1487
Lalwen had found Arafinwë's door unlocked. It was just like him to leave it so; no door with which Nolofinwë or Anairë had anything to do was likely to have less than three locks. Lalwen frequently mislaid her keys and had to bang on the window for a servant to let her in. (Anairë never opened doors herself and lived in a state of perpetual surprise that Nerdanel could lower herself to do so.)
The house seemed to be entirely deserted; Lalwen was glad. She had not come to see her brother or his family. She had come to calm down. Lalwen was furious with Nolofinwë as she had rarely been before. Even here, in this quiet place, a sob of rage rose in her throat at the thought of what he had done to her. How dare he!
In the garden, she found Eärwen, who was doing some embroidery on the lawn. She did not greet her sister-in-law, merely raising her glorious eyes to see who it was bursting in from the house and then lowering them again to her work.
Lalwen threw herself down on the grass. The wind was making music in the malinorni.
What Nolofinwë had done was to steal from the palace cellar, where they had been quietly rusting away and doing no-one any harm, several elderly swords. He had then presented these to his assembled household, after delivering a vague and incomprehensible little speech about the importance of self-defence 'in these troubled times'. Lalwen had asked him repeatedly to what troubled times he was referring. His casual rebuffals had driven her almost to hysterics.
The rest of the family had been no help at all. Anairë and Turukáno had been firmly on Nolofinwë's side in this as in everything; Findekáno had shuffled his feet and looked uncomfortable; Artelda had apparently not appreciated the gravity of the situation.
Nolofinwë had patiently explained that there was no 'situation' - they were merely living in troubled times -, so Lalwen had been obliged to scream at him and run away. As she was slamming the door, he had asked her where she was going. When she told him, he had quietly raised his eyebrows, saying:
"What do you hope to escape? Intelligent society?"
.~.~.~.~.
Nerwendë Artanis was making her way along the Tirion- Alqualondë road. This had once been beautifully paved by highly skilled Noldorin craftsmen; she noticed with some distaste, however, that weeds had been allowed to encroach onto it in several places. Also the dark undergrowth beneath the trees growing to the west was disturbingly wild. As the road wound its way out of the Calacyria and into the shadows and half-light of northern Eldamar, it seemed to be less and less the handiwork of civilised beings and more and more to resemble a wild track leading to nowhere by way of the Middle-earth.
The vegetation on the other side was less thick, parting here and there to allow Artanis a brief glimpse of the sea. The trees themselves were common species. Even in semi-darkness, Artanis easily recognised most of them merely from the configurations of their branches. She could have identified every one of the rest if she had dismounted and examined them closely. So certain was she of her ability to do this that she did not in fact make the attempt.
Artanis was bored. She had existed in a state of almost continual boredom ever since returning to Tirion from the house of Yavanna in 1472. It was not that she had not considered going back there, yet she had felt strongly that to do so would be to pile mistake upon mistake. Her first error had been in returning to Tirion rather than moving on to somewhere else. She could not under any circumstances have remained with Yavanna, any more than she could return to her now. That interval was irrevocably over.
Yavanna had given this apt pupil every scrap of knowledge that her mind, constricted as it was by the necessities of time and space, could hold. Artanis knew the secret of the dragonfly's flight and the growth of the new leaves in spring; she understood the hidden life of the rocks in the heart of Arda. Artanis knew why the blackbird sang.
And what did she do with this great and fearful accumulation of knowledge? She took it to Tirion! To Tirion, where her grandparents lived on the stale memories of their love; where her poor benighted little mother believed herself happy on a steady diet of garden parties and idle gossip and embroidery. Artanis' vague but long-felt idea of herself as a tremendously important and significant being revolted against the very thought of Tirion.
It was many Years since Nerwendë Artanis had first conceived of her life as following a script. By this she meant, not the Music of the Ainur, although of course she knew all about that, but some special destiny of her own. It was of course up to her alone to realize this by fulfilling the potential of her nature to the best of her ability. Sometimes she thought of it in this way: just as the foal is born knowing by instinct how to run, so Artanis had been born with the knowledge of how to achieve greatness. It was instinct that had told her when to take up her education in Valinor and likewise when to leave there. On this particular Day, she had woken extremely early and in the clear knowledge that the time had come to take her destiny to Alqualondë.
