Artanis fixed her mouth into a frown, resisting the urge to preen. Írissë noticed, though, and giggled into her cup of wine.

“I am sorry, cousin,” she said, “but I fear this is not the last you will hear from our dear half-uncle. Fëanáro is quite obsessive. You will either have to steel yourself against him or relent. But come!” Írissë set her cup down and leapt up, offering Artanis a hand. “We will not be drawn into the fixations and feuds of all these foolish men. A dance, sweet Nerwendë?”

“Very well,” Artanis accepted her hand and stood, “but I’m not returning to that hall without first replacing my mask.”

The disguise that Artanis had chosen for this year’s appearance at Tirion’s masked ball included a tall and unwieldy headdress, its menacing face with beady eyes and forked tongue sitting heavily on her brow. The wide scaly hood, however, had the benefit of concealing her hair.

In the time Írissë and Artanis had been gone, the number of bodies in the hall had doubled. The musicians were whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Artanis scanned the room. Good: Nerdanel had arrived. That should keep Fëanáro in check. She tucked the hem of her skirt into her belt and joined Írissë in the whirling circle. Artanis gave herself over to the dance. She was swept into the swirl of bodies, her heart pounding and her blood coursing hotly. This was when she was most alive, her spirit ignited by the exertion of her body.

The first chords of the next song signalled a partners dance. Artanis spun, grasping for Írissë — but her cousin had already darted off and slipped into the arms of an elf wearing the face and comically large antlers of a great stag, loose silver hair tumbling over his broad shoulders. How obvious. Typical Fëanárion.

Artanis scoffed and jerked her chin away from her only female cousin. A traitor not only to the line of Indis but to women everywhere!

Then a hand brushed her forearm. She tore herself from its groping fingers, prepared to confront the impertinent, presumptuous—

“Seahorse?” Artanis blurted. Now that was original, at least.

The elf laughed, and the lilting sound slithered straight down Artanis’ spine, a pleasant frisson. The slice of skin exposed by the plunging neckline of his robe intensified the sensation.

A smile broadening beneath the long elegant snout of his mask drew her eyes back up. “Cobra?” he said.

“Mm,” Artanis hummed in agreement.

“Excellent. I have somewhat of a natural ability as a snake charmer.”

Ridiculous, Artanis thought, but deepened her voice seductively and said, “We shall see about that,” and found herself in the arms of the handsome — albeit rather short — seahorse, his frilly orange train sweeping behind as he led her to an empty space on the dance floor.

Looking back on the events of that night, Artanis felt that she would have been able to resist the allure of both his voice and attire, but the beguiling smell of him had robbed her of her wits. The longer they danced, the more it filled the air around them: bright but heady, like honeysuckle and cinnamon. No doubt, she later realised, he had perfumed himself thus with the precise aim of seduction but, by the dew of Laurelin, it worked. Artanis was intoxicated.

So it was that when he abruptly flitted off, pressing his lips to her knuckles and murmuring an excuse about a promised rendezvous (“But I will return, my lissome snake!”), she discreetly followed after him.

Despite his vibrant orange costume and her longer stride, this was surprisingly difficult to do. Whatever rendezvous he had planned, it was taking place in some far recess of the Palace. That ought to have put Artanis off her pursuit. But with her heart aflutter and her flesh alight (for the brush of his lips against her hand had spread like wildfire over her skin), the possibility of observing a secret tryst only hardened her resolve.

She followed him through narrow corridors and up winding staircases she did not even know existed in the Palace — indeed, why did they exist? Last, she clambered up a ladder through a hatch in the ceiling. It opened onto a small round balcony set atop a turret.

She peered over the lip of the opening, took note of the two sets of feet facing each other near the railing, and quickly ducked out of sight. She perched near the top of the ladder.

“Where have you been?” someone whispered shortly. (Artanis would surely have recognised the voice, she assured herself later, had her normally keen perception not been blunted by wine and lust.)

