d made it there in time you’d have had more to bury, less to work with -” Because he was working with us. As sounding boards, as mirrors for his own desperate inner construction and demolition, not for any talents we possessed in our own right. But that was fine.

“We should not confront her,” he says. “It is lucky that she left traces of herself behind.” 

And he gestures at the mire settling all around us. 

It is too cold to laugh; I make a laughing expression, instead. “You’re going to bottle it up and make, what, new Silmarils?”

“People keep asking me ‘what are the new Silmarils going to be?’ As if whatever I do next is bound to be some variant on them, as if ‘handheld gems’ are the only form my talents can take -”

I looked away, at the mire.

“I am going to pick it apart and put it back together and learn what power she has, and where she got it, and then I am going to stitch it into something that can kill a god. You are going to help me carry samples.”

So I did. I did say, when we were around halfway back, “you could have gotten anyone to take samples.”

“Well, yes,” he said, surprised or maybe just distracted by grief, as he was, near constantly. “But you needed to know.”

“ - thank you. ...other people need to know, too.”

“I have too much to do to herd people on field trips,” he says, “and it’s not as convincing in the telling.”

“I suppose not. I - thank you.”

“You said that already. It’s hazardous ground, and gets worse ahead, I won’t risk people just to awe them. Maybe Canafinwë can make a song. We will have the time on the next stage of the march.” The Helcaraxë we had judged impassable, if enlightening. We would go south.

Nod. Stomp. 

“The Teleri won’t have seen it,” I said. “They’ll see you and - you’re not as organized in the telling, these days.”

“I can see too clearly to make good guesses at what the world looks like to the blind,” he says dismissively.

“Yes, and that’s a weakness.”

“Ambarto.”

I felt guilty. He’d said, after all, that he’d chosen to take me in particular, because I needed to trust him -

- and he wasn’t wrong, there was in fact a power in this world that could destroy a Vala -

“Song’s a good idea,” I said, and he nodded dismissively, his mind already elsewhere. He vanished into his workshop and I stared out at our host, biting my lip until the cold and the pressure split it neatly in the center. Then I worried at the wound until my mouth tasted of blood. 

I’ve killed people, Findekáno reminded himself. He did not do so very often because there was work to do and the thought always left him numb again, inside and out, in a way that the cold never could. The work marched on. They got swifter, more experienced, more confident. Araman’s mists still howled around their tents, still choked them, still shifted to reveal only a black and nightmarish landscape of jagged glaciers. But they knew the glaciers, now, and were not afraid of them. The work marched on. Fear and grief and anger had been unwelcome guests, but now they were constant companions and sometimes almost friends. And there was progress. Through whatever kind of magic that kind of thing required, there were fish in the seas, and seals. As many as there’d been before the Darkening, even. You could drill a hole through the ice, or melt one, and catch them with a few hours’ patience and some rapidly-growing expertise. At last they had a source of food that could be expected to be reliable even once they’d left Araman behind. It was enough they would not starve, if not enough they would not be hungry. Ulmo was rapidly becoming Findekáno’s favorite Vala; he seemed to be the only one doing his job. Though the Pelóri were still inching upwards, and perhaps that was what occupied the rest of them. It was too optimistic, perhaps, to imagine that the Valar were making a deliberate effort not to let them starve out here, but certainly Ulmo, who had every reason to hate him, was not withholding the fruits of his realm. “We’re not the only ones who have need of it,” Angaráto said, when Findekáno expressed this. They were at the first ice camp, three days’ travel north and west of Araman, dug into the cliffs themselves, smug and cozy and satisfactory as a waystation for the host. The plan was to establish fifty of these, stretching across the ice like jewels on a necklace on Endorë’s breast. “You think they’d have the nerve to fish?” he said to Angaráto, hanging up his cloak. Carefully, so it would dry instead of freezing.

“No,” his cousin said, his tone going brittle, as if he hadn’t been the one who’d brought up them. “Me neither.” Findekáno sat down and started rebraiding his hair so he could pluck the ice crystals out of it. “They’re not the only ones on that shore,” Angaráto said, and Findekáno suddenly grasped why he’d been annoyed a moment earlier – he hadn’t been thinking of the house of Fëanáro after all, he’d sincerely resented being reminded of them - “Elwe’s ruling a thriving kingdom among those who were left behind, Ossë said –” “He did? Recently?” “No, this was decades ago. They’re not speaking to us now.” “But you think Elwe and the rest of his people are still all right.” “If we get there in time.” “My father intends to announce a departure from Araman in two weeks, once the third camp is finished.” “I know.” “We can’t help anyone when we arrive there if we lose half our host on the way.”

“I’ve communicated to your father that I have no objections to his intended departure date.” Findekáno tied off his hair, though it was only half-braided. “Angaráto, I know I have said this before, but – I regret it very deeply, ever day, and I will more when I have time to come to terms with it –” “I know,” he said, “and you want the same things as I do, from here forward. Which means we can work together, which is what matters.” Nod. Pause. “You think Ulmo and Ossë and Uinen are keeping the seas alive for our sundered kin?” “They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. And – if it is for us, well – I have sometimes thought - the seas were calm, the night the other host departed.” “I remember,” Findekáno said. “They want us on the other shore. They want us in the fight. Not for our sakes, I don’t think, but that’s fine, because that’s not why I’m fighting.” “Me neither.” But he headed out, a minute later, because under his cousin’s eyes the fish tasted like ash. The camp was vast – it had to be – and three hundred figures flitted around it, testing embankments and moving supplies and packing down drifts of snow that were ten meters high. The winds were picking up, but not in the way that threatened a storm. Under happier circumstances he would have delighted in this; it would have been a challenge perfectly suited to his strengths, to his skills, to his daring. The light of Aman burned in their veins. No incarnate creature had ever been better suited to this. But under happier circumstances there would have been no pressure to reach the other side as quickly as possible, no innocents dragged in his wake and ready to pay for his mistakes… He spent the whole of his shift off, and the next three, hacking his way through a difficult section of ice, making the path wide enough that broad supply sledges could pass through unimpeded. It always helped with the moping. Irissë said that she liked to imagine hammering the spikes into a smug, honorless Fëanorian face. But for Findekáno half the appeal was that when he was in motion he was warm, inside and out, body and soul, which was the closest that he came to forgetting them. It was snowing harder, flakes melting on his face and then refreezing on his collar. He looked bearded like Aulë. He worked faster. When the messengers appeared at the peak of a snowy hilltop he knew it was ugly news, simply because there was no good report imaginable – what, Finwë had returned from the Halls and marched out into exile to join them? The Valar had sent a herald to say “all is forgiven, never mind about that enduring doom that will blot out the futures and turn to ruin the achievements even of your grandchildren and their grandchildren”? News was always trouble, here. He felt the warmth bleed out of his limbs. “Avalanche,” Irissë said, when she reached him. Her eyes were dark and hard, as if the tears had frozen in them. “Twenty. Findekáno –” “Injured,” he said, not a question but a correction, as if he had the power to somehow change the message she’d brought, “tell me twenty injured –” She didn’t answer. She clawed the fast-falling snow off her face and then he could see the story even before she recovered enough to draw breath for it.

Araman. The nightmare into which they’d carved a camp out of sheer stubbornness. The scouring winds now barely touched the camps, insulated as they were by the snow. The fog was pierced at regular intervals by lampstones. Supplies were piled up for transport, sledges were hammered into shape on the scoured ice plains, and crab-traps dragged sustenance from the waves that lashed the rocky shorelines. And behind their camp, the Pelóri were slowly growing taller. Was that the reason? Irissë didn’t know, and from the snapshots crashing down on him Findekáno certainly couldn’t even formulate a guess. They had camped at the edge of the ice and the edge of the water and the edge of Aman, and today the mountains had begun to rumble. They had not seen it coming, not among the fogs and whirling snowflakes, but they’d heard it, and families had called their children back to the tents, back to safety. The roar had grown louder. More terrible than the sounds the dying Trees had made. More terrible than the thunder that had accompanied Melkor as he fled the land. More terrible than the way the world had twisted and shaken in the throes of Melkor and the gods. Twenty dead. Hundreds injured, dozens trapped still –

- he took off back for camp, at a run –

By the time they arrived it was forty-one dead. Elves could go without breath a long time, but not quite that long.  The ones still trapped and alive had gotten lucky, such as it was, the tons of snow borne down on them leaving them with a pocket of air. They were sending their location while everyone frantically hacked the snow aside. Layers and layers of it, and each one had pummelled the snow beneath it into a densely packed nightmare. They were not going to be in time. They were not nearly going to be in time. He drew up short, his chest being wrenched open in one direction by oxygen deprivation and in the other direction by searing emotional pain, and some fraction of his mind marvelled at the scale of it, wider than any river he’d seen, the unimaginable force and power –

He doubled over, coughing, eyes stinging, calculating how much farther the diggers had to go before there was any hope of unearthing survivors. He felt the insides of his mouth freeze as he coughed. He straightened up, again, and willed his lungs back to attention, willed his breathing steadier. He looked up at the mountains. And he sang. (Creation was woven out of song; what better than song to alter it?) Lighter, he told the snow, like cloud fluff, like fog, like marshmellow desserts puffed carefully over a fire back in Alqualondë-it-aches-to-think-about.  Light like fog, part for us like water in a stream, quickly, quickly, let us out, let us go, let us live… The people around him joined in. The people digging joined in. The whole host joined in, until the sound surrounded them all, and the diggers threw snow aside like golden hay back in Valinor in the years-it-hurts-to-think-about, and still they were not in time. Fifty four. An hour after the last Elf stopped calling they stopped digging, stopped singing, stood dazed and exhausted and breathless and weeping at the edges of the sea of snow. Findekáno looked up at the yawning blackness where the Pelóri blotted out the stars and found himself not just lost for words but lost for thoughts, so far beyond grief that he could no longer recognize it. Someone pulled him inside. The warmth burned his skin, burned so badly. He tried to push them away; his movements were slow and clumsy. He tried to claw his burning skin off. Someone restrained him. There was a bed, and he thought, briefly and vaguely, that it was absurd to imagine he could sleep while he was burning like this, and then his eyes fell shut of their own accord and he was far too exhausted to lift them.

