Chapter Text
There once were three children, they were kin, and their parents did not all abide each other.
This is how every story starts – with the innocence of beginnings.
They were born in Númenor late in the Age, a girl and two boys, and one would become a king and the other a tyrant, but at this first junction, they were neither. This too is how it always is. Not brothers, but close enough.
The stage is set. It had been so for a long time, perhaps since the beginning.
***
It was the only such summer they had together, before Gimilkhâd learned of it, and began to pay more attention to his son's whereabouts. Afterwards, just as it ended, he came and he flew into such a rage towards his sister, Pharazôn’s aunt, that she never again allowed him to visit the house of Lord Númendil when Míriel was there. That summer, however, they could yet run free.
Elendil was seven, Pharazôn was eight, and Míriel was nine, going on ten. Step by step, their ages went; it was almost as if they were meant to be a set, Míriel would say, her smile flashing, and her eyes too flashing above. Her smile was cherry-coloured, and there were often cherry stains upon it. Her black hair bounced wildly, when it wasn’t weighed down by salt-water.
There was often salt-water in it, that summer in Andúnië.
Pharazôn and Elendil were much alike, next to her. All three had mid-dark complexions and Elendil had black hair, although Pharazôn’s was brown. Elendil was slight though, and he stood over a head smaller than Míriel.
He felt out of place in other ways than one, that summer. With the newcomer there, he was uncomfortably aware that Pharazôn and Míriel were first cousins, and he was a far relative to both, the youngest, and more timid than the others, and not a king’s grandson. Sometimes he feared they might prefer to get away from his company once in a while.
It was true that Míriel grew wilder that summer with Pharazôn there. Maybe it was her age. Maybe it was the difference of a playmate who did not look up to her as much. Without becoming any more inconsiderate than a child has right to be, her behaviour grew freer. And with Pharazôn, she had to learn to stand her ground.
It was a fact of life that he was spoiled, and used to getting his way, that he pulled her back by the braids if she got ahead of him in a race, and cheated at games. He could be harsh and had a mean streak, called her names and threw stones at both birds and people. But he always made fervent apologies if he made anyone cry, and promised never to do it again, even if he always broke his word. After a while he began to make allowances for that – ‘I know I will do it again because I can’t help it, and I was born that way, but you know I’m sorry, don’t you, Míriel? You have to, Zimri, you’ll break my heart if you don’t,’ he’d say – and she did believe him. They quarrelled every day and made up right afterwards.
She ignored Elendil shamefully at times that summer without ever quite meaning to, she had to admit. They never actually forgot about him; it was his ancestral villa, after all, but the old games the two of them used to play fell to the wayside. Elendil was afraid to keep pace at a gallop, and he wouldn’t climb as far up the trees that grew in the garden. When it was the two of them, she would have never have made her perch too far above him, but now she was not as thoughtful.
Pharazôn was afraid of the waves though; he feared he might be drowned.
All in all, though, that summer they were heroes of legend, Bëor, and Hador, and Haleth, and Tuor, and Túrin slaying the dragon, and they dressed up as Beren and Lúthien with Elendil playing all the bit parts, and they fought off savages and corsairs, and almost sneaked on a real ship to Middle-earth (or somewhere, they couldn’t really come to a proper decision), and then Gimilkhâd arrived, angry and livid, and took Pharazôn away.
If he had known that it was likely the easiest way he could have made sure that Míriel and his son would look fondly upon each other… history would have probably continued roughly the same direction. Probably.
There they are, though, the future rulers of the world, or of all the parts that matter. Still else, the queen, the usurper, and the one who would be left to pick up the pieces. But this is before and their paths lie still ahead of them.
***
The way those paths did wend, Míriel and Elendil all but grew up together, and Pharazôn spent several weeks in a year with Elendil, because once upon a time, Lord Númendil had been the only kinsman willing to lend a young Gimilkhâd money for his endless debts and frivolities, so Gimilkhâd had to at least tolerate this side of the family, and Míriel and Pharazôn passed letters through their kinsmen and got to really be alone together for any significant amount of time all of three times before they came of age.
They passed each other at court quite regularly, in that time. Míriel started wearing women’s dresses, and jewels in her hair, the proud daughter of the King’s Heir. Her grandfather was growing too old to hide it beneath paints and treatments and Palantir’s hour was fast approaching. There were plots against his life.
Elendil and Pharazôn had also grown into adult stature, year after year, as it had always been among them. Sometimes they spoke in corners, when Gimilkhâd lost his son to the candlelight and the din of the feasting. The guests and courtiers were the field of their jests – they knew the hatred behind the careful smiles well enough to cut mercilessly.
***
Pharazôn had begun to hate his father.
When he had been in his ninth year, he had overheard the insinuations from one servant to another: Gimilkhâd had had one child before him, and he had the girl strangled as she had been born malformed. He accepted these as truth without much deliberation, and never let it show. It was the sort of secret shame that many families knew and which was acceptable to have as long as one kept silent about it – shame perhaps more for having produced unworthy offspring than for aught else. He would have done the same, had it been him, a married lord and in his father’s place – so why did it rankle him so?
