Chapter Text
It might have been a short story, a simple one. Two princesses: one dark, one light. A noble knight, pure of heart. Love requited, love spurned. A prophecy. A curse.
What are fairytales if not desire paths carved into the landscape by weary, rushing rivers of souls rounding the sharp-edged turns of their courses? And stories, like water, run downhill, on courses set long ago, once upon a time.
It might have ended as it always had, happily or not: ever after.
But only young rivers run straight. Told enough times, a tale wears at its boundaries, begins to twist and bow and braid…
Maeglin and his mother ride at a punishing pace under a wider sky than Maeglin has seen in all his life. The lancing light of the naked sun makes his eyes smart and stream, but he can’t tear his gaze from the sprawling landscape, the boundless potential of a world outside the oppressive canopy of Nan Elmoth.
When he catches Aredhel’s backward glance, a strange pressure wells up in his chest like a sob, pulls at the corners of his mouth. He ducks his head, diffident, but can’t quite subdue a smile full of teeth that would earn him a scowl under his father’s eye. The future is bright as the day.
Aredhel’s vision blurs, but not for the light.
He is better off safe than free, she reminds herself.
It is a difficult road; they are forced to abandon the horses halfway up the Dry River. Maeglin doesn’t think anything of Aredhel stashing their saddlebags of provisions in the boughs of a young birch. It isn’t too much farther now, she assures him.
“The way is steeper than I remembered,” she says. “Best to leave your personal effects, too. We can come back and retrieve them later.”
They rest for a few hours, watching the light turn long and gold before it bursts into a conflagration in the far-off clouds and stains the cliff faces spessartine, tourmaline, ametrine until it sinks into night.
“Lómion,” she says abruptly. “I hope you will be whoever you wish to be in Gondolin. This is a chance to start again. You can be anyone.”
His gaze darts away before he reigns it back and sits up straight again– a flinch in reverse.
When the way becomes vertical and the lichen begins to change, Aredhel gestures and they crouch beneath an overhang to catch their breath. She grasps his hands.
“We’re very close,” she says. “Listen to me, my son. Once we clear this ridge you will see the first Gate. I will go first to greet them, but they will not expect you. You must wait here an hour or so while I explain myself a dozen times to every rank in the fort.” She smiles wryly and Maeglin’s frown smooths a little.
“Make your climb then and go to the Gate,” she continues. “Promise me you will go straight there. Do not stray.”
Maeglin has always been perceptive. He nods his head, but looks at her a little askance for the gravity of her tone. She pulls him into a brusque embrace.
“It will be an ordeal, Lómion– everything is an ordeal in Gondolin. Endure it a while.”
He will be suspicious if she holds him too much longer.
Aredhel gives him a final squeeze and smiles convincingly, she thinks.
He had been a skittish child. It behooved one to be quiet and reserved in Nan Elmoth, and he learned it early. They’d made a game of inventing codes to express strong feelings, which he liked immensely. She extends her forefinger to him to press with his own, light and brief as a butterfly.
I love you.
It is enough. It must be.
Aredhel resumes the climb up to the ridge and does not look back. Out of sight on the plateau above, she walks a few paces before pulling the letter out of her cloak, places it with the red seal facing out where he will see it.
She has an hour to disappear into the dense trees and find another path of descent far off where she will not be seen. From there…
She can go anywhere else in the world but the place she misses the most.
Maeglin takes an hour more to approach the first Gate after he scales the ridge at the appointed time and finds his mother’s letter. He reads it twice, buries his face in the comforting dark of the crook of his elbow for a long moment, then turns to practicality.
He scrubs his face in the trickle of water down the sheer rock face. He chars a handful of fine twigs. He unbraids his hair.
“This is a chance to start again,” Aredhel had said. “You can be anyone.”
So Maeglin will become who she has always wished to be.
It is slow-going without a mirror, but she maps out the placement and symmetry painstakingly with her fingers. She mixes a fine charcoal paste on her palm and carefully draws on the appropriate facial markings for a Sindarin woman. She rebraids her hair accordingly.
She rises without ceremony and walks toward the Gate before she loses her nerve. Doubtless, it will all catch up with her and she will have to face the torrid emotions piling up inside of her like snow, but it is not that time yet. Now is the time to endure.
The secret of her parentage tucked in with the letter folded against her heart, she approaches the outermost boundary of the Hidden City, Lómiel at last.