“Never mind,” replied the deeper voice of her dance partner. “I am here now, am I not? Come here: I have something I think you will find hard to resist.”

A whine of protest turned to a groan of pleasure. “Mmm,” said the first voice. “So you have made up for lost time. I am afraid I will need some assistance rising to the occasion.”

Artanis’ chest heaved along to the smack of lips joining, a low moan. Jealousy had no place in her thoughts, which were filled with vivid imagery of what might be happening just out of sight.

“Worry not, my golden flower bud. You know I will tend you as diligently as I must, until your petals are all unfurled and glistening with dew.” These words were punctuated by more wet sounds and rustling silk.

Artanis’ hand slid down the neckline of her gown, fingertip teasing at her hardened nipple. Though the gown draped loosely over her chest, her swollen breasts now felt constrained; she hurriedly unclasped the gown down to her sternum, sinking her fingers into her firm but forgiving flesh.

A groan, both irritation and pleasure. “Longer, no doubt,” said the mysterious lover. “You will wait until I am a fruit nearly rotting on the vine.”

The flick of a fingertip over her nipple caused Artanis to gasp audibly. She pinched her lips shut and froze in alarm, but a timely clatter of metal on the tiles saved her from being discovered. Artanis peeked: a belt of linked gold discs set with emeralds had fallen to the ground.

“Not rotting, no. Only until you are swollen with nectar, so that I might lave sweet juices from you with the barest stroke of my tongue.”

This was followed by the unmistakable exhale of one who had just found relief for some pent up ache.

Artanis hooked her feet around the ladder to steady herself. With one hand she resumed kneading her breasts, and the other she placed over the throbbing mound between her thighs.

The hitched breathing of the elf above took on greater urgency and volume, until he was keening with pleasure. Artanis’ fingers pulsed in time with his cries.

“Oh, oh yes, please, like that,” he babbled.

Artanis inhaled the scent of her own desire, her tongue thickened, and her mouth fell open. Her head lolled back against the top rung of the ladder, her hips lifted and she rutted against her palm. A thin wail escaped her throat, and then another, and she could not keep herself from whimpering as the hardness and heat of her arousal uncoiled deep inside her. The ladder dug into the tops of her feet, her toes curled tight. She squeezed her trembling thighs together, crushing her fingers between them.

“Oh, oh. Oh, fuck,” cried the elf above, “I’m going to spill. Oh stars, take your mouth off or I’ll fill your throat. Oooh, eergghhh!”

With the slightest pulsing of her fingers and the lightest circling of her nipple Artanis too was coming, heart thundering, holding her breath to keep from crying out. As she shuddered through the aftershocks of her climax, Artanis heard laboured breathing, a wet pop, and soft laughter.

Then she fell.

~

Despite the loud thud of her body hitting the floor, and, in the next second, the clattering of the ladder coming down on top of her, Artanis managed to scramble out of sight before the two lovers saw her. Holding her headdress up with one hand and her gown closed with another, she hurried back down the way she came — but took a sharp turn before coming too near the hall, eyes seeking some room or nook where she could put herself in order.

A voice from behind halted her.

“Nerwen! There you are!”

Artanis turned to face the tall, lean figure of an elf wearing a mask with a black beak and golden hawk’s eyes. Long, mottled plumes fanned out to either side of his face.

“Aikanáro!” she greeted her brother. “When did you arrive?”

“Not long ago. Have you seen Ingo? Grandmother is looking for him. Apparently he promised to perform some poetry with her.”

“Oh,” said Artanis. She could not recall seeing Findaráto at all that evening. “Are you sure he’s come already?”

Aikanáro snickered.

Artanis narrowed her eyes. “Do grow up. No, I haven’t seen him.”

“Fine. Well, I’m going back to the party. He can make his own apologies to Indis. Why are you here, by the way?” He strode closer to her and reached for the top of her headdress. “And what happened to your hat? Oh — oops. One of your eyeballs fell out.” He held the large black bead out for her to see.