When he woke the tent had twice as many people as usual. Right, some of the other ones had been crushed in the avalanche. He wiggled his toes experimentally. Two or three of them still responded to instructions. He stood up. He took a deep breath. It hurt, badly. Everything hurt. He remembered thinking yesterday that some had been physical pain and some psychological, but now it seemed terribly strange to separate them. Everything he endured had been inflicted on him deliberately by someone he’d once trusted; everything he endured his people were enduring, people who trusted him; every pain could be felt a hundred thousandfold and that wouldn’t be enough to capture what it meant, what it was, what had been done - Outside the tent people were singing. He needed to get to work. He dressed, slowly and unsteadily, instructing his joints on their proper functioning as they proved themselves deficient. People rolled aside for him, bleary-eyed, and he pushed apart the fabrics and then the additional fabrics at the door, and then he was looking out on cold and starlit Araman again. Turukáno turned his head. “We’re leaving now. Worried it’ll happen again –” “Could happen on the road”, Findekáno said, scanning for people who were doing something laborious and hurrying in their direction. “Yup.” “We lose anyone else in the night?” “Three.”

“I wish I had stayed out of it in Alqualondë,” Findekáno said. It was only half-true – he was too numb inside to feel anything, ‘wish’ implied an intensity he could not quite summon to the surface, but the substance was right. He would, now, have left them to die. At least it would have been quick.

They left as soon as everything could be prepared. The third camp wasn’t done yet, but the unknown was less terrifying than the looming mountains that could at any moment shift in some microscopic way that tons of cascading down to swallow the shoreline alive. They left as planned, three-abreast and with the sledges, scouting groups circling out ahead to reach the campsites and complete them and ensure that there’d be food when the exhausted camp arrived. It was heartening, actually, to be moving. In Araman the memory of suffocation, the last thoughts sent by the last dying Elves, was too close. Only once it was out of sight could they hope to feel anything else. They marched. They sang. They moved with Elven grace and grim determination. They climbed the cliffs and they weaved through fields of ice and rock and by the time they reached the first camp Findekáno almost felt warm. His father found him as the host filed past him into camp. Nolofinwë looked – older, thousands of years older, millions of years older. It was an odd thing to think, Findekáno realized even as he thought it, because Elves did not visibly age. But whatever the difference was between an adolescent and an adult, that was the difference between his father a week ago and his father now. He had the reassuringly steady air about him that the Valar always strived for, and such a palpable grief that Nienna would have seemed comparatively sunny. “King,” Findekáno said. “The camp is well-designed.”

“Thank you.”

“You set a poor example for our people and your brothers when you work yourself to the point of catatonia and need be guided off to bed.” “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t say ‘I’ll do better.’ His father notices, of course, and raises an eyebrow. “It’s torture, sitting still.” “I insist anyway.” Findekáno swallows. “All right. Are you – are people –“ “Two dead children had parents who decided to turn back in the hopes that Mandos, despite the words spoken against us, will see fit to restore them to life someday. The father of one we lost found it increasingly painful to move or speak or think, and remained in Araman to die of grief.” Nod. “Everyone else is moving forwards. At this point they will no longer be able to expect an easier route back than forwards, and I have apprised them of this; they are confident that ahead lies the hopes of our people.” “That answers my second question –“ “I made the decision to guide my people on this road in the expectation of losses more grievous still, and I grieved these horrors when I chose them. I am fine. You?” “As long as we win the war. Then it’ll all be worth it.” “…I suppose that’s a safe enough thing to stake your sanity to.” Findekáno half-grinned. “Yes, that’s what I thought.” Not because they were certain to win, but because if they lost it was not as if his sanity would matter for much longer. “Are you going to rest?” “Surely the point of your scolding, your grace, was that I should rest when tired, not that I should rest whenever a cozy tent presented itself?” “As I think I said quite clearly, you should rest whenever it would serve our people to see you resting. What you need actually has very little to do with it.” “Yes, your grace.” “You should occasionally address me as ‘Father’, you know, lest I forget.” “If it were just my father telling me to rest more I’d ignore him,” Findekáno says, “your grace.” “I don’t think I ever told you how often I said variations on that to my father.” Findekáno half-grinned again. He couldn’t get past half-grin, actually, the relevant muscles were too stiff. “No, you didn’t. Perhaps all sons of kings come to it independently.” “All the ones with any inclination to respect either their father or their sovereign, at least.” “What are you going to say to Fëanáro when –“ “I do not know. It will likely be unwise for us to meet face-to-face.” “I’ve been worrying, idly, that they’ll try a more forthright method of murder when the indirect one succeeds only incompletely.” “I have worried about that also,” Nolofinwë said. “I think it more in character for my brother to pretend he never wronged us; doubling down on murder would admit it was murder in the first place.” “Can even he lie to himself about what he’s done –“ “Of course he can.”

He went to their family’s tent. Itarillë was sitting on the floor, feet soaking in lukewarm water, singing the tengwar to herself. She looked up when he walked in. “Finno!” “Itarillë!” he said, copying her tone because it was easier to echo warmth and enthusiasm than to find it inside himself. “I have been ordered to rest, but perhaps my father merely wanted me on babysitting duty.” “I don’t need babysitting,” she said, wiggling her toes. “’m not a baby. I’m twenty. It’s a good thing the Darkening happened when it did because Mommy and Daddy were going to try for a little sister for me and then there’d be a baby and then the baby wouldn’t know anything but cold.” And your parents would have stayed in Tirion, he didn’t correct her, and maybe that would have been better, I would have missed you terribly but you’d have been safe, and steadied by Valinor’s slow pace, the war over before you were grown. He sat down. “I didn’t know that!” Splash splash. “It was a secret. I don’t think it’s still a secret, though, because it’s not true anymore.” “Well, no. The Eldar do not bear children in wartime.” “Why not?” “Children should have peace and safety, and we have all of the Ages of Arda and should bear them into the time that gives them the best hope of peace and safety.” “And warmth.” “Yes, and warmth.” “That means it might be Ages before I get my baby sister, though, and I’ll just be a grownup to her.” “It might be Ages,” he agreed, “but I was grown up when Irissë was born and when Arakáno was born and I do not think I am just a grownup to them.” Frown. “Okay. …they won’t remember the Trees.” “They won’t.” “They won’t remember being safe and happy.” Findekáno peeled off wet socks. “By the time your mother and father are ready to have them, we will all be safe and happy again.” “Mmmm,” Itarillë said. “Will you sing to me?” “Yeah, of course.”

She was asleep by the time her parents came back. Both of them looked at her and then at Findekáno, and Elenwë smiled slightly. “She’s been having a hard time getting to sleep,” Elenwë murmured. Findekáno clasped and unclasped his hands. “Haven’t we all.” “You like to think you can shield them.” “I – don’t get the sense she’s very shielded.” Turukáno made a vaguely despairing noise. “She’s a smart kid,” Findekáno added, in case that softened the observation any. “Which means she will very cleverly pick up on things no child should ever have to deal with,” Turukáno said. “Damn them.” “They are,” Findekáno said. “Damned, I mean. Very thoroughly – problem is, so are we –“ They sat in silence, listened to the howling winds.

Further on the ice was breaking up, the ground unstable. Why the ice was breaking up was beyond Findekáno’s reckoning, it being far below freezing, but they were learning to recognize the signs. The floes here bobbed on the water, independent and eager to prove it by striking out on their own. They’d have to route around. Farther north, where there was solider ground but no food to be found. They were running through their supplies too fast. He’d mostly stopped eating. Itarillë’s soft grey eyes were too big in her face. “If you’d known,” he said to Elenwë in the tent one day – “I wasn’t under any illusions,” she murmured, her fingers anxiously massaging her sleeping daughter’s frostbitten feet. “Everyone keeps saying that,” Findekáno said. “I guess I am the only one who was under any illusions.” “I think the Ñoldor have an unusually short collective memory,” she offered. “We grew up hearing about the first war-“ “So did we –“ “ – differently. Turukáno told me - ghost stories to scare children around a fire, racing around in the palace cellars imagining that the world was dark, chase games of Elves and orcs – the way we told it was that we were hopelessly and utterly outmatched, and that a god toyed with us to exactly the degree that pleased him until other gods decided to stop him, a story on a scale where we were ants, leaves in the wind, never characters –“ Findekáno pinched his own fingertips. He couldn’t feel them anymore, hadn’t for months. “Then why come?” “It’s the right thing to do.” “Is it?” “Yes, of course. Why are you doing it?” “I’m not afraid of anything,” Findekáno said, “but I also don’t have children.” “I have a daughter with all the ages of Arda ahead of her and I desire that she be safe and happy but I desire also that she believe that she matters.” “You just said – in your stories, no one mattered, we were hopelessly outclassed –“ “And that is truer than the Ñoldor realize,” Elenwë said, “but less true than the Vanyar think it, and in neither direction is there really any affordance for error.” “Ah.” “We are hopelessly outclassed and it is going to be terrible on a scale we cannot fathom and failure will be worse than we can comprehend and we are leaves on the wind and we still matter.” He nodded, numbly.

“Anyway,” she said, “I married a Noldo, I chose to believe your version of the legends.” “I don’t think it works that way.” “Sure it does. Stories aren’t – beliefs, they’re frames. If you can’t both feel like you matter and properly fathom the gods – and it doesn’t look like you can – I want her to believe she can be a hero.” “But it’s either true or it isn’t.” Thin smile. “You know, I think mothers get foresight because without it we’d never have the courage to let our children step outside. “ “…she comes out okay?” “She comes out okay.” He exhaled. “And she matters.” Elenwë said firmly, and her hands traced the scars on her daughter’s feet. “I don’t suppose you happen to know about the rest of us.” “ – I would have told you.” “Would you have? Even if it was terrible?” “Oh, it will be terrible,” she said, “but that’s not foresight, that’s just – obvious.” “If I hadn’t – helped, at Alqualondë –“ “Then maybe we’d have the help of the Valar and we’d have crossed safely and no families would be sundered and Turukáno’s best friend wouldn’t feel vaguely sick at the sight of him. You wanted to matter, right?” “…not like that.” “I did not think so.” He could not think of anything to say. “Or,” she went on, “maybe we’d have stood there and watched them all die, for the crime of being too desperate to stop the greatest evil the world will ever know, for the crime of being discourteous in their desperation, and then the Valar would have doomed us anyway, for it is not obvious to me that they cared primarily about how much blood was spilled, and it was too late for it to be none. And there’d be no one on the other shore, and no better prospects of reaching it.” He bit his lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “That is all the absolution I can offer you.” “I wasn’t looking for absolution.“ “Well,” she said, “do hold on to it anyway, you might need it someday.”