A newcomer in Gondolin is no common occurrence, even if this one hadn’t been dropped out of the sky. Turgon goes out to the guardhouse at the Seventh Gate to meet her– the farthest out he has been in centuries– with Idril in his wake. He is not pleased that she’s come with him, she knows, but hasn’t come up with a sufficient argument to the contrary for himself, let alone her.
The warden had offered a cursory description: a dark-haired Sinda, no bags, no weapons. Idril isn’t sure what she expected, but it’s not the comely slip of a girl in rumpled riding clothes with a princely bearing but downcast eyes.
Her voice is soft and low, her hands are rough, though she folds them demurely. Her purported pedigree is convincing.
“I crossed the Ice with Tollor, he was close with Argon.” Turgon confirms quietly to Idril. “He fell with him in Lammoth and Tollor’s wife went south with their young son soon thereafter. I'd heard the boy wed a Dorathrim woman.”
“Haeweth,” Lómiel supplies, proving herself a keen listener. “My mother.”
But her story is not.
“I was unhappy in Doriath and longed to know my father’s people. I began to receive dreams that led me here.”
Idril does not say that such trifling matters have, historically, never unduly concerned the Valar. She cannot make Lómiel meet her eyes, either.
“You will have your wish, child, for here you must remain,” Turgon says at last. “An enchantment upon Gondolin bars any elf from crossing the Seven Gates more than once.”
Lómiel pales visibly. Apparently, her dreams had not told her that fact. To her credit, she recovers quickly.
“I am grateful that I will not be cast out,” she says, and bows her head. “I hope I may be of service to you in my new home. I am a skilled smith and–”
“Your father was Noldorin nobility,” Idril notes, well-practiced in speaking with such gentility that it hardly sounds like an interruption. “You should be closer to matters of Gondolin’s court than the forges.”
Turgon makes the fractionally-longer-than-normal blink that means Idril, could we not have discussed this prior?, but does not interject.
She concludes, including her head respectfully: “Father, I should like Lómiel to learn of her Noldorin heritage in my retinue.”
Turgon sighs, but eventually gives his leave in the weary tone that means we will talk about this later.
Lómiel’s head spins with the sheer magnitude of information before her, to say nothing of the grandeur of Gondolin or–
Or the petrifying, inescapable radiance of her Lady.
Of course Lómiel is indignant that she cannot put her talents to use, of course she chafes at the role of a mere attendant. She knows little of women’s work and far less of the complex dance of Noldorin etiquette and all the dizzying palace politics at play in every waking moment. Fortunately for her predicament, if not her pride, the sheer breadth of subtext and symbolism embedded in every word and gesture and tone and adornment is a worthy puzzle that she is determined to solve.
And Idril…
To Lómiel, Idril has always been a perfect storybook princess; the shining jewel at the center of all her mother’s stories. As a child, Lómiel used to pretend that she was Itarillë Celebrindal– bravely enduring the Helcaraxë if the night was particularly cold, walking with effortless grace and ringing footsteps when Lómiel paced the meandering mortar lines on the stone floors, perusing her own enormous library if Lómiel read one of her mother’s books in secret.
Idril as Lómiel imagined her could not possibly be real– let alone related to her, a first cousin– but here she was in the flesh, everything and more. Even in such close proximity, her elegance and loveliness and charm are relentless. She is startlingly incisive, her wit whip-sharp. She is dazzlingly, unbelievably beautiful: hair golden, skin dark, eyes searing. Lómiel hadn’t known the beds of someone’s nails could be captivating, never thought she would lie awake thinking of the delicate skin beneath someone’s eyes.
Itarillë Celebrindal deftly wields a devastating gravity.
Lómiel also did not anticipate she would be quite so calculating, or dream for all the world that Idril would have cause to turn that piercing gaze on her.
The first few days Lómiel merely watches, as she is told. Idril’s ladies range in their duties, from dressing and styling her, to running her errands or writing while she dictates. Often, their purpose appears to be simply keeping her company. They sit talking with their heads bowed together or walk arm in arm in the gardens. They lean in close to whisper to her. Lómiel averts her gaze when one called Meleth starts dozing with her head on her Lady’s shoulder while Idril reads.
The ladies are not unkind to Lómiel, but she knows they watch her. She declines as politely as she knows how when they invite her to accompany them to go to the shops or play cards in one of their rooms after Idril has retired.