“I tripped,” Artanis said in a hurry, and grabbed the eyeball from her brother. “On my gown. Too much of it.”

Aikanáro laughed. “Ah little Nerwen, you never could manage in a dress. You ought to have worn trousers. Come on, let’s get you straightened out.”

~

Findaráto still had not appeared when Artanis returned to the dance hall, and Indis had started the performance without him. But at the climactic moment of the first canto, describing the raising of the Lamps Illuin and Ormal, suddenly he stood in one of the high arched openings behind the stage. His golden raiment shimmered in the light of Telperion.

The crowd roared their approval of these theatrics, but Artanis caught the look of surprise on Indis’ face. This entrance had not been by design. Artanis tutted and turned to the spread behind her: her brother would get no approval of his antics from her. She plucked a few plump grapes and stuffed olives from the table and added them to her plate.

Then she caught a heady whiff of that cinnamon-honeysuckle scent. Like a spiced wine it sank straight down into her belly and pooled there, pleasantly warm.

“Psst.”

Artanis looked up. With fluid grace, the seahorse-costumed elf slunk over the sill of an open window.

“Don’t tell me you are part of this ridiculous act,” said Artanis.

“What?” He glanced at the stage where Findaráto had begun to dance in time with his recitation. “Oh, no. No, I just got a little lost on my way back and came round the outside. Easier to get my bearings. I hope you will forgive the delay.”

Artanis cleared her throat and tilted her chin towards the ceiling. If only he were taller, she thought, and in her thought she heard the voice of Írissë rejoinder, “Why? You know it makes no difference lying down.”

“Forgive you?” said Artanis. “That will depend on how you intend to make up for it.” Artanis sliced her front teeth through a fat grape and licked a circle around the rim of her parted lips to gather its juices.

Through the openings in the other elf’s mask, she could see his eyes darken.

“Well,” he said, his red lips dancing around the syllable, “the dew is gathering on the primroses about this hour and they are most fragrant—”

“Yes,” said Artanis, who was going to go mad (from both lust and vexation) if she heard one more word about flowers spoken in that dulcet tone. “Let’s go.”

~

It was not well known among Tirion’s elite that the staid and formidable Nerwen Artanis Arafinwiel was as ambitious about the acquisition of lovers as she was about the acquisition of athletic and intellectual accolades. Because Artanis was decisive and efficient, eschewing the coquetry that normally preceded an act of pleasure, it was believed, by those she did not bed, that she was uninterested in such matters. As for those she did bed, the reverence and fear she inspired kept them from making any boasts about having breached the steely exterior of Arafinwë’s daughter — at which each believed him or herself to have been uniquely successful.

This included Canafinwë Macalaurë Fëanorion, who, when he had looked about the dance floor and spotted, on her own, an unusually tall woman with spools of silver-gold hair escaping her headdress, had rearranged the evening’s agenda to include concourse with not one but two children of the House of Arafinwë.

“Won’t you take off that ridiculous mask?” Artanis protested, as the tip of Macalaurë’s seahorse snout brushed the space between her bared breasts.

“Ah, but that would spoil the fun, now, wouldn’t it?” Macalaurë took one swollen breast in each hand, shaping her chocolate-brown nipples into hard peaks with his thumbs. He looked up at her. “I tell you what. I will remove my snout if you will remove but the hood of your headdress. I long to run my fingers through the beautiful hair you are hiding beneath there.”

Artanis shoved him off, hard enough that Macalaurë stumbled backwards over the wet grass. “No. We shall have to make do.” Then she tugged him back, navigating her way around the awkward protuberance of his mask to stick her tongue down his throat.

They were both gasping when she pulled back. “There is one way this could be made significantly easier,” she said. “And fortunately for you, I am in the mood to be fucked like a bitch in heat.”

Then she threw off the rest of her gown, spun around, and bent down nearly in half. She planted her hands on the low garden wall.

Face appearing upside-down between her calves, she commanded: “Come now, get on with it. I have little patience for a drooping stem.”