They marched. They ate. They slept. Sometimes anger at the other host, at the Valar, at the Enemy, at the callousness with which promise after promise had been betrayed, flared up and made the tents feel unbearably warm and confining, and he hacked his way through the ice instead. More often it was impossible to care, all the promises so distant he could not remember ever having believed them. When he imagined it now, reaching the other side, he – couldn’t. There were lots of people on the other side, hopefully, fighting the Enemy; some of them looked like people he’d once known. He was vaguely aware that this was a better revenge than the ones he’d planned when he’d wanted revenge, but the thought stirred no feelings at all. It was so cold. One day they failed to skirt the unstable ice by enough. Even in the wind the sharp crack carried, and he turned around and blinked away the stinging cold and ordered people rerouted and ordered a head count and ordered supplies reshuffled so as to put less pressure on the ice in other places where it had seemed similarly – and apparently falsely – safe. People were screaming but that was all the more reason to give instructions instead of rushing in to join them. He was numb. He was so numb. He headed in to witness the results of the calamity and felt himself grow number still. Itarillë, Elenwë had said, came out okay. She was uninjured, now, wrapped in a dozen dry blankets while someone frantically toweled her hair dry before it froze that way. There were no such promises for the rest of them. They’d torn off Elenwë’s clothes because the wet fabric wasn’t helping. They’d broken her ribs trying to get her heart beating again. Her hair had frozen, thin wispy white icicles, and even at the roots it wasn’t melting. Findekáno came to a halt and closed his eyes, as if the world didn’t have to be this way until he noticed it, as if he could stave it off for as long as there was a strand of uncertainty to cling to. Elves could survive a lot. Elves could survive worse than – Someone took his hand. Guided him somewhere else. He did not resist them.  As always, warmth burned. It managed to do this without chasing away the numbness.

“Are you,” he said to Turukáno much much later – it seemed like years – “are you going to be okay.” “No.” “Ever?” “No.” “Is there anything I can do –“ “Ask the King.” “I meant for you, not for our people.” “There is nothing you can do for me.” “I’m so sorry.” “Are you.” Oh, Findekáno could still hurt. He’d wondered. That had hurt. “Yes.” “Mmm.”

But Angaráto had never said anything like that so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I am chasing absolute understanding of the universe.”

He threw his head back and laughed. My father says that the Lindar laugh to be heard and the Ñoldor laugh to be seen. The former are expressing emotion, the latter performing it. If that’s so, I’m a Ñoldo after all, because laughter and humor and grace and charm have always been performances for me, learned only by calibrating my movements to the disapproval of the people around me. But Angaráto has our mother’s unselfconscious sincerity, and even while he was laughing at me I felt warm.

“Now?” he said. “That seems like a project for the end of the ages. The world’s still new, what are you going to do once you’ve finished understanding all of it?” 

“Imagine if we’d never put numbers to parchment,” I shot back, “thinking arithmetic a problem for the end of ages, and not knowing – because we’d never begun – that every new invention in mathematics invites a dozen more questions, harder ones, more meaningful ones.” 

Angaráto never studied arithmetic. It’s considered a woman’s art. There are men who do it, at university, but they all have a peculiar sort of performative indifference to peoples’ assumptions which my second-oldest brother could never muster. Angaráto is never indifferent to anything, and bristles at assumptions, and would have made himself miserable studying mathematics.

I still wish he had.

“So do research in mathematics,” he said, “take that masterwork certification of yours and go to Valimar and throw yourself into whatever they’re arguing over. Or ask Turukáno if he’s still looking for tutoring –”

“He was looking for tutoring?” I said, astonished. My cousin Turukáno seemed even less likely to develop a passion for mathematics than Angaráto. Stiff, patient, quiet, a person who moved slowly. I did not dislike him but we had nothing in common. 

“Wants to impress a girl, I think.” 

That made more sense. It also made my interest in tutoring him evaporate immediately.

“I’ll come back to mathematics once I’ve learned everything else,” I said. 

He nodded absently. “Metalworking? Embroidery?”

Both …politically charged subjects in this family, to put in mildly. “No.”

“Suppose not. Glassblowing? Music?” 

“I’m more interested in theory than practice,” I said.

“I’ve noticed.” That made me, briefly, reconsider. If he’d noticed that meant other people had noticed, and if people were thinking of me as a dilettante who knew everything in principle and nothing in practice then I’d never be taken seriously. “I could do glassblowing?” I said, knowing even as I said it that I couldn’t, it would be boring –

“What specifically do you dislike about the practical arts? It’s not the physicality –” 

It wasn’t that. I loved running, on a road or on a trail or through the fairgrounds of Tirion for the races. I loved sailing. I’d helped build the boat that had taken me to Tol Eressea, as was tradition, for my majority.

“You have to do things more than once,” I said, “even once you understand them.”

“That’s life, Artanis.”

I was sure it wasn’t a necessary part of life, though. It was like hunting, or sewing – only a feature of existence because we didn’t know how to do better. The Valar didn’t have to clumsily fashion bad pots to learn good ones, because they understood the nature of reality and clay took the form that they desired –

 Angaráto caught the tenor of my thoughts, there. I tended to broadcast them when I was distracted. People’d told me that it was like being caught in the middle of a lecture in a course they weren’t studying. “I think the Valar did learn how to shape clay, once,” he said gently, “and that their first attempts were disastrous. That was just a very long time ago.”

“I don’t want to study pottery,” I said. “Maybe botany, if Yavanna supervised? Less growing things, more understanding them and cataloguing them and putting it all together – why are living things pieced together so oddly, why are there plants that only grow if their seeds catch fire, why are insects bigger in the south –”

“That’s hardly Yavanna’s domain,” he said.

“Yes it is, she explained it to me once, only I was stupid, and didn’t make sense of the explanation and can’t piece it together now that I’m not quite as stupid. There’s whole blank chapters in the books of chemistry we’re writing –”

“How astonishingly wasteful.”

“I don’t mean literally, I just mean, that’s the magnitude of the things we don’t know, and one of them relates to plants which are the domain of Yavanna and also airs which are the domain of Manwë and also the reason insects are larger in the south and I don’t understand how it all fits together but I would, if I were only paying attention –”

“Next masterwork in environments, the interactions of plant and animals, whatever it’s called?” He scratched his head. “There’s a new Ñoldorin word for it – there’s probably three new Ñoldorin words for it –” 

“I can’t possibly study under Oromë!”

“Why on earth not? You’re not a bad rider, you’d be able to keep up –”

 “Irissë’s doing that!” 

“Did you two have a fight?” 

“In fifty years I don’t think we have ever had an interaction that was not a fight. She’s my least favorite – she’d be my least favorite cousin, if Curufinwë hadn’t any children.”

 Curufinwë had seven, so this considerably softened the declaration of dislike for Irissë. Angaráto, who got along well with Irissë and splendidly with several of Curufinwë’s brood, nonetheless managed to look wholly sympathetic. “All right. No studies under Oromë – you could still do environment sciences, though, with Vána or something –”

“Can’t,” I said, “that’d mean all of my examinations so far have been with Valier or female Maiar, what will people think –”

“That you’ve studied mathematics with Ilmarë and chemistry with Arien and history with Varda Herself and you are an astonishingly capable young woman who embodies all the hope and promise of the Blessed Realm,” he said solemnly.

“No, they’ll think the first Finwean granddaughter is getting special treatment, and a princess can just go around having her masterworks rubberstamped by the Valier, shying away from the real arts –”

 “They would have to be astoundingly cruel-spirited.”

“Most people are.”

 “I’ve noticed how you feel about that. You’ll notice I haven’t suggested sociology or rhetoric or politics –”

“Ewwwwwwww.”

He sighed. “Once you’ve discovered the secret to everything, are you going to use some half-living construct to shape the world to your designs, as it’s said Aulë did before the Elves awakened? Because otherwise, you’ll have to talk to people.” 

“That’s not fair. I can talk to people,” I said. “I am said to be compassionate and good-spirited.” I was, through deliberate practice – but then, wasn’t that more impressive than having a natural instinct for it? “I will study politics and learn the principles of governance and be a just and capable ruler. Just – not yet. Do you know what I’ve been congratulated on most, in the letters and gifts celebrating the certification and my majority? My hair.”

“Well, it is uniquely beautiful hair,” he offered, twirling his own around one finger.

“All of my achievements are unique,” I growled.

“Marine biology? Ossë’d probably agree to help you, maybe not if you went to him with a long list of questions but certainly if you fell into the ocean while trying to verify your answers.”

“That might do,” I said slowly.

He chuckled again. This time I wasn’t sure he was laughing at me, and oddly that made me less comfortable. “What?”

“I greatly enjoy talking with you,” he said, “but it’s astonishingly freeing to make a suggestion that isn’t shot down within five seconds. And so rare. Refreshingly rare,” he added hastily at my crestfallen expression. “You know I love a good challenge.”

“I’ll ask Amil,” I said, “she’ll be pleased.”

She was.

My mother and I did not see eye to eye. That was not just because at 50 I was already a head taller than her, or because my studies kept tugging me up the mountain to Valimar which bewildered her or Tirion which she disliked. It was also not because she’d named me ‘Man-Maiden’, as a particularly persistent rumor in the city had it, though it was related to some differences in our outlook that were also related to why she had given me that name.

 The King had, at last count, thirteen grandsons and two granddaughters. People said that was why I was competitive and arrogant and friendless, and why Irissë was reckless – too much male influence in our lives, too many brothers and cousins. The poor King, to have gotten men in all but looks when at last he’d been granted granddaughters. 

Carnistir studied mathematics and embroidery and Findaráto spent all of his time looking pretty and shopping for clothes and jewelry and everyone knew Findekáno flirted with men and yet no one called them girl-princes or wondered if they’d been warped by too many female influences. It was infuriating.  

And none of the boys were married and I was only fifty and people were already saying things and –

“Dear?” said my mother, and that was when I realized I’d gotten lost in thought in the middle of persuading her of my new course of study, and failed to notice any of the many signs of boredom and disappointment that the Eldar display during conversation, such as foot tapping and deep sighing and eye movement.  

