The light glinted from their rings as their fingers brushed. She suppressed the acrid bitterness roiling from within. The figure in front of her, draped in lustrous palladium, was a sight that no longer inspired anything but a deep longing for distant shores and dreams of foreign lands.
Her expression, it seemed, to be forever arranged in perfect tranquility, as befitting of a queen, an image of boundless magnanimity and radiant benevolence, like the porcelain dolls ferried on camelbacks from the Utter East.
He said he hated it (her, really), when their earthly facades of king and queen would crack, when the swarthy vassals of Lorien would alight upon Arda with incantations of sleep. When he would win arguments against her in the only way he knew how—after a battle drenched in tears and blood, crimson against her pale skin and umber locks, he submitted her to the yoke, as she lay amidst the sheets as if it were her wedding night, her eyes vacant and mouth open in silent prayers, supplications offered at deserted altars and fallen on unhearing ears.
Once, a soft whisper, the quietest exhalation of air, had escaped her, subjugated and enslaved yet again,
"Why?"
Why did you ask for my hand if you felt nothing?
He paused in tying his trousers.
"Because this is an exchange, your Sindarin prestige and diplomacy for queenship, nothing more."
Cool metal met her flesh, but every gold coin burned like a scorching brand, marking her as chattel.
She wanted to bite her tongue off out of spite (see how he would like that!), but all she did was lay there, pale skin among rich gold and crimson, not unlike the whores that were brought to Laketown to be sold every other season.
Yes, a queen and a whore—what is the difference but the former serves one and the latter, many.
Even the most vicious beasts of the night retreat at the oncoming dawn. The night ends, eventually, as it always does, and it is these quiet moments of the morning that she cherishes the most. Those few spaces between heartbeats that truly belonged to her—not the kingdom, not the queenship, and certainly not him.
But as her handmaids and dressmaker enter, those moments slip away, and the titters of her handmaids at the marks of the recent conquest and the seamstress's remark about high-necked dresses bring her into the world of the living—of billowing dust and curling smoke, validating the present and dismissing the night as a mere dream.
They never seem to notice the depths of her wounds, the bite marks, the scratches, the lacerations that ripped from her any shred of dignity and crushed her beneath his heel. Or if they did, they chose to remain silent in respect and fear of their liege's wishes.
Before leaving her chambers, she would stop by the mirror to carefully arrange her features into that mask of masterly serenity and gentle clemency, despite the angry, weltering tears beneath her silk gowns (when was the last time she wore a low-necked gown?).
He joined her in the antechamber to the throne room, his pale, steel-gray eyes flickering a brief glance to her before taking her arm with a gentleness completely absent from the night's campaigns, and entering the throne room, arm-in-arm.
As they turned to brush their fingers as a gesture of pious harmony, the corners of her mouth lifted past their usual position into a radiant smile. Illuminated by the metallic light—silver like the starlight their forefathers had witnessed upon waking on the shores of Cuivienen, silver to symbolize the eternity of marriage—she paid homage to the perpetual consummate perfection of the day and the utter depravity of the night.