Macalaurë, all the blood in his brain currently allocated to maintaining the rigidity of said stem, failed to note the reference to his earlier florid blandishments. With all the enthusiasm and cocksure confidence he brought to celebrating victory in the theatrical arena, he thrust into the glistening blossom of Arafinwë’s daughter.

~

What a splendid evening! Findaráto leapt off the stage, landing with another sweeping bow. The applause vibrated in his bones. The success of the recitation (and extempore dance) with Grandmother Indis had been a triumph, and all the more so for how perilously close it had come to disaster. Findaráto should have known better than to trust Macalaurë to be punctual for a warm-up on such an important occasion, but truly there were no other lips or fingers so skilled in all of Eldamar. And then the ladder toppling over! Scaling down the palace walls!

Findaráto laughed and threw his head back. He let it rest there, inhaling deeply. The chandeliers cast a myriad of colours over the domed and tiled ceiling. Marvellous!

A resonant, vaguely threatening voice drew his chin abruptly down.

“Have you seen your sister?”

Findaráto worked to keep the smile plastered across his face. No ‘Well done, nephew!’ Not even a ‘Good evening, Findaráto, how are you?’ Just ‘Where is your sister?’ Fëanáro’s interest in Artanis’ hair, amusing at first, was becoming a worrying fixation.

“Uncle,” Findaráto replied to the elegantly but plainly attired Fëanáro. He wore no costume or mask save a tall plumed headpiece — likely at his wife’s insistence. Fëanáro was vocal in his disdain for wearing disguises, even in fun (and yet his hand in crafting the bedazzled costumes of his sons was unmistakable). “Good evening. No, I have not seen Artanis.”

Fëanáro frowned. “Hm.” He threw back the last of his drink and shoved the glass into Findaráto’s hand. “Would you tell my wife I’ve gone for a walk?”

Without waiting for an answer, Fëanáro spun, heels clicking on the stone floor as he marched towards the hall’s exit.

Findaráto stared at his retreating figure. His mouth flapped uselessly. 'Leave my sister alone!' he wanted to cry. Especially now. Artanis’ proclivities were no secret to her eldest brother and primary confidant (or so Findaráto flattered himself into believing). If Artanis was nowhere to be found at this hour there was almost certainly a salacious reason for it. So far the evening had gone so well! Not even a word of aggression exchanged between the bifurcated lines of Finwë. But if Fëanáro were to catch Artanis in an act of passion—! Findaráto rather doubted the proud son of Míriel would come away unscathed.

By now, Fëanáro was nothing but a black plume rising above the crowd. Findaráto trotted after him.

~

Fëanáro stalked through the garden paths silent and perilous as a panther. Findaráto tracked him. It was due only to his greater familiarity with these gardens, which his uncle shunned whenever possible, that he managed to escape notice.

While keeping an eye on Fëanáro, Findaráto quirked his ears in the direction of various locations he knew from personal experience to be ideal for holding tryst.

His left ear caught on a staccato series of sharp cries. They were coming from the primrose garden. A low moan and murmur soothed the cries into silence. Momentarily — for they started up again almost at once, louder than before, and then broke into speech.

“Aahh, yes, yes! Fuck me, you wanton rogue!”

A knowing grimace tugged Findaráto's mouth down. He was by now mostly inured to the shock of hearing such cries from Artanis' mouth, but no big brother would ever wholly be free of the impulse to drag his little sister away from her ravisher, no matter how willing she might be.

Then he panicked: the path Fëanáro followed was leading him directly to her location. Findaráto broke into a run, thoughts grasping for a clever distraction while his feet raced to stop his uncle.

When he came to a breathless halt and Fëanáro spun on him, he still had no plan.