I’d described the way people behaved to Ilmarë in those terms once, and she’d found it delightful. The Ainur catalogued like that, as well, and found us utterly confounding. There’d been many dreadful confusions until they’d learned all the odd ways the Eldar behaved. 

Sometimes I wondered if I was really meant to be an Ainu and Eru’d held my essence back at the beginning by accident – maybe it’d gotten caught in his sleeve – but of course that wasn’t the sort of thing that one could say to people. 

“Dear.”

“Sorry, I was just thinking.”

“For a change.” She was smiling.

 “I honor our people and our relationship with the sea by doing a study under Ossë,” I said, “and I’ll be close to home and it’ll let me figure out all the things I don’t know – it’ll compliment my studies in chemistry, I mean – and I’ve been thinking that we need better language for capturing the interesting features of a set of data, which will be a mathematical endeavor, but I need data that has interesting features first, and I can collect that in the ocean, so really it’s the perfect integration of my previous areas of study while also being applied science so no one can say I’m just a dilettante theorist, and it’s not under a woman.”

“That’s a problem?” 

“People will think I’m getting special treatment,” I explained.

My mother pursed her lips in the manner that communicated she didn’t like my priorities and considered herself virtuous for not criticizing them. I hated it, because I didn’t mind being criticized but I loathed being patronized.  There are very few things that frighten me but being surrounded by silent, polite disapproval is one of them.

“I think marine biology is a lovely subject of study,” my mother said, “and I’m proud of you.”

 I’d spent decades fighting to hear those words from my parents, but now they said it all the time and it didn’t reassure me in the slightest. I think because they had realized it mattered to me and so were saying it because that was good parenting, not because pride in me was an emotion that they were actually experiencing.

 The King favors Curufinwë. Everyone knows it except Curufinwë, because no matter how much anyone fawns over him he navigates social situations like a rabbit surrounded by starving wolves and he would not notice adoration if it kissed him on the lips. With tongue. 

The King hasn’t quite done that but he bursts with pride whenever Curufinwë is in the room, pride-the-emotion not pride-the-parenting-skill. His eyes flicker around the room like he wants to know if everyone else sees it, this achievement, this astonishing achievement of his firstborn son, and he looks at Curufinwë with the total absorption of a Vala at their work, and he blazes with pride. I am not sure there is anything at all I could do to make my parents feel that kind of pride. Give them grandchildren, possibly, which is the one thing I am determined never ever to do. 

“Artanis,” my mother said gently, and I wondered how much of that she’d heard. 

“I’ll go talk to Ossë,” I said, “once I have a good project proposal and won’t be wasting his time, and I can have one in a week if I start now. Or – I suppose I really ought to visit Tirion and find out the state of the field, but I can work on the road and still have it in two.”

“Or you could give yourself some time off,” she said, but I vigorously shook my head. 

“It adds up. You say to yourself ‘this is a project of eight years’ work, what’s a week here?’ but a week here, a week there, and now it’s a project of nine years’ work, and –” 

“And you finish it in nine years!” she said. “The world will endure for many Ages, Artanis, and it is said that we will grow weary of it before the end. There’s no need to rush it.”

“I think,” I said, “I’ll only weary when I stop rushing. May I leave for Tirion tonight?”

“Of course.”

I say I was friendless, but that wasn’t quite true: I had three adoring big brothers, and they had friends, and I got on well enough with all of their friends except the ones who were our cousins. Our cousins are something of an acquired taste, see, and I had no desire to waste the time acquiring it. So there were quite a few people to say good-bye to, all of them affecting horror at the thought of going off to Tirion again, hadn’t I just gotten the place out of my lungs?

My father, who grew up in Tirion and left before his majority (and, if it were up to him, I think would never have gone back) smiled broadly at me. “We’re proud of you,” he said. 

“Thank you.”

“Will you be disappointed if you write up a proposal and Ossë declines you? Your mother said you were unwilling to ask Uinen –”

 And they’d had a conversation worrying about how I would cope with rejection. That spoke louder than a thousand declarations they were proud of me. I felt an unhappy lurch in my stomach. “Of course I won’t be disappointed. Angaráto all but said that Ossë’d refuse me but that if I spent a couple years hard at work he’d come around.” He had said, actually, that Ossë’d refused to sponsor me but would rescue me if I fell into the ocean while conducting field work. But I found myself suddenly unable to force words about my incompetence through my teeth, even joking ones that hadn’t hurt when my brother had said them. “And I’m not unwilling to ask Uinen, it’s just – you don’t go around petitioning the Maiar for aid in a list – ‘my preferred candidate turned me down, but you’ll do’ -  they’re the agents of Eru in this world, and the makers of it! It’s an honor! I’ll prove myself worthy of it and Ossë’ll agree and it’ll be fine.” 

“All right,” he said. “Ride safe, will you?”

Our grandfather grew up in the Outer Lands, where a minute out of sight of your family could mean you would never be seen again. Centuries ago, that had been, but there are scars that are slow to heal even here in the Blessed Realm, and whenever someone leaves his field of vision he flinches, even if they are only scurrying off down one of the palace hallways. I think he remarried so quickly after the death of his first wife because he fears being alone the way I fear being unimportant.

My father has no similar excuse. “What’s going to happen on the way to Tirion,” I asked, “will I fall off my horse?”

“Accidents happen,” he said, which was true only in the most vacuous sense. I hadn’t fallen off a horse since I was ten, and even then I’d barely scratched myself. Scars on the body, rather than those of the heart, healed so swiftly here it was hard to remember that they occurred at all. 

“I’ll attempt to stay atop her.”

“And stay on the road, it’s easy to get turned around –” 

It wasn’t easy to get turned around. The Trees blazed from the West like the world itself had cracked open to spill its divine energies out across the plains of Aman. One could not possibly get lost with their eyes open, and even with eyes closed the Trees beat their brilliant print into your eyelids.  “Yes,” I said, “Sometimes on the way to Tirion I find myself a thousand miles south in a nest of cobras; on this trip I shall aspire to avoid that.”

“’Ride safe’”, said my father, “is an endearment meant to communicate that someone loves you and will think of you until you are reunited.” 

“Oh,” I said. “In that case, ride safe.” 

“I’m not going anywhere.” 

“The way you defined the phrase, my use was proper!” 

“Artanis, you should be more polite and less pedantic when you’re speaking with Ossë, he won’t appreciate being second-guessed and snarked at.” 

I didn’t answer that. The answer was “of course I won’t do that to Ossë, he knows more than I do,” but that made it perfectly obvious that I didn’t think my father knew anything I didn’t. And it would probably hurt him to hear that. He might have inferred it anyway, because he sighed, deeply, and said “have a joyous and relaxing journey.” 

“No,” I said, “I plan to spend it developing project proposals. I wanted to do something with coral but it grows too slowly – algae grows so fast, but it’s not particularly interesting – anyway, it’s a week’s travel and I’ll have the time to organize my thoughts and perhaps start rehearsing the proposal.”

“Have a productive and satisfying journey,” my father said, and even though I still felt like there was something missing between us I couldn’t think of any objections to that one.

I left as Laurelin waxed, the ocean glimmering golden behind me.

  Tirion is a walled city. For peace of mind, I suppose; no monsters stalk these plains, and none ever will. But the walls, though ornamented, are very definitely functional. They’re also rather striking as you approach the city: amidst the surreal, idyllic, perfectly-crafted hills and valleys and fords of Aman, a city shining against the horizon so white it is hard to look directly at it. You would get the entirely wrong impression of the Ñoldor if the only thing you knew about them was that they had built this city.

The palace would give you a better sense of them. The central building is as much magic as stone, raised with the aid of the Valar in the giddy early days of our arrival in the Blessed Realm. The walls are translucent marble, through and through except where there’s detailing in precious metals; it sustains its weight only by divine intervention. By Laurelin’s light it is like walking through a dreamscape; by Telperion’s, the floor is like a pool of molten silver. I arrived at the Mingling, and padded down the glimmering gilded hallways feeling like a Vala before the making of the world.

The outer buildings were built later, and obey the basic principles of architecture, though they push them to their limits. My cousins’ family home is a solemn dark grey; the music hall is mahogany, so smooth you can see the whole city reflected in its face. There is a great glass tower between them. The libraries are held up by intertwined columns, the gold detailing is striking against a glassy black rock. They stretch for two blocks even though a single book requires a years’ labor to produce.  The Ñoldor are extravagant, obsessive, obnoxious, the people of engineering and invention. They love stories and they love their own reflections.

 I am a princess of the Ñoldor but I’m not really one myself. My mother is Lindar; my father’s mother is the King’s second wife, Indis of the Vanyar. One-quarter in blood, less than that in looks, but nine parts of ten if tribal membership were measured in temperament. I’m certainly stubborn enough.

If I’m speaking to someone who seems to think I am not a Ñoldo I aggressively demonstrate that I am; if I’m speaking to someone who thinks that I am, I set out to show them how wrong they are. Angaráto, who is the only person who has noticed that I do this, says it is a very Ñoldorin thing to do. But then, what would he know?

  I ran into Melkor in the back hallways of the palace, on my way to the library. It did not occur to me until much later to wonder what he was doing there, but it was a terrible convenient coincidence. 

“Blessed friend,” I said, and drew against the wall but did not bow; when Melkor begged the pardon of the Valar he abjured all his titles, and pleaded to be let into the world as the humble servant of the smallest creature, so he could right some measure of the wrongs he dealt the world. The parole had been granted, and here he was, servant to the humblest creatures. But you didn’t have to be the most brilliant of the Eldar to feel like there was something wrong with the whole thing, and in any event I was the most brilliant of the Eldar, and I thought that there was.

“Lady Artanis,” he said, his expression troubled but clearing at the sight of me. “I think there was a betting pool on how long it would take you to return here after you passed your exams.”

I’d meant to make my apologies and keep going, but people talking about me was upsetting, and what if – “and whether I passed the exams?” I asked, forcing my features into an absent smile. 

He shook his head. “Who’d take that bet?”

“Well actually,” I said – I always had to explain this to men - “unless everyone is precisely in agreement about the likelihood I’ll pass my exams, there ought to be odds at which someone would take the bet – even if those odds are a thousand to one. Claiming that no one would take a bet is just claiming that everyone had exactly the same probability estimate, which speaks poorly of you all but also is not the compliment to me that you evidently intended, since you could’ve all thought I only had a 90 percent chance -”

 “We all thought you were guaranteed to pass your exams,” he said.

