I own nothing.
They never had a daughter of their own flesh. Through six childbirths and seven children, never were they blessed with a daughter. Nerdanel had wanted one, known that Fëanáro had wanted one even more, but eventually, she was just too tired. After the Ambarussa were born, she just couldn't do it anymore. Fëanáro agreed, there would be no more children. Their relationship was already disintegrating by that time, but he had too great a horror of his wife enduring the same fate that had taken his mother.
But even acknowledgement of the truth could not erase the longing in either of their hearts. With the knowledge of increased centuries upon her, Nerdanel supposes that that may be why, in the days before he turned against his half-brothers, Fëanáro never protested against the regular presence of Nolofinwë's first and third children in his house. Why he seemed to welcome them.
To Fëanáro, Findekáno and Irissë were like his eighth and ninth children, in the days before paranoia took him and he distrusted anything of Nolofinwë's. They were his eighth and ninth children, and one of them was even the daughter he had so wanted. 'You must have stolen them from us,' he would say to his brother. 'They're far too lively to be children of yours and Anairë's.'
All the same, they weren't Fëanáro's children, and they weren't Nerdanel's. And now, she has no children left at all, sons or daughters. Her seven sons have gone over the Sea, and it seems unlikely, so unlikely, that she will ever see them again. So unlikely that she does not trouble herself with wild hope the way Anairë and Eärwen do. If she sees them, then fine. But she will not torment herself with wild, desperate hope.
She makes her sculptures, accepts commissions, and learns to live in a house of silence.
-0-0-0-
The first to break the silence comes to her one day in summer, in the one-hundred and ninety-eighth year of the Sun.
Her dark hair coiled in a tight braid, Telpalma stands on Nerdanel's front stoop, a bag slung around her shoulder and an uncertain, and yet determined, expression upon her face. "Mother." Her address and the tone she takes is formal, but it is hardly unexpected, considering how little the two nissi even know each other. "May I speak with you?"
Nerdanel finds herself entertaining a stranger, for that is all Telpalma is, really. They have only met twice, once at the younger nís's wedding in Formenos, and second at the birth of her son Telperinquar. From what little she had seen of her, Telpalma is a weaver, and she has gathered Telpalma to be possessed of a sharp, though not unkindly personality. Nearly all the bright gregariousness has gone out of her though, Nerdanel sees, as Telpalma sits down in a chair in the small sitting room, and tells her story.
What was left of Formenos after Finwë and Moringotto's duel was razed at the order of the Valar in the attempt to purge the place of the fallen Vala's malevolent influence. As a result, Telpalma and her kin were forced to relocate to a town higher in the mountains, but she can't stay there anymore.
Whispers follow her everywhere, she confides in frustration, and Nerdanel nods; she knows the feeling. "Wherever I go, they are watching me, whispering at my back. I hear the whispering, I hear the gossip. I know what they think of me. As if I really could have stopped him," she mutters bitterly, looking away, and when she realizes that she spoke that last sentence aloud she blushes and winces, though Nerdanel has made no move to chastise her, nor acted as though she knows of whom Telpalma speaks. "I know it will be no easier in Tirion, but now my kin have begun to feel the anger of the mob as well, and I…"
Her proud, sharp face creases and crumples, and she taps a finger against her knee, staring out of the window. Telpalma stares out on the near-deserted streets of a near-emptied city, and she says, so softly, "I wonder if Curvo would still have gone, if he could see what he's left behind."
Indeed.
Nerdanel reads between the lines enough to know what Telpalma is asking of her. You must surely also be assaulted with the hostility, silent or otherwise, of your fellows in this devastated city, she says without words. And you too have lost your children. Surely what follows me shall not weigh on you.
It's rather mercenary, truth be told, but it's practical, and Nerdanel likes practical. There is room enough in this house for a second occupant, and she would like to know her daughter-in-law better. She would like to have some remnant of her lost family with her, even if that remnant is someone who is as a stranger to her.
Nerdanel makes sculptures on commission, and Telpalma does her weaving on the same basis. The house, it is all but silent still.
-0-0-0-
The second comes in winter, in the six hundred and first year of the Second Age.
There comes one night a knocking on the door. Nerdanel does not hear it at first, for deeply does she sleep, curled up beneath blankets upon blankets, the fire crackling in the grate. She and Telpalma have both removed to the sitting room, the only room in the house with a proper fireplace; the hearth in the kitchen can not compare, and should not be left unattended for long. It's not normally so cold in Tirion, even in the depths of winter, and Nerdanel hopes that they will not need to sleep in the sitting room often. The visitor knocks, and knocks again, and very nearly has to kick the door before Nerdanel hears her and wakes.
