Artelda walked into Fëanáro's atrium with a carefully assumed carelessness, intended to demonstrate her cheerful contempt of such little things as parental disapproval or avuncular instability; for indeed it was nothing to do with her if Curufinwë Fëanáro was to be banished to the wilds of northern Valinor for threatening his brother with a sword before their father's house. Nothing at all. She was entirely a free spirit!

The atrium was strewn with various trunks and packages and loose items, stacked carelessly among Nerdanel's beautiful sculptures. Someone had left the front door open. Losselótë was weeping quietly to herself in a corner. She took no notice of the visitor.

Makalaurë's Ambalindë, frowning over a list in the passageway, regarded her cousin by marriage with a look of gentle puzzlement and offered her something to eat or drink, which Artelda declined with as much firmness as if accepting would bind her forever to this house of mourning.

She took the list and the offer as a manifestation of Ambalindë's new authority in the household, now that Nerdanel had left Fëanáro for her father's house. Apparently the final blow to their marriage had been Fëanáro's condemnation by Mandos himself. Nerdanel had always had a great reverence for the Valar.

.~.~.~.~.

"I've taken to drink," Lalwen remarked. She seemed to find this a pronouncement of general interest. Anairë could not agree with her.

"You have driven me to drink! You and him between you. Oh Aulë-"

"I should think it is up to you whether you take to drink or not."

"Look at you, sitting there - And are you actually pleased? By Aulë, you are! You like to think of yourself as the queen, don't you? Don't you? I could tear your throat out, you - you - you!"

"I cannot understand what action of mine or Nolofinwë's it is that so distresses you, dear sister."

"Can't understand! Rubbish! My own brother banished is something to me, isn't he? My father reduced to a halfwitted wreck!"

"Fëanáro is banished through his own actions, Írien dear. And it is surely the King's own business if he chooses to accompany him into exile."

Lalwen abruptly stopped still in her pacing of the floor, threw back her beautiful head and howled like a wolf. She was dishevelled and frenzied and had indeed drunk rather a lot of wine since Fëanáro's trial. Anairë did not look up from her needlework.

"Through his own actions - Oh! Anairë, Anairë! You know as well as I do how he was provoked. I would like to attack Nolofinwë with a sword myself sometimes!"

"I'm sure you would."

"Oh, oh, oh... Anairë, can you not understand that this is a catastrophe?"

"I do not see why I should be tormented in this manner for the crime of loving my husband. That is all I will say to you."

"Love! You call it love, do you? - Your snivelling indulgence of his every whim? You set another living creature on a pedestal and call it love! That is not love! You don't know, you don't know - I will tell you what love is, Anairë. When you can see every fault in your love's heart and you find the strength to go on loving them, when you scream at them, abuse them, risk losing their love to save them from themself - that is love, you bitch!"

Anairë smiled placidly over her embroidery.

.~.~.~.~.

Tyelkormo was in his bedchamber on the second floor. By the window he stood, so that the golden light came through and illumined every golden hair on his head. He shone like some being of a newer and a greater race. He shone like a child of the Maiar.

"Well!" said Artelda.

"Well!" he said too, grinning at her his most brilliant and thoughtless smile.

She sat down on the window sill and tried to think of something more to say. It was curiously hard to fall into their usual ironic banter.

"Well! I hear the hunting is very good in this Formenos place."

"So do I," he said; and this last stroke robbed Artelda of words altogether. She did not dare speak, for fear that she would find herself mentioning her father or his father or his mother or some other of those subjects which had suddenly become taboo. She did not dare speak, for fear that she would burst into tears. That would be worst of all. Tyelkormo despised all such weaknesses.

.~.~.~.~.

When Fëanáro was very small, Finwë had often come to Míriel's workroom to think about her. Later he had become too absorbed in being a father for such self-indulgence. Later still, Indis had come. By that time, this claustrophobically untidy space had become almost the stuff of dream for Finwë, as if it was not just behind the third door on a first-floor corridor; as if he could not have returned to it on any Day of his choosing.

Now it was Indis that was forgotten; and Míriel's room remained as it had always been, as Finwë found, when his stumbling footsteps led him there for the first time in more than three Ages.

But it was exactly the same! Hard, very hard, to believe that she would not appear, sitting there under the window. She would look up from her work with her strange unfocused little smile and that look in her eyes as if she was thinking about something quite different all the time he was kissing her. Surely it was impossible that she would not be there!

Through the window, he could see Indis standing among her white flowers. She was so still and white and small herself, in a dress of ivory satin, that the frame made her into an artistic composition.

It was with real surprise that he saw her; she was becoming to him in these last Days little more than a nebulous phenomenon beyond the circle of his own comprehension. They moved around the rooms like two discrete and isolated worlds, eating separately and sleeping separately and avoiding each other in the maze that was the palace of Tirion. It was beginning to seem as if she had never really existed at all.

There were very few things that could be taken for granted in this place. Only the feelings that went deeper than words, as his love for Indis never had. That is not to say that it was not real love, in its own way. It was merely the intellectual love of an cultured heart that knew what it ought to feel.

No, the time was past for relying on such things; so necessarily the one ripe fruit of decision that had dropped into the hand of his mind in Years - a fruit grown from the deeper-planted seed of his love for Fëanáro - must be incalculably precious. Indis ought to understand that!