“Because none of you know any theory of probability. It doesn’t – look, if I’d offered you all the kingdom if I failed an exam in exchange for a single grain of sand if I passed it, would you take that bet?”

His eyes were dancing with something – the Valar were impossible to read. Distraction? Amusement? “Yes.”

“Then you don’t think it’s guaranteed,” I said. “Which is fine, I didn’t think it was guaranteed. It’s really absurd to say that there is anything you are so sure of you would not take ten thousand to one odds against it; the world is new and we are just beginning to learn of it. And I can tell you a dozen stories of people who were utterly certain of a working of the world went out and tested, and found themselves embarrassed and astonished… what if someone had asked my grandfather when they lived in terror beside Cuivienen what the odds were that his people would soon build this?” I took a deep breath. “Not that I don’t appreciate the thought. The mistaken thought. I know you just meant that everyone knew I was qualified for a master’s title in chemistry. Though you could have just said that. And the betting pool about how soon I’d be back really does mean something.” But the whole conversation had left me more insecure than I’d started it. And now there was a Vala who probably thought I was obnoxious. I tried to fix things with another absent smile. “It brings me joy to see you here and so evidently busy,” I said, “may your thoughtful advice bring peace to you and many boons to our people.” There. That was pretty good. Wise and compassionate, that’s Artanis Arafinwiel, I had to stop lecturing people just because they were wrong and thought they know everything…

He’d now stopped doing facial expressions entirely, which mostly only happened to the Valar when I really confused them. I made an apologetic half-curtsy and slipped by him before he remembered he could use his muscles to move his body. It felt like something was eating at me all the ways to the bookshelves, but I couldn’t tell whether it was something I should have noticed or just my overactive sense of embarrassment, anguished at the thought that I was the subject of gossip in the city.

Gossip because I study so quickly and do so well, I told myself firmly. That’s exactly what I want. And I plucked off the shelves every scroll that involved marine biology, until the unease was buried in the soothing smell of parchment.

The thought that must have crossed Melkor’s mind – the one he was so astonished did not cross mine – was that if I bet him the kingdom that I would fail my exams I would surely have met an accident the morning of. It did not cross my mind because I was making the same foolish mistake as the bettors: I was treating some things as utterly certain, utterly secure. I’d been born to paradise, and I believed in it.

They did not need to request an audience. But they did, because moments of this significance should be done properly, beautifully, in a way that lent them strength and solidity. Elrond wondered sometimes if he’d feel this way, this attachment to forgotten graces, this deep and enduring attachment to recognizing his part and realizing it on his own terms, if he had not been raised by Maglor. Disentangling who he was from his whole childhood was impossible but he found himself attempting it more and more often.

“We’re going to fight,” Elros said, that night.

Maedhros and Maglor did not look at each other. They did not need to; their thoughts were so familiar they could exchange them even from a great distance, and could certainly do so like this, sitting side by side in a room in Amon Ereb that had once been used to receive guests.

“You will very likely die,” Maglor said.

It wasn’t a refusal. Not that they’d expected one: Maglor had no authority to refuse them this, and no means short of imprisoning them, and Maglor disliked being reminded of this and would not attempt to exercise power that he didn’t have. 

“We don’t care,” said Elros, steadfast. They’d agreed he would talk for the both of them, because he was better with arguing. 

Maglor laughed. “I believe you. In my experience young men never do. Then they grow older, and care very deeply, and then they get older still and stop caring at all. Which is wise, do you think?”

“We’re not here for an argument,” Elros answered warily.

“And I am not arguing. Your lives are yours; there are worse ways to spend them than in fighting the Enemy. I am telling you that you will very likely die, because I love you and care for you and would have you know, at least.”

“We know.”

Maedhros smiled, which was disconcerting. “Do you?”

Their eyes snapped to him, or at least to his hair, which was the closest anyone ever came to meeting Maedhros’ eyes. “As I recall,” Elros said tightly, “We saw a war and we saw people die and I cannot imagine the Enemy is really more terrible.”

“Differently terrible,” Maglor said, and then he spoke of war. Of dragons, of balrogs, of ordering people into a fight that would kill them, of giving orders that could save them but that went unheard amidst the roar of war and the screaming of the dying and the ugly crunches weapons made as they sunk in -

“Yes,” Elros said, “we remember,” and Maedhros raised an eyebrow but did not argue with him.

“The other thing you should know,” Maglor said, “is that people go off to their first war for justice, for vengeance, for glory, to prove themselves, to protect their families - and then the years come and they go and they go to war because there is nothing else, because they have nightmares when they sleep at home, because their families do not recognize them, because they only feel safe in full armor with a blade in their hands, because they would not dream of taking their own life but they are hopeful that the enemy can be relied upon to do it. War is good only for breaking everything it touches and leaving it unfit for peace.”

“And that is if you are lucky,” Maedhros said, and Elrond and Elros felt quite cornered, despite the fact it was two-on-two. 

“So, what, we let the enemy win?” Elrond said angrily.

“No,” Maglor said. “We go off to war, even knowing. But you ought to know.”

“You did it wrong,” Elros said, “you poisoned everything from the start, that’s why it happened that way, not because it had to. The host of the West, this is, in enough force to succeed where you failed. This war might really end in peace.”

“It might,” Maglor said.

“But you don’t think so.”

“I would not have you go off to war believing it.”

“People need to hope for something.”

“Yes,” Maglor said, “they do, but those who command them should know the truth of what they ask, and shouldn’t count hope as an achievement of leadership, lest they grow more adept in lying to their men than commanding them.”

“We command no one,” Elros said.

“That is one way to be safe,” Maedhros said, “will you commit to it?”

“No,” Elrond said, impatient with them, he’d wanted something different from this conversation, “not if it can make a difference.”

“It can’t,” they both said in unison, and then Maglor added thoughtfully, “not in the end, but it can feel for a long time as if it did.”

“Then it did,” Elros said. “Things that don’t last forever still matter.”

“What we wanted to ask,” Elrond persisted stubbornly, “was advice. On tactics and fighting - you’re the best - you could come with us, you know, you could fight -”

“If we do,” Maglor said, “Better that the host of the west do not know of it, because they would not desire to fight beside us. And better that you not fight alongside us, because all you achieve will be diminished by that, in the eyes of those you might command if it can make a difference. And we are doomed and might bring it down on you.”

“Right,” Elros said. “All right. We want armor, and swords, and your blessing if you’ll give it, and advice if you have it, and you can consider us appropriately warned, so if you don’t have any of that you can stay out of our way -”

“Wait,” Maglor said, “that’s my advice. Wait a few years, you are too young for this, the war will still go on - I am sure that the war will go on, in two years and in fifty -”

“But it’s starting now,” said Elrond. 

They had armor. And swords. And advice, given in sparring matches in the courtyards, given in bedtime stories, four hundred years of history pouring out, now, with a stranger urgency, as if Maglor really was sure he would never see them again. Two months, Elrond and Elros had offered, expecting a counteroffer, but Maedhros and Maglor had accepted the departure date unquestioned. Two months to tell everything that one learned in the terrible long arc from young prince of the Eldar to loathed and hopeless murderer. Elrond took notes, though he did not look at them during the war - did not look at them, in fact, until much later.

On the last night he scoured his mind for questions he’d forgotten and, unable to find one, indulged himself in one that didn’t seem likely to matter. “What,” he said, “what do you wish you’d known? If you could go back in time to Lake Mithrim at the very beginning -”

Maglor watched him as if trying to memorize him. “But I did know,” he said slowly. “Certainly by then. I think I knew from the very beginning.”

“Then - are we safe? Since I don’t -”“Maybe,” Maglor said, “or maybe I have fooled you. I was very good at that, I had almost everyone fooled for a very long time - though Nelyo fooled himself, I don’t think I could have done it. Are you sure you want our blessing?”

He found himself speechless.

“Elrond, stay another two years.”

They did, but every day they also were hungrier. Scouting for food had proved more difficult than scouting for safe paths through the northern wasteland. They had clawed the fungi off the rocks and tried eating it; it was not filling. There were animals in the north, of course, but most of them were dying themselves. Perhaps Melkor’s passage through this land poisoned it. Perhaps they depended, in some delicate way, on Aman’s light and the creatures it supported. 

There was still no light. When he had a spare moment between testing hazardous climbs and authorizing new scouting trips and dragging back inadequate food to the encampment, he wondered at that. The Valar may have taken a few years, but they’d stirred at last from Taniquetil to send a herald to scold the Ñoldor for leaving, and they’d stirred themselves in proper force after Alqualondë. He’d have thought that, once they reached the end of their paralyzed grief, they’d put the light first. Most of the animals would die. Most of the Elves would eventually starve. Was Yavanna currently engaged in personally supporting the growth of every plant on the continent? Was she capable of that? Could Varda throw some new stars up into the sky?

He got an answer – well, a partial answer – toward the end of the first month, after a crack in the ice had swallowed a log and a supply pack. Miraculously no one had been injured. Their luck had to break, soon, and that knowledge itself was weighing on them. 

“Even if we had the supplies we couldn’t make it across with no losses,” Irissë greeted him, unsmiling, when he reached the tent.

The tent had been improved. They were Ñoldor; they’d done that first. They’d dug their quarters into the rocky soil of Araman, slow and painstaking work, four feet down for every tent. The earth itself now insulated them against the winds. From a distance the little city looked like a row of rabbit warrens. It had been lovely for morale. It would be impossible once they started moving. 

“No,” he said to Irissë, climbing down into the tent, which now had a horrifically muddied outer room and a lavish inner room where they all slept. Before the betrayal Turvo and Elenwë and Itarillë had slept in their own tent, Findekáno with Irissë and Arakáno, and Nolofinwë alone once their mother had turned back. Now it seemed a little silly, all the effort to maintain the old customs. If the tent was too small for them all, it was a good thing; it meant it was always warm.

“And in practice, what’ll kill us is the hunger,” she continued.

“Can hunger kill us?” It wasn’t a question he’d ever had cause to consider before.

“Makes it easier to freeze to death, makes it harder to hold on to a difficult climb – the things we’re doing out there on the cliffs right now? we won’t be strong enough by the far side of this thing-”

He hadn’t really thought about that. They were going to such lengths to make the sheer parts climbable even for a moderately-sized child, or even with a large bundle on your back; today they’d tried carrying each other up it. It had worked, until the ice in that one place had snapped.