Drawing a shawl around her shoulders and wincing at the feel of the chilly stone against her bare feet (Elves may be more resistant to the cold than the Atani, but they can still feel it), Nerdanel goes to the door, wondering who it could possibly be at this time of night.
She swings the door open, and nearly screams in shock to see one she had thought still dead.
Snow melting on her black wool cloak and green wool dress, Ilmanis stands shivering outside. There's a bag slung across her back and she clutches what is likely a harp covered in cloth to her chest. "Mother." Her teeth chatter and her eyes linger longingly on the fire in the grate. "May I come in?"
Nerdanel stares over Ilmanis's shoulder, for one long moment hoping beyond hope (before she remembers that she's not supposed to do that) to see Makalaurë standing behind her. He always followed after her when they were children. Nerdanel can remember the startling revelation that the two of them were in love, borne from so simple a thing as how he would bow his head and lean in close to catch the strains of her soft voice when she spoke to him. But her lost singer-son is not here. He has not trailed after his wife as Nerdanel always remembers him doing. Ilmanis is alone, and she stands shivering in the cold, slim and shy and uncertain.
Telpalma feels the draught from the outside and awakens. She comes to the door, murmuring a bleary, "Who is it, Mother?" before she sees Ilmanis standing there. Her hands fly to her mouth—"But… I thought, I thought…" and Nerdanel clasps her daughter-in-law's arm and pulls her inside, shutting the door firmly behind them and steering her towards the fire.
Ilmanis was released from the Halls recently, having been deemed fit to live again. She went back to her family in Tirion, but found "a gap that could not be bridged had sprung up between us. Our paths diverged long ago. I've seen too much, done too much—" she stares into the fire, straight sheets of long, loose black hair falling over her face "—they find me a stranger, and I barely recognize them." Her voice is flat and toneless, like she's telling someone else's tale, or wishes she was. "And my cousins."
Aye, Nerdanel remembers. Ilmanis's half-Telerin cousins.
To be honest, Nerdanel finds Ilmanis a stranger, so similar to the nís she knew in the days of bliss, and yet so different as well. There's something about her, shadowed and gaunt, utterly and unnervingly alien. But here she is, returned when her husband has not, come home to find that it is not home, and how can Nerdanel turn her away?
Ilmanis takes up work teaching the young children of Tirion music. The whispering follows her around as well, more venomous than it is with Nerdanel or Telpalma, for while they stayed in Aman, Ilmanis followed her husband. 'This one has killed. She has killed, Orc and Elf alike, for was this one not slain in the Second Kinslaying? The others are merely wife and mother to Kinslayers, but she is Kinslayer herself.' The whispers, the glares, they roll off of her like water. She is quiet, her expression, her pale face and mind shut. Nerdanel wonders how Ilmanis managed to convince the parents of Tirion to let her teach their children to play the harp.
One morning in spring, Nerdanel awakens to hear the sounds of a harp being played. She rushes down to the kitchen, heart in her throat, to find Ilmanis sitting in the corner of the kitchen, her fine hair falling over her face, playing upon her cherry-wood harp. Playing a song her husband wrote.
Suddenly, Nerdanel finds herself in tears.
Telpalma comes down as well, looks at her sister-in-law, then to her mother-in-law, and hisses to the former, "Stop it." Ilmanis does not notice, and Telpalma leans down and shakes her shoulder. "Ilmanis, stop. You're making her cry."
Ilmanis's eyes clear and she seems to come out of a trance. Her dark gray gaze settles on Nerdanel's face and a hint of color comes into her pale cheeks. She sets her harp aside and gets to her feet, taking Nerdanel's hands. "I'm sorry, Mother," she says softly, contrite. "I didn't realize…"
Nerdanel shakes her head, abruptly, disentangling her hands from Ilmanis's to scrub at her tears. "No, no, it's alright." She looks down into Ilmanis's face, expressionless, brow furrowed. "I've not asked you this before, Ilmanis. I was, I think, afraid to hear your answer. Do you think he will come back?" Her voice is fraught, and tense. Nerdanel tells herself that, as mother, she would know best, but perhaps wife would know better, and she really is afraid to hear what Ilmanis will say.
"Yes." Ilmanis smiles so sweetly, smiles for the first time since she appeared on Nerdanel's doorstep that winter night. She sounds so confident, and Nerdanel sees in her face the faith and trust that led this one to abandon everything she knew to follow her husband over the sea, to what, she could not know. It gives her hope, and Nerdanel no longer thinks it foolish to hope.
The house is silent, except with strains of music pierce its stone.
-0-0-0-
In the second thousandth, four-hundredth and thirty-first year of the Second Age, on a crisp fall day, comes the third.