~

“Then I just blurted: ‘Uncle!’ — he grimaced at that — ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about a point in your recent lecture on the tehtar.’ ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Er yes,’ I said, frantically trying to remember something from the talk. ‘Ah! Yes, well, as you know, I am fluent in Telerin,’ — he huffed and rolled his eyes at that — ‘and I was interested in your point about the roots of Quenya méla as it relates to Telerin māla.’ He raised his brows impatiently, but his eyes lit up. I think my youthful enthusiasm must have saved me from humiliation. ‘Well, my Telerin prince,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t,’ then he took me by the arm and indulged me with an hour lecture on the coalescing of vowels, which might have gone on until Laurelin’s flowering had not your mother tracked us down and dragged him away. But it was a small price to pay to keep him from coming upon my sister and her lover. Can you imagine!”

Findaráto burst into a fit of laughter.

“Mm, clever Ingo.” Macalaurë nipped Findaráto’s collarbone. His hands tightened around his ribs.

“Ah, that tickles!” Findaráto shrieked.

Macalaurë settled himself on top. Findaráto was still chuckling as he stooped to kiss him. When he pulled away, his lips curled in that way that meant he was about to say something he thought witty: “Lucky you didn’t walk yourself into a bed of thorns.”

“Oh, please.” Findaráto smacked his shoulder.

Macalaurë’s smirk split into a grin. His thumbs followed the curve of Findaráto’s pectorals and toyed with the pearl rings piercing his nipples. When Findaráto responded with a shiver, he slipped his tongue through one of the rings.

Findaráto’s sigh of pleasure ended in another fit of giggles. He could not keep his thoughts from straying to the narrowly-avoided crisis in the gardens.

“Who do you think she was with?” he mused.

Macalaurë groaned and thumped his forehead against Findaráto’s breastbone. “I do not care!” he grumbled, then bracing himself on his elbows and adjusting his hips so that the hard length of his arousal met Findaráto’s abdomen, he said more seductively: “You are with me now, and there is something we need to finish.”

Findaráto’s own arousal jumped in answer, and he allowed himself to be rolled over and hoisted on top of Macalaurë, where their mouths joined hungrily.

It was not long before Findaráto’s neck was thrown back, breath coming in short gasps and hands clenching and unclenching around the sheets, while two slick fingers worked to ease him open. A tongue swirled around the head of his shaft. A shock of pleasure rushed from each point of contact and Findaráto cried out when they met mingled inside him.

Then suddenly he was bereft of both tongue and fingers. “Wha— What, no! Please, don’t stop, I’m— wha—”

A hand clamped over his mouth. “Did you hear that?”

“Herwut?” Findaráto mumbled against Macalaurë’s palm.

A shout and the patter of feet on the stairs answered for him.

“Ingo!” the woman’s voice called.

Ai! Findaráto cursed himself for not speaking to Artanis after the last incident with the wax ‘body painting’. “You have to draw a boundary, Ingo,” echoed Turukáno’s wisdom from the recesses of his memory. Too late now.

“Quick!” he squirmed out from under Macalaurë’s embrace. “It’s Artanis! Under the cover!”

Findaráto sprung up to tug at the blanket bunched at the foot of the bed, but with a flash of skin Macalaurë was out of the bed and—

“NO!” cried Findaráto.

—out the window.

In the same moment he disappeared from sight, the door swung open. “Ingo! You will not believe the evening I have had!” Artanis swept into the room, and her oblivious enthusiasm granted Findaráto precious seconds with which to cover himself.

She perched on the edge of the bed, flinging her cobra headdress onto the mattress beside her.

“Hello sister,” said Findaráto, and smiled.

Artanis laughed. “Ingo, did you know there are hatches in the ceiling of the Palace that lead to little balconies atop the turrets?”

“Mmhmm.” Under the cover, Findaráto’s fingers gripped his knees. His teeth clenched behind his smile.

“Well, there was this elf behaving very oddly — the one dressed as a seahorse, did you see him? — and he slipped off for a ‘rendezvous’, so I followed him.” A pained squeak rose in Findaráto’s throat. “Oh, don’t be a prude, I know you would have done the same. In any case—”

Abruptly, she stopped, her darting eyes landing on the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed. On top of it lay Macalaurë’s forgotten, and rather mussed-up, seahorse mask.