“So – have a team go ahead, map the whole Ice before we’re too hungry to do the work that will make it safe?” 

“No,” she said. “They wouldn’t come back.”

It was a caution he’d never seen in Irissë. In truth he’d expected that they’d both favor such a strategy, that they’d argue it to Turukáno with his inbuilt caution and to their father with his deeply-seated sense of duty and to Lalwen who had seemingly decided to be the advocate for Nolofinwë’s happiness and peace of mind, Nolofinwë himself being far too busy to let himself consider that. If there was anything reckless enough to divide even him and Irissë, it was usually her on the side favoring it.

“I think we could make it,” Findekáno said, “in three months, with a team of ten. The faster you go the less you have to carry. And we would scarcely rest; we stay warm while we’re moving. You and I could go three months without stopping.”

“There’s something you need to see,” she said. “But after you rest, you’re frozen through and by all account that was a close one, that accident today.”

“I don’t need to rest. I’m not really very cold.” 

“And the accident?” she said mildly, but she’d already begun pulling on her coat and gloves and hat and muffler.

“It was close. We were lucky, but I don’t feel lucky. That’s hardly a reason to rest, though.” 

“This is about an hours’ walk,” she said, “there are guide stones but I still don’t think it’s wise to take it at a run. You’ll see why.”

“You could just tell me.” 

“We found the path Melkor took, leaving.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, I do want to see that.”

 It was scorched. Not with fire - Findekáno leaned down to touch it and drew up a hand stinging with something that was certainly not ash. But scorched all the same; the ice had been melted through and the rock crushed and crumbled, a wide and ugly trail bludgeoning its way through the land. He stepped, cautiously, into it; in a moment he was knee-deep in some ugly kind of dust and mire, and it dragged at his ankles as he walked. “Melkor and the thing that accompanied him through Valinor,” he said, because you didn’t need Irissë’s talent for tracking to notice the other set of tracks, deep and razor-like and dangerous. 

“Yes,” she said. “You should get out of there; presumably at some point their paths crossed, and if you step into one of her footprints you will slice yourself into ribbons.” 

“A shame,” Findekáno said, “it would have saved us much time if we could have taken this path and been sure of our footing. What does this have to do with sending a small group out in front?”

“We scouted five hours’ out,” she said, “along this, considering the possibility of  doing exactly that. It ends. In a fight, or I’m no hunter at all.”

“Melkor and his monster fought?”

“The ground is flattened for a mile around,” she said, “and all like this, only the mire rises higher and her footprints, if you like to call them that, are everywhere. It’s a foul, foul, dangerous place – you can feel it. Dark like the darkness, not like out here, and the air makes you sick to breathe, and everywhere those razor-sharp crevices, the marks she leaves in the ground - ”

Findekáno whistled. “No injuries?”

“I’m good at my job,” Irissë said tightly.

“Me too,” he said. “Sooner or later it’s not going to be enough.” 

“There were other tracks,” she said.

 “Animals? If there’s anything that can survive up here, I want to learn from it and then eat it.”

“Not animals.” 

He stepped out of the mire; it was starting to make him nervous, the way it tugged like a rushing stream at his ankles even while it was easy to see that it wasn’t moving at all.

 “Endórë used to be crawling with Moringotto’s monsters,” he said cautiously. 

“I think it still is.”

They walked back. Irissë seemed to be wavering over whether or not to say something. He wondered at that for a while – she wasn’t known for reticence – until he guessed what it must be. “Oromë told Tyelcormo something, and he told you?”

She started. “Yes. How – ” 

He didn’t answer that.

“Right,” she said after a while. “We can trade revenge fantasies once it’s all underway, at the moment I’ve been too busy to develop them beyond the obvious –”

“That being?”

“I will slap him, and he will laugh, and then I will choke the air from his lungs until he stops laughing, and then I will let go and walk away and tell him I hope he dies a very painful death because otherwise I’ll rejoice at the news of his loss and I don’t really want to.”

“Oh,” Findekáno said. 

“You?”

They were walking more briskly. The question at once made him want to go frozen in his tracks like a startled deer, or else to break into a run. Like a smarter startled deer. “Maitimo’ll apologize,” he said after a minute, “that’s the difference.”

“No,” she said, “that’s not a difference at all, you can’t imagine you’ll –”

“Of course I won’t forgive him.” He paused. “I’ll thank him, for making it so easy to do what I should have done so long ago. And I’ll ask when he decided – not that there’s any possible answer -  there’s a saying, you know: when someone shows you who they really are, believe them. We’ll say our bit and then I’ll never speak to him again, though I think I’ll weep no matter how he dies. But he will ask for forgiveness, and there’s nothing satisfying about beating someone bloody when they let you because they’re desperately hoping it’ll cancel out everything else they’ve done to you –”

“Yes, there is,” she said, “Tyelco certainly won’t apologize but he’ll let me, too, how did you think I was planning to overpower him?” 

He hadn’t actually given that much thought. Irissë struck him as a much stronger person than Tyelcormo in every possible respect, enough so that it was hard to remember he’d probably win an arm-wrestling match with her and could certainly prevent her from strangling him. 

“You were saying,” he said, “something Oromë said –”

“Some of the Maiar sided with Melkor,” she said, “in the first war, not just lesser ones, ones who had once been great, and the greatest of those became terrible demons of Melkor’s who lit their very essence afire and lashed out with the sharpness that exists at the edges of two worlds, and they were called the Valaraukar, and in the fall of Utumno they vanished.”

 “Vanished? As in –”

She shrugged.

“But you think they’re out there?”

“Oromë always hunted for them, never found one. Of –” she kicked a rock, and cursed, - “of all the things to hate him for, you know, I keep thinking that if he’d asked Oromë for aid in departing he’d have been given it, and then we’d all be there with no one dead and a Vala on our side –”

“I never thought of that,” Findekáno said. And then, loath to give his cousins any credit but equally loath to think there had been a way out, and they’d all collectively missed it - “Manwë would probably have refused to permit it. He said the Valar would offer us no aid in departing. They can’t just defy him on that, it’s not in their nature.”

She shrugged again. They could see the rise behind which the tents were buried, now. 

“How do you kill a Valarauca?” Findekáno murmured.

“You think I’m an expert?” 

“I think you’re not, yet.”

She smiled at him, then, a real and startled smile. He realized that his family felt closer than it had before the betrayal. They appreciated each other more. They complemented each other marvellously. They worked and rested and debated and planned like they’d been born to this. “I don’t think anyone is born to rule,” Finwë’d told Findekáno, once, when he’d been young and captivated by political philosophy mostly because Maitimo had been. “But I do believe some are born to lead.” A family of kings, they’d turned out to be, when the repeated twists of tragedy had tossed the crown to their house. Wasn’t that something? If the Feanorians had cut the line a little faster, if they’d been this unified in purpose and this constructive in their grief sooner, perhaps his mother wouldn’t have turned back –

- but no, that had mostly been because of what Findekáno himself had done, and even knowing that the damned ships were lost now forever and the damned cousins had casually left them all to die, Findekáno could not quite imagine standing at the docks of Alqualondë with an army and waiting to see how many hits it took for Maitimo to die. 

“They owed me their lives,” he said out loud, thoughtfully.

Irissë was walking faster now. “I wouldn’t have thought that a favor you ever wanted to call in,” she said, “even before.”

“No. But I also don’t know if I want to take it back.”

She snorted. “I’d have shot Fëanáro from the walls of Tirion the day he arrived with his host, if I’d known –”

“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t have, you’re not –”

 “Artanis would have,” she said tightly, “and I’m a better shot and would actually have understood what it meant, what I was doing, what I’d become, so it would have been better for it to be me. And I’m not what, exactly?” 

There wasn’t even a word for it. For an Elf who would raise arms against other Elves – who needed a word for that? Even the Ñoldor, who gloried in inventing words to encompass every possible shade of meaning, had never dreamed up that one. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“For damning us all, for saving their lives, for killing innocent people, for – we’re never going to see Mother again, you know –”

“Findekáno,” she said, “get us across the Ice.”

 Turukáno was back in the tent, Itarillë sleeping in his lap, trying carefully to ease her off onto the mat so he could stand and join them. “Findaráto thinks there is a storm coming,” he said.

Findekáno had not even known the two of them were on speaking terms again. For the walk up the coast they certainly hadn’t been. “Great,” he said, “exactly what we need.”

“Yes,” Elenwë said, “it is, and hopefully this is an unusually bad one. Better to experience it now, see what the worst is that this place can throw at us –”

“Yeah,” Findekáno sighed, “you’re right, fair enough. Irissë, want to tell them what you found?” 

She peeled off her clothes as she explained. The assembled faces went graver and graver. Itarillë was, Findekáno realized, obviously not sleeping at all, just pretending; she’d been doing a convincing imitation, but now her hands were clutching at her father’s robes more tightly than they ever did in sleep.

Elenwë said, “The Valar say that the lesser Maiar who sided with Melkor would have found – did find – that cutting themselves away from Eru’s world and its gifts cut them away, also, from their own capacity for beauty and for creation. In the end they’d be stuck in one form. Injuring and killing them would then be straightforward, if not simple.”

 Turukáno said, “we can’t take armor.”

“No,” Nolofinwë said, “we can’t; the weight would be as much as everything else we might carry combined, and Finno’s people were trying, today, to ensure that one healthy Elf could carry another up even the worst cliff faces –”

“That worked,” Findekáno said –

“But with armor it’d be impossible,” his father said. “I don’t think it’s such a terrible loss; the force of a blow from a Maia would kill you no matter how much steel interceded. Don’t get hit.”

 “Ata,” Turukáno muttered rather pointedly, looking down at Itarillë. 

“Itarillë,” said their father with a laugh, “is obviously sleeping. I can tell she is sleeping because her eyes are very still – not flickering while she tries to stop herself from laughing, no, not at all –”

At this her eyes did flicker, of course.

“I can tell,” Nolofinwë continued, “because her breathing is very still and even, and she is certainly not holding her breath, trying not to giggle –” 

Itarillë went bright red.

“Should we let you sleep, dear?” he asked.

 “You should look at your King while he’s talking to you,” said Elenwë gently, and her eyes popped guiltily open.

“Tomorrow’s going to be a storm,” the King said gravely to his granddaughter, “and we will all be trapped in here becoming sick of each other. In the meantime would you like to come outside and look at the stars while the clouds of the storm steal in to hide them from us?”