They are persistent. One called Airalis presses a light, tray-sized box into Lómiel’s hands and won’t take it back. Lómiel peeks inside, her face burning, and there are neat bunches of richly-colored ribbons and cords laid inside like piles of spices at market. A wide-banded length of spring green satin is edged with seed pearls. Many of the ribbons are intricately embroidered and heavy with goldwork.
“I can’t accept this,” Lómiel murmurs, clicking it shut with her heart pounding.
“It’s only a loan, then,” Airalis wheedles, lacing her hands behind her back so Lómiel can’t foist the box back onto her.
“Or think of it as a gift to our Lady,” another, called Nordhrien, offers slyly. “It’s a show of love to match her dress each day.”
Lómiel looks down at her own gown with new-found self-consciousness. She hadn’t know what to ask the dressmaker for and after a nerve-wracking length of time spent flipping through the catalog, just asked for something simple, in dark colors. A high neckline, please. She, too, wears the fine sash with her Lady’s heraldry embroidered on it like her other ladies, but had wondered how they always managed to look so coordinated.
Later in her room, she lays all of the box’s content out on her narrow bed to pore over every lovely detail. She notes, with a strange ache, that the ladies must have all contributed to the collection; some of the contents bear notes of florals, others of citrus, some sweet, some herbal.
She rolls them all back up neatly in the box and buries her face in her pillow.
Lómiel is not idle for long. One evening, Idril sets her pen down and casually dismisses all of them but Lómiel, still wiping the ink from her fingers.
“Not an examination, I hope,” Meleth says, only half-joking.
“We learn by doing,” Lómiel says, surprising even herself a little. It is a terrifying prospect, but she knows in her flinty core that she cannot refuse a challenge.
She tied a glossy blue ribbon around her throat this morning, with the long ends trailing down her back. A black faceted bead hangs delicately over the dip of her collarbone.
Lómiel inclines her head deferentially and pretends she does not see her Lady’s appraising gaze.
Idril has her own bath attached to her rooms: a palatial, domed chamber of marble and crystal. The tub itself is a single, enormous agatized coral, brimming with smooth blue-grey botryoids like great chalcedony cushions. Idril’s whole retinue might fit inside it. Not that she has imagined it…
Before now, Lómiel has mostly done the work of holding or hanging whatever garment is handed to her while one or two of her ladies undress Idril behind a screen, but tonight it is her task to undo all the fastenings and clasps. It is more like tuning the strings of an instrument or, more familiar, levering off the wafer-thin gears of dense clockwork than shelling a nut or peeling a fruit. Methodical. Almost meditative.
She lays the outer layers aside carefully and hesitates.
Idril lifts her arms a little, graceful as a crane, and Lómiel has done enough fine detailing work to know how to keep her hands from shaking. Breathe. Let the muscles higher on the arm do the work; fingers are only for steering. She peels off Idril’s chemise a bit clumsily, given Idril’s height, with her pulse pounding in her ears.
Noldorin ladies remove their jewelry last, Lómiel has learned. She circles around to face Idril, who stands bare and poised in only her jewels and stockings. Careful not to betray herself with a pause, Lómiel allows herself one lingering look.
Idril’s body is beautiful. How could it be anything but? Her exposed skin is so smooth it seems to diffuse the light around her like a cloud, the geometry of her shoulders and clavicle are dizzying, draped with fine chain and enamel flowers so delicate they might have been spun from sugar. Lómiel rushes to memorize the heavy curve of each breast, the velvet-dark of her nipples, the swoop of her navel, the soft drape of her sex against her thighs– because, oh, Idril is like her – in the space between one breath and the next.
Lómiel’s body thrums with restive energy, but it does not ignite until, rather than sit at her dressing bench as usual, Idril shifts her weight to one side for Lómiel to remove her stocking. She will have to do so on her knees.
It takes considerable restraint for Lómiel to kneel slowly and soundlessly when she would much sooner drop at Idril’s feet.
In the summers, Lómiel is told, Idril forgoes any footwear and the halls chime with her silver steps, but the weather is cold enough that she wears tall woolen stockings over her prosthetics today. Lómiel’s fingertips thrill with the abrupt change from warm thigh to cool metal as she pulls them off. She is positive Idril can hear her shaky breath in the silent room and does not risk a glimpse at her expression.