Her face fell. “Why do you have that,” she said darkly, a pallor of revulsion bleaching the rosy tint from her cheeks.

~

Angaráto was seated on the low portico wall when the nude elf landed in the flowerbed directly in front of him, arms extended like wings and mouth agape, as if shocked he’d stuck the landing.

Grinning smoothly, Angaráto shoved the dark head between his thighs down and draped his other hand casually across his hips.

“Hello Macalaurë,” he said. The body lying prostrate against the wall at his feet grunted. Angaráto kicked it.

Macalaurë blinked, mouth still hanging open.

“Are you lost?” Angaráto asked.

“I…” Macalaurë stammered. While he waited for his cousin to verbalise his thoughts, Angaráto’s eyes darted down the exposed plane of his chest to find him — as expected of one who had fallen naked from his older brother’s window — still half-hard. Macalaurë evidently took this as a sign of interest (which it was, on some level): when Angaráto’s gaze again found his, he was smiling smugly.

Macalaurë dragged his teeth over his bottom lip. “Lost? Not at all! I was just going for a swim — would you like to come?” His brows waggled suggestively.

This could be fun, Angaráto thought, stamping down on the body beneath him and leaning forward to come closer to Macalaurë. “A swim, eh?” he said.

Then several things happened at once:

The body on the ground sprung up between them, knocking Angaráto’s chin with one shoulder as he swung to shove Macalaurë into the greenery.

“Can you not leave anyone for the rest of us?” growled Macalaurë’s assailant.

“Carnistir?!” Macalaurë cried. “But I thought you hated—”

From upstairs, a shriek louder than both Macalaurë’s disbelieving protests and Angaráto’s roll of laughter: “I cannot believe you let a Fëanárion put his teeth near your—! Ugh!”

“I can’t believe you were listening! How could you not have known it was me?”

This was followed by a cry of dismay and several incomprehensible noises of disgust. “I don’t know! He was very— oh Varda save me! I can’t believe I let a Fëanárion fuck me!”

“You WHAT!?”

“I let him fuck me! After I heard him with you, I went to the gardens and he fucked me. And then he came back here, to you, the insatiable boar!”

But when Artanis and Findaráto appeared side-by-side, torsos thrust out of the upstairs window, shouting “Cáno!” and “You Fëanárian philanderer!”, it was only Angaráto they saw grinning up at them.

Concealed by a high retaining wall, Carnistir and Macalaurë made a slow retreat, mouthing curses, flicking, shoving, and tugging at the other’s hair.

~

The dining room in the seldom-occupied quarters set aside for Fëanáro and his household slowly filled with bodies. Fëanáro beamed as brightly as the rays of Laurelin streaming through the windows as each of his sons took their seats around the table.

When at last they were all assembled, Fëanáro addressed them. “My sons, I am most proud of your appearances last night. Seeing each of you like a jewel amid the crowd—” he ignored several groans “—swells my heart with—” a glimmer stopped him short. Laurelin’s light had caught on a long thread of gold on the tablecloth between Macalaurë and Carnistir.

“What is that?” Fëanáro asked.

His sons mistook the intensity of his tone for displeasure. “Oh, sorry,” they both said at once, reaching for the glorious strand of hair.

“No, let me see that,” said Fëanáro, extending his hand greedily. Macalaurë scowled (poor child, thought Fëanáro, he had clearly had too much drink), then plucked the hair from the table and held it out for his father.

Fëanáro snatched it from him and twisted it around one finger reverentially. He slipped it into a pocket. He looked from Macalaurë to Carnistir, briefly considering which of them— no matter. He had it now, that precious filament of mingled light he had so long sought.

“You did well,” he said to them both.

Sticking his fork into his eggs with satisfaction, he missed Macalaurë whispering to his brother: “Should we tell him?”