He only knew that in that time his strivings for his father’s appreciation took on a very different, bitter hue.
(The idea of a mother had not heretofore appeared often in his life; his parents held separate households, and the woman who had borne him was tired by children and worried their company might age her prematurely. For a moment he made of her a dream-vision of recourse, but it faded by the time he had been next made to visit her and found that, with age, he could only look upon her vanities and foibles and lovers with scorn.)
By the time he had come of age, he had a period of rebellion already behind him. Elendil’s customs which he had been weighing in his mind for some time, bored him, he decided at last – but he was still drawn to them as an aloof spectator. His father would have hated both as much. There was something aesthetically clean and simple in them, even in their austerity; they were, he thought, deeply Númenórean for all their foolishly un-Númenórean spirit.
He began to have grandiose ideas about Númenor, and the colonies, and their exalted place in the world, in these days, though he didn’t exactly know how to put words to them. He was only certain they differed from his those of his father in some nebulous but all-significant way.
Elendil and Amandil, he thought, treated his philosophies with a certain, perhaps critical, indulgence – but they allowed him his fill of talk about these matters. There was freedom in it – none of it was exactly legal, but they were high lords who could make little of seditious matters, and among his father’s friends, everyone only repeated the same, stale phrases.
He went in his father’s footsteps in one thing, cajoling the Lords of Andúnië to cover gambling debts. More than once, Elendil arrived home to find Pharazôn lounging in the parlour with a pleading set to his face.
‘Dearest older cousin, my father will kill me if I tell him,’ he’d be saying to his father.
‘But ten galleon in a month? Pharazôn, you’re too young to develop a gambling habit!’ Amandil would lament with due seriousness.
‘It’s not a habit, just a stroke of poor luck.” And then, balancing on the edge of irreverence and flattery, though he had not enough of a concept of the former to be aware, ‘If that worked, I’d be praying to all the Powers that be, but you’re the next best thing.’
And sometimes Amandil would give in. Or, he’d ask: ‘Pharazôn, are you planning to spend it on a woman? You know I will not be financing your mistresses.’ Or try to redeem a slave in return, one of the fair ones that never had it well in the house of the Kings.
Sometimes, Pharazôn would even answer true. Perhaps the house of Andúnië was rubbing away on him.
***
Then, Ar-Gimilzôr entered his Council Hall one day only to die on the spot. They said that he had insisted he was not in pain after he fell to the ground, but died crying, panicked at the thought of his own mortality. Míriel had no warm feelings towards her grandfather, but she covered her ears and wouldn’t hear the gossip for the shame of it.
They were all three of them there, at the funeral, sombre in their mourning robes. Míriel was the talk of the season, for she wore a veil – in forty years no woman of degree had worn a veil for mourning; it was a slave’s attire. Pharazôn’s robe was studded with black onyx and he wouldn’t meet their eyes.
Twenty-three tombs lined the Noirinan, from the plain effigy of Tar-Minyatur, to the last, new-carved chamber. The workers had not yet finished laying the gold-and-jewelled mosaic over the stone when the time came to put Gimilzôr’s embalmed body to rest upon the marble pedestal. Palantir insisted on paying them, though they had been his father’s slaves, and Gimilkhâd called him eight times a fool.
There were fights on the streets later that day, and men threw rocks into Palantir’s carriage. One of the horses was lamed by such a throw, and he made Míriel ride the rest of the way with Elendil. They prayed, but didn’t speak out loud.
There were riots in the streets by nightfall.
***
Palantir crowned himself in the half-empty Great Hall the next afternoon, and immediately took command of the guard and army. Gimilkhâd and Pharazôn were nowhere to be found in the palace, now halfway under siege by the King’s Men factionists. Many were armed.
Lord Númendil was in hot debate with the new King on whether Palantir should at all attempt to present himself to the people. They decided in favour, and the King went out upon the balcony, the guard flanking him closer than it had ever flanked his father. Elendil wondered if any of them would have dared to put a dagger in his back, but he did not say that to Míriel. It was an odd coronation.
Palantir’s speech was a halfway measure, hastily amended within the previous hour to take into account the violent mood. It managed to neither placate nor aggravate the throng. Perhaps that was the most they could hope for. Someone was throwing stones, but they didn’t reach the platform.
Míriel broke protocol and ran to her father’s side midway through the presentation.
***
It took over two weeks to manage the rioting in Armenelos, Palantir being quite adamant that he did not want his first actions as King to be of excessive violence, and by then the news and unrest had made its way everywhere else. People had been killed in Arandor, and more still in the peninsulas.
A month after, Pharazôn left for the colonies. He did not say goodbye.
The last words he had said to Elendil before they parted, before his grandfather's death, went: ‘You are good people. I'd hate to be born into your family... but perhaps less so than mine.’
In his fashion it passed for a sincere compliment.