Idril hums an inscrutable note and goes to sit on the bench at her dressing table, and Lómiel lingers on her knees for a second too long.
Prosthetics are next, from her usual daily attire to a lighter, simpler pair for sleeping. Lómiel wants badly to examine them closer, to take the plating off and see the inner workings. Surely they could be streamlined or improved– but for tonight she moves quickly and does not dwell on Idril’s small sigh when Lómiel fits one leg and then the other into their precisely-molded sockets.
Idril breaks the silence to make polite inquiries while Lómiel helps her into her bathing gown and then begins to remove her jewelry: how does Lómiel find Gondolin, has she visited the royal gardens yet, has she seen the fountains at night? Lómiel is hardly aware of the tension falling away in her shoulders with the pleasant mundanity of the conversation until Idril asks innocently:
“What have you found to be the biggest difference between Gondolin and your home in Doriath?”
So far, Lómiel has not had cause to lie tonight.
“Gondolin is my home,” she says after a moment, taking out the last of Idril’s earrings. “My Lady.”
She does not let Idril catch her eye in the mirror. What comes next…
Her very first night, Lómiel had watched Idril’s ladies all work to undress her in a synchronized flurry of movement until the very end, when all but Meleth stepped away.
“The Noldor are… particular about their hair,” Meleth told her later, walking her to her room. “We’ll bend the precept if she needs an elaborate style, but best to leave her hair to me; I have been in her service the longest.”
Idril wears her hair in a thousand or more tiny golden braids, which tumbled to her waist when Lómiel took her hairpins out. Having finished all else, she stalls a little, organizing Idril’s jewelry on the dressing table, but Idril does not offer any instruction. As though she wants to see what Lómiel will do.
After a moment, Idril rises wordlessly, her hair trailing loose behind her, and Lómiel follows her to the bathing chamber.
Lómiel spends the most time on Idril’s hands and nails; ink stains and graphite dust are the most common offenders on Idril’s person. She notes that Idril has her hair mostly cast over the side of the coral tub to keep it dry, but a number of braids have fallen forward into the water when she moves carelessly. If Lómiel was not so unfamiliar with Noldorin custom, she might think it was a provocation.
“But what is it like in Doriath?” Idril resumes, genial, as though they hadn’t spent the last several minutes in silence. “Most of what I’ve read are histories.”
“The light is different,” Lómiel says carefully, thinking fast. “Under the canopy. There are places where the growth is so old that it blocks out the day, but others where the sunlight shimmers for the shifting of the trees. Like being under water.”
“You make it sound beautiful,” Idril says, with some surprise.
“It is, in its way,” Lómiel admits. Hardly anywhere in Nan Elmoth shimmered but the edges of the forest, but when she and her father went abroad, it had felt like greeting an old friend each time she saw it.
“But you were unhappy there?” Idril asks, soft. Lómiel starts to stammer through a response when Idril adds, as though only just thinking of it: “Don’t you miss your family?”
Lómiel drops the nailbrush into the water, where it clatters against the gorgeous chalcedony botryoids. Idril has to reach down and hand it back to her.
Lómiel dries it off and replaces it in its kit, jittery with nerves. She must be careful, she reminds herself.
“I miss… when there was a simpler answer to that question,” she hedges.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” Idril says, with what looks like genuine chagrin. “Tell me, then, where in Doriath did you grow up, was it close to Menegroth? Your Quenya is quite good.”
Cold fear washes through her and she clamps down hard on her facial expression to keep it still.
Itarillë Celebrindal is not to be underestimated. Or trusted.
“High praise, my Lady,” Lómiel says airily. “I doubt the name is on any map you’ve seen. A small village at the northern edge of the Girdle.”
Before Idril can say anything else, Lómiel plunges forward and draws Idril’s stray braids out of the bath, pressing the water from them. The flicker of shock on Idril’s face is, itself, almost worth the risk.
“Here,” Lómiel says, gathering Idril’s hair into a bundle. “Shall I put it up for tonight? Let me oil it first.”
She is quick as a serpent, gliding on the icy unease in her chest, and has the vial uncorked before Idril can respond. Rosemary wafts from her palms when she rubs them together to warm the hair oil.
“I, ah,” Idril says, gratifyingly.