She scrambled to her feet and was the first of them fully dressed. Outside their people were occupied in securing everything and tying it down for the winds.  Already rather few of the stars were visible. Nolofinwë picked Itarillë up and set her on his shoulders. “Valinor was newly created,” he told her, “and the Valar still rejoicing in its joys, when the time came for the Eldar to awaken in Endórë. And Varda imagined the world they’d look out on, and realized that it would be strange and alien to them, and in her wisdom she did something great and wonderful. She did not come to meet us on the shores; she did not try to raise the great pillars of the world once again. She put the light of creation itself in the sky, beyond where Melkor could reach it, beyond all fear and hope and invention, and when the Eldar awoke it was the first thing we saw, and we rejoiced in it.

We are the people of the stars, and when we falter they will hold their course, and when we are lost we can find our way by the lights of the Valacirca. Endórë is not dark. It is lit by a gift so far beyond Melkor’s power that he can only dig his way into the earth and resent it. And we are not forsaken; the first and greatest gift of Eru to our people was the land, and we go now to reclaim it. And the first and greatest gift of the Valar was the stars, and they will always guide us. Ai, Varda Elentári!”

“The stars are going,” said Itarillë, warily. 

“The stars remain; the clouds are coming,” said her grandfather, “and they will leave, and the stars will still be there. The Valar have said that they will not hear or heed our prayers, but I would have us say them anyway; we speak so the remembrance of these things remains in our own hearts.”

“And maybe someday –” said Itarillë – 

“And maybe someday they’ll listen, too,” he said with a laugh. 

The storm did not take long to move in fully, but Itarillë fell asleep before then.

“She’s going to hear and see worse things,” Ñolofinwë said to Turukáno once she had. “I would rather arm her to face them than hide her from them.”

“She’s twenty,” he snapped.

“I would understand if you decided to stay –”

“No,” Elenwë said. “Our forefathers were born beside Cuivienen and it did not leave them shattered; we are a flexible people.”

 “I’m not sure we could, either,” Turukáno said. “That’s the other thing Findaráto had to say. The Pelóri are getting taller. ”

“That can’t be,” Findekáno said. 

“He is very confident.”

“How could he even tell, in the dark?” “The stars,” said Ñolofinwë seriously. “That’s what I was trying to see, tonight, but the storm confounded it - ” 

“They said they would fence Valinor against us,” Lalwen muttered.

“So even if they do find the means to restore light to Valinor,” Findekáno said, “and even if we’re still here, we may not know of it. I’d been looking, hoping they came up with something – for all those who remain behind –”

“They will,” said Ñolofinwë firmly. 

“You, ah, never used to be so much their champion,” Arakáno muttered wryly.

“I would not have any of your proceed forward because you feel that you have no choice.”

“Oh, would you stop that?” Irissë said. “It is understood that we can go back. Mother went back. You offer every day. It is growing unbearable. We chose. We chose to follow you, Finwë Ñolofinwë.”

“We will follow you to the very gates of the Enemy’s stronghold,” said Turukáno, “And if you turn back we will follow you there, too.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Findekáno. “I’m crossing.”

Their father was observing them with an odd expression.

“I told Findaráto that it brought me joy to know the Valar concerned at least for the safety of their subjects,” Turukáno said, “and that despite their words I still hope our valor in Endorë can redeem the griefs that leave us outside their mountains and their protection. And that even if that is not possible there are people there who need us.” 

“I’m very pleased that you two are speaking again,” said his father. 

“I denounced you rather forcefully,” Turukáno said, raising an eyebrow at Findekáno. 

“That’s good,” Findekáno said, “someone ought to, and even now that it was all for nothing I’ve struggled to summon the fervor, myself.”

The winds howled above them.

“You children should sleep,” said his father, though they were not tired, and not children, and though he made no particular effort to shut them out as he traded thoughts with Lalwen over a ragged map of the Ice.

No particular effort until one question, tossed onto the board of considerations they were toying with. And by then Findekáno was attuned to them both, and paying full attention.

You were watching the two of them earlier, looking troubled, Lalwen prodded.

I always told myself, Ñolofinwë said, that were my sons ever truly at odds, if real griefs ever lay between them, if I ever doubted whether one of them would follow me at uttermost need, then I would understand my father’s decisions, just as I never understood his love for us until I was a father myself. 

Ah.

And this is a terrible horror that will sit on Findekáno’s shoulders for the rest of time.

And?

I do not understand the decisions that my father made.

A long pause. Findekáno realized he was playing Itarillë’s game, pretending to rest, and tried for a second to really rest. It was impossible. 

He would not have wanted me to take up this crown, you know, not even now.

 Then fuck him, Lalwen’s thoughts lashed across the room rather vehemently, tempered only slightly by the grief that was so clearly at their heart. He was no Vala. Sometimes he was just plain wrong.

Sometimes they are, said Ñolofinwë’s thoughts, not in words but with memories of the Máhanaxar and of darkened Tirion and of heralds and of doom.

Good thing you have a good head on your shoulders, she said, and can do the sensible thing anyway. Certainly no one else ever would. 

You?

I think I know how reckless you would have to be, she said, before I turned away from following you anywhere. 

Oh?

A thought-laugh, a blur of tangled childhood memories, a blur of more recent ones, dark and fraught and painful, a bitter serenity. You would probably have to light a fleet of ships on fire.

In Tirion he had thought he had known pain: a costly error, a bitter argument, a public death threat, a cousin exiled. In Tirion he had thought he had known loss: a precious artifact dropped and smashed, a horse killed in a terrible hunting accident. They had felt tremendous, these things, deep and fully colored. But now it was as if he’d been given the eyes of a Vala and could see the whole spectrum. Everything he’d felt and regretted and dreamed before the Darkening fit into a tiny sliver of the griefs he had known since. What was the difference between far-red and true-purple, to Aulë? What was the difference between the greatest joys and most terrible griefs of an entire life, to one who’d lived through the last Year?

Alqualondë, its own searing, shattering color: the fear he’d felt when he’d crested the hill to see his family dying, the uninhibited relentless clarity of the fight that had followed, the conversation where he’d learned that, no, the Teleri had not beset his frightened people unprovoked - that Fëanáro, damned Fëanáro, had forced the issue by taking the ships - 

The news of Finwë’s death, a slow-breaking horror, a loss so senseless and absolute that he mostly coped with it by pretending that it had not happened, a loss felt in its own right but also, just as acutely, in the hollow agony in his father’s eyes - and in Fëanáro’s, damned Fëanáro’s, no wonder he’d always been so different, to have weathered that as a small child -

And this. Here his mind went numb and blank. He had hated them before, but to call this hatred suggested it was merely a new intensity of a familiar feeling. That was wrong. This feeling had, in its first terrible flare, burned every good memory he had of his cousins, left all of them tainted and colorless. This feeling kept him warm against Araman’s winds even as it froze him from the spine outwards. It was violent. It was painful. It was paralyzing. 

“Findekáno,” someone said.

What remained, in the face of a betrayal that burned away all love and hope and happiness? Something, certainly, because his body responded to the urgency in that voice even before his mind had registered it. 

He turned around.

There they were, a host of a hundred thousand, eyes silently fixed on the same thing. Like a sculptor who could only do one facial expression, Findekáno thought. Though in Tirion, a sculptor who could only do faces fixed in unspeakable pain would have had very little work...

“Findekáno.”

Lalwen. His eyes felt too frozen to focus on her face, though he was reasonably sure that was not physiologically plausible.

“Yes,” he said. Findekáno. The name attached to all my memories. Once, some of them mattered.

“Your father’s going to say something,” she said. 

Yes, he would. That was the sort of thing that Findekáno’s father would do.

“I think you should be there with him.”

Do you ever get tired, he’d once asked her, of nudging us all into place, and wish you could take up the damned thing yourself? The crown, he’d been speaking of. Nolofinwë’s regency crown, which was not the King’s, for symbolic reasons. Back then, things like that had mattered. 

Remembering that - remembering anything at all - tasted like ash and felt like being buried alive. He let Lalwen take his hand. Hers was scarcely warmer than his but burned it. They weaved through the crowd to find his father. Somewhere there was a child crying. People were beginning to move. To return to shelter. To embrace their families. To check - check if anyone they knew, any things that they possessed, had been on the other side - there was so much to do -

They reached his father’s tent. It was unbearably hot, set his skin afire. He reached out to part the draped fabrics and found his hand was frozen stiff, unable to close. He batted the fabrics aside like a clumsy marionette. People were sitting in the corners of the tent. They were all blurry.

His eyes couldn’t focus on his father, either. He could see him only peripherally. When he tried to look directly he saw nothing at all. 

“Findekáno.”

His name was easier to recognize as his when spoken with the hollow despair that, in that moment, filled Nolofinwë’s voice. “Yes,” he said.

“Should we go back?” Nolofinwë said.

“No,” he said. That was easy. He should have just asked Lalwen to convey his answer, he should have remained at the shore, watching to see if anything changed -

His father might have been startled. Hard to tell, through frozen eyes. His shoulders shook, perhaps with hollow amusement, perhaps with constrained anger. “You are very sure.”

He was. He was not sure how to explain it. “This matters,” he tried, but that was not going to suffice as an explanation, and he couldn’t explain how colorless the past had been, how colorless the future would be, if they did not somehow - “Do you want to look out across the shore,” he said, “and think ‘I hope Fëanáro exacted our vengeance’ and ‘I hope Moringotto exacted our vengeance’ and know that eventually one of them will -”

“No,” Nolofinwë said. 

“Right,” Findekáno said. 

He was thawing, just slightly. His voice no longer sounded so distant in his own ears. His eyes could move around at will, now. He fixed them on his father’s face and immediately regretted it. Nolofinwë was in a pain so blinding it was agony just to witness. He was hiding it, transmuting it already into terrible determination. A man should not see his father like that, it was too private.

“There’s no way across,” Nolofinwë said.

“We’ll look for one.”

“I cannot lead my people to their deaths.”

“You can - ” his thoughts weren’t clear enough for this, the emptiness was slower to thaw than the rest of him. “Ask them. What I asked you. Ask them if they want to live in a world where Fëanáro triumphs over Moringotto and rules Endorë while we return, penitents, to Tirion. Ask them if they want to live in a world where Moringotto triumphs over Fëanáro and rules Endorë while we sit, penitents, in Tirion. Because it will be one or the other.”