There's a nís with silver hair wandering about a marketplace, looking lost. She stares all around her, brow furrowed in worry, wringing the ends of a scarf in her hands. Nerdanel frowns at her, thinking her one of the Teleri, and wondering what on earth she would be doing here—the Teleri never come to Tirion anymore.
At her shoulder, Ilmanis catches sight of the nís and practically jumps. "Gladhrien!"
Ilmanis runs to the nís's side. Gladhrien, as she called her, seems to recognize her and her face splits into a wide, relieved smile as she launches into a long spate of speech in a language that Nerdanel recognizes as some dialect of Sindarin or Nandorin. Ilmanis, smiling more widely than Nerdanel thinks she has ever seen her do, takes Gladhrien's hand and leads her back to Nerdanel.
"Mother," she says without preamble, though rather nervous. "This is Gladhrien. I told you about her when I first came back. Carnistir's wife."
Nerdanel tries not to frighten the clearly timid girl as she introduces herself, in broken, heavily accented Quenya. "I… I am Gladhrien. It… It is an honor… to meet you, Mother." She smiles, a faltering, slightly cracked smile, her light blue eyes over-bright. "Caranthir…" She uses his Sindarin name, Nerdanel notices. "…He…" She looks away, swallowing hard "…He told me much, of you."
Not a Teler, but a Laiquendë, a Wood-Elf. A native of Ossiriand, of lost Beleriand. And of lost Eregion. Gladhrien tells her tale, brow furrowed and nervous. She slips into Sindarin, a tongue she has greater mastery over. After Carnistir was slain in Doriath, Gladhrien went back to her people in Ossiriand, and as Beleriand was ruined during the War of Wrath, they fled over the mountains and to the south. After he became lord of the city, she took refuge in Ost-in-Edhil with her nephew-by-marriage. Nerdanel is so glad that Telpalma is not with them this day, for Gladhrien's tale of Telperinquar's death, short and stilted as it is, causes pain enough to her, and she does not wish to think of the pain it would cause his mother. For all that it is a tale they have already heard, over and over again.
"There is a darkness falling over Ennor." The Laiquendë begins wringing her scarf again. "The old servant of Morgoth, Gorthaur, he gathers might and seeks to set all lands under his hand. I fear it is the end of all, for Ennor," she croaks, and will say no more.
She has no family here, another widow of a Kinslayer, alone in a strange land with no family and precious few friends. Nerdanel takes her in; her conscience will not let her behave otherwise. She watches this girl, a stranger, as she helps Telpalma at her weaving, or as she sits at Ilmanis's side, or as she smiles shyly at Nerdanel herself. She watches as Gladhrien struggles to follow even the most basic and simple of conversations conducted in Quenya.
Nerdanel watches Gladhrien, and wonders what Carnistir, her stormy, short-tempered son, saw in this shy, meek nís. For that matter, she wonders what Gladhrien saw in him. How did they even communicate, unless Carnistir could speak Gladhrien's tongue? Nerdanel has no illusions regarding her children, and knows that Carnistir is not easy to love even by those of his own flesh and blood. She remembers how often she was frustrated with him. He was so solitary, so wont to go off by himself, and yet he wed a nís of the Laiquendi, a timid nís.
The house still seems silent to her.
-0-0-0-
Until one morning when Nerdanel wakes, and realizes that it is not so silent after all.
Telpalma sits at the kitchen table, going over her accounts and receipts, tapping her foot against the floor in time with the rhythm her sister-in-law plays. Ilmanis and Gladhrien sit in a sunlit corner, the former strumming on her harp, and the latter singing a song in Quenya, stumbling over the words, but singing sweetly enough that it does not matter. Nerdanel sits down at the table, softening bread on a plate filled with oil, and listening, her eyes shut.
There they all sit, mother and daughters though not. The house is not silent. It is filled with music, and song, and the chatter of living people. It is not empty either; it is crowded and warm as a house should be. Her sons are gone, but her daughters have returned to her, one by one by one. Nerdanel lets her eyes close halfway, and she allows herself to believe that she has found better days.
Fëanáro—Fëanor
Ambarussa—Amrod and Amras
Nolofinwë—Fingolfin
Findekáno—Fingon
Irissë—Aredhel
Telperinquar—Celebrimbor
Moringotto—Morgoth
Curvo—Curufin
Makalaurë—Maglor
Carnistir—Caranthir
Gorthaur—Sauron (A Sindarin name often applied to him by the natives of Beleriand)
Nissi—women (plural: nís)
Atani—Men (singular: Atan) (Quenya)
Laiquendë—"Green-elf" (plural: Laiquendi)
Ennor—Middle-Earth (Sindarin)