Lómiel doesn’t know what she’s doing exactly, but she twists her oiled hands around the gathered length of Idril’s hair to start, tugging her head back just a little, and works in sections. When her fingertips brush the base of Idril’s skull, she does not miss Idril’s quick intake of breath. She changes her tactic and laces her fingers through Idril’s braids to massage her scalp from base to crown.
“No, it isn’t offensive, per se,” Meleth had clarified, some nights ago. “Just… personal. Intimate.”
Airalis had started: “You know, in poems when they say ‘to tie a love-knot in one’s hair’--”
“Don’t tell her that!” Nordhrien laughed, feigning to swat Airalis’s arm.
Lómiel circles against Idril’s temples and works her way up, just barely lets her nails graze Idril’s scalp.
“Mm–” Idril starts, and it’s more the way she realizes and cuts it off abruptly than the hum itself that shoots a naked bolt of desire clean through Lómiel’s stomach. An answering sound rises in her, but she closes her throat around it. The fight to control her breathing is valiant.
She gathers all of Idril’s tiny braids together and plaits them like a spine running from her brow to down her back. Tries to blank her mind while she wraps Idril in a dry sheet. Idril is still a little damp by the time Lómiel fastens all the buttons on her nightgown.
“That’s all for tonight, I think,” Idril says quickly, expression… mixed. Wary. Shrewd. A little guilty?
Lómiel bows her head and wonders if she imagined just a flicker of in-kind competition there, too.
In time, Idril does not suspect Lómiel less, but she becomes less and less convinced that whatever Lómiel is hiding is actively dangerous. If that makes it harder to justify her lingering distrust… it is not the only thing.
She’ll do as she likes. Lómiel should build her culinary repertoire, should develop informed preferences, so Idril would naturally have a wide variety of treats brought to her. The new stomachers and coats are practical, to add variety to her wardrobe, which she sorely lacks. Of course she won’t have Lómiel remain culturally ignorant, so she drags her to the theatre, has a few more private concerts than usual. She puts together a reading list, and, well, some works are better listened to than read on the page so–
“Our Lady is quite besotted with her new favorite,” Meleth proclaims in a loud whisper the moment Idril pauses her reading. Idril shoots Meleth a look, but she is busy casting a dramatic hand over her brow and laughing.
Lómiel, sitting at her feet and disassembling a clock to clean its parts– yes, obviously the antique Idril brought her because she thought it might intrigue her– hides her mouth demurely with the back of her hand.
Idril does still mistrust her, which makes it particularly important to keep her close. And busy.
Lómiel asks often when it might be convenient to practice at the forge, and Idril hears her wages have gone largely to materials and supplies. Infuriatingly, she defers whenever Idril asks when she might come by and see what Lómiel is working on.
“A forge isn’t just a firebox,” Lómiel says gravely. “There are a million variables, I’m still adjusting and nothing is coming out the way I want–”
So Idril has no choice but to catch her at work.
Lómiel cuts a striking figure with the sleeves of her tunic tied up out of the way of her thick gloves. She is not the only woman in the workshop who prefers soft leather breeches to skirts when she works, but Idril is accustomed to her impeccable, severe court dress. She is so smudged, here! But while her hair is braided practically, it is still threaded through with a dark green ribbon. She has a braided black cord wound around her throat that ought to look sparse, but that Idril finds charming. A frugal excess.
Lómiel scowls at her work, too absorbed to see Idril coming, and nearly flings her file across the room when Idril greets her.
Gripped in a clamp is a pin or a brooch in-progress. There are rough edges and empty settings, but the body of it is intricate wirework: a very convincingly-rendered wreath of woven grasses.
Lómiel sounds pained, trying to hide it with her gloves. “It’s not nearly finished.”
Idril bats them away. “It's clever,” she says seriously. “I've never seen a– what, a botanical Sindarin knot? Jeweled-inlay for weeds…” She straightens back up and taps her chin, thoughtful. "Will you wear it when it's finished?"
Lómiel shakes her head mutely. She is very pink in the face, but Idril will think about that later.
“I’ll sponsor the remaining materials,” Idril says decisively. “I would have it adorn the cloak I commissioned for my father’s begetting day. Don’t look like that, I know you won’t settle for inferior gems and it will be months if you try to source them yourself.”
She looks suspiciously sulky sweeping away stray metal filings on the other end of the bench.
Idril quirks her brow. “Unless you’d already planned to give it to someone else…?”