“The first one rankles me more than the second, right now,” Lalwen said dryly.

“Yes,” Findekáno said, “me too.”

“Perhaps they’ll kill each other,” said Nolofinwë. Already the pain was almost hidden from his face.

“If they can’t live with any of the things that could happen if we stay,” Findekáno continued the train of thought, with some difficulty, “it’s not leadership, to force them to stay.” 

“I am not forcing anyone,” his father said sharply.

 “Then they’ll leave. And we’ll lead them.”

“Where? How?”

 The numbness, as he thawed, was gradually being replaced by pain. Pain in his fingers and toes, pain in his skin, pain in his memories. It was like being very very slowly burned alive. “Across the Ice.”

“To their deaths.”

“It’s so dark,” Findekáno said, hoping his father had noticed his messy state of mind and would take this, correctly, as the beginning of an answer.

His father did, and waited.

“It’s so dark. So many people are dead. It’s all right when we’re walking, because then it’s all for a reason. If we go back to Tirion, we sit there in the dark -”

“Eventually I am sure the Valar will come up with something.”

“How long?”

His father laughed. “Years, I’m sure.”

“Years in the dark, going nowhere, waiting helpless. If we cross we die - once. If we stay we die again and again and again, every day -” 

“I cannot lead them forward without hope.”

“I can’t - can’t quite do hope,” Findekáno said, “but I will survive the Ice and survive what comes after and change all of history, for the better, I am sure of that, and if our people come with me I will keep them alive and command them well and die, if we do, gloriously.”

Nolofinwë raised an eyebrow. “That’s not hope?”

“Hope is a feeling.” His body still burned; it felt as if it had almost burned through. He realized after a minute that had been a bit cryptic. “I mean – I don’t feel anything. I can’t feel anything. So I can’t feel hope. But I can do this.”

Lalwen and his father were speaking now without words, eyes flashing. They wouldn’t be deliberately excluding him, but he found himself too hollow inside to reach out and listen. He shook himself like a wet dog and found the numbness gone, except from his memories. Elenwë was sitting in the corner of the tent, rocking Itarillë on her lap; she smiled at him. Turvo didn’t; he was watching their father, steely, frightening. 

The tent was warm and elaborate and kingly; they’d all bustled about, the past few weeks, keeping Fëanáro away, for if he’d gotten a mind to enter it he would doubtless have read an insult or a threat into its stately majesty. All that effort managing Fëanáro, all for nothing. All the weary promises Maitimo had made, when they met on the edge of their hosts – “he’ll relax once he’s slept”, “he’ll relax once we’ve mourned the dead,”, “he’ll relax once we’re loading the ships,” “he’ll relax once we’re across”, - the promise of just last night, “we’ll come back for you” – at what point had Maitimo silently cut himself away from their shared memories and switched to lying?

He’d done it so effortlessly, too. In the same voice, with the same quirked eyebrow and the same fingers light on Findekáno’s shoulder, leaving a fiery trail down Findekáno’s arm even though, through four layers of clothing, he should rightly barely feel them. “We’ll come back for you,” he’d said, exhausted and embattled and yet shining with conviction, and he’d met Findekáno’s eyes. At the time he’d found it a reassuring proof of sincerity. But perhaps it had been because Maitimo wanted to look at him for the last time.

Findekáno wanted to believe that none of the words had been lies, that Maitimo had changed his mind on the ride over, or refused Fëanáro’s final order, or – he shook his head again. As well believe this was all a dream. Or that Finwë was still alive and would walk in – after all, was it not Fëanáro’s sons who had reported him dead, Fëanáro’s sons who were now known to be faithless liars? Findekáno wanted to believe lots of things but if he was going to cross the ice he was not going to carry wishes across with him.

 His father rose. “Come outside with me. I am going to speak.”

His father did not generally speak extemporaneously. He prepared his words first. Findekáno felt a spark of mild curiosity, and they trailed out behind Nolofinwë, Lalwen’s face shining with every ounce of the anger and hatred Findekáno should be feeling and yet, somehow, was not.

Nolofinwë’s voice carried, even in Araman, and the people on the edges of his hearing would repeat the words for those behind them. He walked up the rise behind which their tents were sheltered, and the crowd parted around him, and the mists swirled over the deadly land, and he spoke.

“We are thrice betrayed,” he said. “By Melkor, Moringotto, the Enemy who abased himself at the feet of the Valar and swore himself redeemed, and turned at once to sowing hatred and mistrust, who murdered my father and poisoned the light and the joy of our homeland, who seeks now to massacre his way across Endorë and extinguish or enslave our sundered kin.

By the Valar, who in their determination to exercise their rightful rule over their land decided to deny us the right to depart it, promised us freedom and set this Ice in our path, hoping we would return to them like a hungry animal slinks home. 

And by Curufinwë Fëanáro, my brother,  who left us here to die, today. Who was unsuited to Kingship from the start and would, I think, never have desired it if Melkor had not set us at each others’ throats.  His call for vengeance and victory and a new beginning echoed - echoes - in all of our hearts, but in the end he took the easy path, of destroying instead of building, of mistrusting instead of earning trust. He is in Endorë with Melkor now.” Nolofinwë paused. “For a little while I was tempted to turn around and say ‘well, they deserve each other.’”

The crowd laughed. They were standing in the worst of Araman’s winds, here – the price of standing high enough that their people could see them. Findekáno did not feel cold.

“My brother’s Oath,” Nolofinwë said, “has already driven him to terrible things and will drive him to failure and death, eventually. And among the crimes that we can lay at his account is this: he intends to make my own oath false, for in the last hours of the light of Aman I swore that I would follow him.” 

Another pause. This rippled through the crowd more slowly than the laughter, and with more gravity. 

“I still intend to,” Nolofinwë said.

A fast ripple of some emotion Findekáno struggled to identify. He strained his eyes – relief. They had not wanted their lord to announce he was turning back. Findekáno’d read that rightly, in his initial paralyzing grief.  They were angry, they were cornered, they were Ñoldor. They wanted to go on.

“If you desire to turn back,” his father was saying gravely, “that is not cowardice. It requires, I think, a different kind of courage – for the greatest of those who betrayed us remain behind us, and have sworn their enmity, and may not accept our repentance. I cannot speak ill of anyone who chooses to face them. But I cannot lead you to that. So I will lead you on, if you choose to follow. We will cross the Ice and face the enemy  and prove ourselves stronger, the thrice-betrayed, than they, even fearing us, could possibly imagine.”  He raised his arms. “And they do fear us!” he cried. “Moringotto runs because he fears us. Curufinwë cripples himself in his fear of us.  He cannot win. But we can. We have twice his strength of arms, none of his pathological recklessness, and the strength of character no one ever wrote down academically enough that he could learn it.”

Another laugh. Findekáno was starting to realize that his father had been holding himself back in all his public debates with Fëanáro. 

“The Ice is dangerous,” Nolofinwë said. “I will not make light of it. It will be terrible and painful and dangerous. Some will die. I ask you not only to chance your own life but the life of your loved ones. And when we reach the end, we will not have reached safety; for the Enemy is there, gathering his strength and killing the innocent. I can promise you only this: we will reach that end, and we will fight that Enemy, and innocent people will live, will thrive, because of our sacrifice.” 

Someone had begun stamping their feet. Others had taken it up, and then others. The ground quaked like a Vala was approaching. Rhythmic. Thunderous.

 “There is a subject on which I have not spoken,” Nolofinwë said, “not since Tirion, to preserve my brother’s delicate sensibilities. My father is dead. He was the King of the Ñoldor, and always will be, and I believe that he will greet our fallen with joy and comfort, and be honored to know all of those who fight the Enemy he died facing. Fëanáro claims my father’s crown, and his title.” 

A breathless silence.

“I was willing to give him a chance,” Nolofinwë said mildly, “but I think he’s proven himself unworthy of both.”

A gasp, building to laughter, building to a roar –

“Will you name me your King?” 

And they knelt. Findekáno first, gracefully, easily, his whole world aglow with the delight of this moment – Turukáno, beside him, a little steadier – he had probably actually been paying attention when they’d been choreographing this in the tent, when Findekáno’d been lost in bitter reflections. He did not feel bitter now. This – whatever this was, this madness, this rebirth, this moment – could never have happened until Fëanáro’d rode himself off his cliff, and Maitimo’d chosen them, and so now there was no gaze Findekáno had to avoid, abashed, as he chose his father’s side. He owed them nothing, now. How oddly generous of them.

 “You’re shaking,” Turukáno said. 

He was. There were fireworks inside his skin. Every word of his father’s speech was landing with blazing clarity, ripping the numbness away from all the memories, leaving them bright and sharp and blazing in the pit of his belly. Every word Maitimo had ever spoken to him, ammunition for the hard road ahead.

They rose. They cheered. They went inside. And Findekáno thought – of course. If the griefs of Aman were narrow and shallow, so were the joys. If there was anguish so far outside what I had known, I should have guessed that there would be strength in equal measure. We are greater, out here. We stand taller. We see farther. We know, now, what terrible loss is. But with that knowledge has come new knowledge of ourselves – that we are great enough to face it.

“I hate him,” he said, experimentally, and meant it, felt it, disgust and revulsion and searing pain leaping up inside him like fire. “I can never forgive him, and he will beg for it –” and a blazing determination –

“You’ll have a lot of time on the road to sort that out,” Arakáno said, and he realized with some embarrassment that he’d said at least parts of that out loud. “Now you can help me figure out supply lines? The first way we’ll die is starvation.”

“Not the cold?” said Findekáno, looking up, grinning at his little brother perhaps a bit maniacally. 

“Not the cold,” Arakáno said, “Father can just talk everyone warm again. Didn’t you feel it?” 

“Oh, yes,” Findekáno said, “but let’s plan for the cold anyway, he’ll eventually run out of cruel but entirely true things to say about our uncle.”

 “Are you sure of that? He’s had centuries to come up with them, and he’s never said even one out loud–”

Behind them, Nolofinwë laughed. It did warm the room. Itarillë had kicked off her shoes and was dancing, barefoot, on the thick fur rug; her parents held hands, eyes twinkling, voices joining the chorus of planning and logistics that now bubbled around them like a hot spring in the mountains.

“I hate him,” Findekáno murmured to himself, under his breath, once he was sure the conversation was loud enough to cover for him.