“No,” Lómiel says quickly. “No, it’s– fine. Thank you.”
“Splendid,” Idril says brightly, and means it. She will not see Lómiel’s work adorn just anyone.
“No one has ever tried to go through the Gates twice?” Lómiel asks out of the blue on one of their early morning walks, while the rest of the retinue lingers behind or strolls ahead.
“The only person I’ve known to leave indefinitely has not returned,” Idril says, looking at Lómiel sidelong.
“If they tried,” Lómiel insists. “What would happen to them?”
“I don’t know,” Idril says honestly. If she did know, she’s not sure she would say. She does not like Lómiel talking about leaving.
“There were two Men once,” she adds, when all the pink has bled out of the sky. “Who were saved from certain death and brought to Gondolin on the backs of Eagles. They were permitted by the enchantment to leave. Perhaps it doesn’t work on Men.”
Or perhaps the Valar pardon those who figure into their plans and care little for the rest.
Idril links her arm in Lómiel’s wordlessly. That night is the first time she asks Lómiel to stay with her.
Lómiel bows her head in the infuriating way she does when she’s pretending to be a faithful servant to get out of being honest about something. “I’ll go get changed, shall I?”
“Stay,” Idril emphasizes. “Wear one of my nightgowns.”
She lets Lómiel change behind the screen, this time. When they lay together in Idril’s enormous bed, she waits until Lómiel's breathing evens out before reaching forward to worry the edge of Lómiel’s skirt between her forefinger and thumb.
The next time, there is a little more wine involved.
“You dress so simply,” Idril complains, hiding her sharp smile with her glass.
“I don’t wish to outshine my Lady,” Lómiel replies predictably, enunciating just enough that Idril can tell she has to try.
“Happily,” Idril says. “Such a thing could never happen.”
She sets her glass down and tugs Lómiel to her feet. The blackberry wine stains her bottom lip a little, just enough to be intriguing. Lómiel seldom wears makeup, aside from her facial markings.
“Let me dress you,” she says, not a question. “You dress me every day, it’s my turn.”
“You– my Lady,” Lómiel says. “You pick those outfits, too. Anyway, you have prettier dolls to dress than me.”
Idril has already flung her closets open. “It’s so dull when you become self-effacing,” she sighs, then spins around. “So, you think my ladies are pretty? You’ll all elope without me. Who is the prettiest of them?”
Lómiel covers her face with her hands and laughs one of her funny little inside-out laughs, the ones that catch on the inhale instead of the exhale. “Idril,” she says indignantly.
Not my Lady. At this moment, Idril likes that very much.
She coaxes Lómiel out of her clothes, lets her keep her petticoats and chemise for now. Her outer clothes look good strewn on Idril’s floor.
“I know,” she says. “I’ll dress you as the moon and you’ll not have to worry about outshining me.”
Idril has no shortage of blue dresses in every shade, and reaches for the silverest of them.
“I’ll drown in it,” Lómiel groans, but does not protest. Her dark eyes are wide and her flush is spreading.
Idril has to dig to find a smaller pair of stays, which Lómiel regards warily. Idril is not an unkind person, but she wants badly to wring a gasp out of Lómiel and will jerk the lacing as hard as she must. Lómiel, for her part, obliges. She is breathless by the time Idril has reshaped her and looks at her reflection in the mirror almost shyly.
Lómiel must perch on a stool to keep the skirts from pooling too much and she looks like a doll on a stand. The bodice froths with embroidery and lace, the shot silk gleams and shifts like labradorite, the layered sleeves are so spiderweb-fine they almost float on the air. It is so utterly unlike anything she’s ever seen Lómiel wear before and the effect is enchanting.
“Lady,” Idril says with a bow that is more flourish.
“I can hardly move,” Lómiel gripes, too breathy to be convincing.
“And why should you need to do that,” Idril says, circling her like a hawk. “I’ve got you right where I want you.”
Lómiel’s eyes drop away and Idril wants to scream.
“My Lady,” Lómiel says with mock-reproach that sounds awfully genuine. “How cruel to tease one so devoted to you.”
Idril has pushed her too far. She was insufficiently light and ironic, or else she has misread Lómiel and now she will think–
Lómiel brushes the enormous diamond drops on her borrowed necklace pensively– stupid really, Idril thinks abruptly, laughably transparent to pull out her best diamonds– but then stands straighter under them.
Her expression resolves slowly, as though through oil.
“Did you not dress me as the moon so that I would chase you?”
Idril’s pulse thunders. Even now she cannot evade the deep-set memory of the first moonrise, how soft and cool it looked peeking over the horizon through her haze of fever, her legs two lines of pain, afraid she might burn up in her father’s arms. When she was older, Aredhel told her about running with Oromë’s train, how Tilion was quiet and relentless, tracking wounded prey until they fell dead from exhaustion. She’d wondered if Arien felt hunted.
I don’t want to scorch you, Idril thinks first, and then more honestly: do not trap me in an endless cycle in the sky when I am already–
But she says, advancing slowly: “If you chase me, you will never catch me.”
Lómiel shivers and Idril wants to devour her.
“So you have trapped me instead?”
Idril reaches out to Lómiel’s void-dark hair and winds a loose tress around her finger. It is silken as a feather, warm near the nape of her neck and cool at the ends, and she thrills to imagine it as a snare when it feels so good around her: softer than a ring, tighter than a glove. She tugs the thick coil very slightly before she lets it unravel again. Lómiel’s eyes flutter like she wants to close them, but she will not flee from Idril’s gaze any longer.
Lómiel’s intake of breath hisses tellingly through her teeth, though she says evenly enough: “My Lady, was I not already yours?”
Idril thinks, wildly, that she will bite the blackberry off her lip, but the sweet inexperience of Lómiel’s kiss sears Idril infinitely hotter than she expects. She gasps with the touch of Idril’s tongue, her hands hover restlessly over Idril’s body, she trembles prettily.
Desire rolls through her in heady waves, her very gaze feels heavy with it, but she pulls out Lómiel’s dress pins deftly, drops her stomacher, lets her gown drape loosely at her sides. The obstruction of her viciously tight stays are cosmic punishment for cinching her so thoroughly, Idril supposes.
“Lady– I, I can,” Lómiel starts, nonsensical. Idril bends to suck a mark on her shoulder before she can get any ideas.
The stays only need loosening at the top enough that, when Idril unpins the shoulder straps, she can yank it down to bare Lómiel’s breast. It pulls her chemise with it so that the neckline grazes her nipples.
Her breasts are small, pretty as budding flowers, only a soft swell at their center, but they will swell more with the graze of Idril’s teeth. She peels the chemise down to thumb Lómiel’s nipples, hard and indecent and–
A crackling lit fuse of want flares from her throat to her core, burnt-paper bright, sudden and dizzying. It forces a small, mortifying sound from her.
When did Lómiel–
“Oh!” Lómiel gasps, hands flying up to cover herself. Her face and chest flush deeply. “I’m sorry, I–”
Idril is hardly aware of ordering her to put her hands to use unlacing her stays. Slow with reluctance, Lómiel obeys and drops her hands from the fine silver rings pierced through her nipples.
Idril reels. All this time, demure, restrained, solemn Lómiel had pierced nipples rubbing against her underclothes as she moved through her mundane domestic tasks. And in the forge covered in a thin sheen of sweat. And the very first time she attended to Idril alone and dared to put her hands in Idril’s hair.
Lómiel finally pulls the stays off and she was in them for such a short time that they hardly left any lines pressed into her. Pity. She twists one of Idril’s borrowed sapphire rings sheepishly. Idril is not so taken that she doesn’t recognize an appraising look in Lómiel’s eyes.
Idril can feel herself get wet, feel it bead and drip, molten with how she wants to wring shocked sounds of desire from Lómiel’s throat until she is as dizzy and hard as Idril is.
She plucks out the heavy earrings she’d put on Lómiel– a cascade of diamonds the size of lotus seeds near the lobe, tapering down until they are tiny as seed pearls as they follow the line of the neck– and hooks them onto each of Lómiel’s nipple rings. Lómiel moans with the weight on them, brushes her fingertips there to gauge their pull.
“My Lady,” she pants. “Please. I will dirty your dress.”
She is certainly squirming enough. Idril fits her hands around Lómiel’s waist and soothes the stretch of Lómiel’s nipples with her tongue. She keens and bucks under Idril’s lovely petticoats.
“No,” Idril points out. “You will dirty your chemise.”
The last time that Lómiel will see the inside of her Lady’s chambers for many, many years, it is in the small hours of the morning, just after the Midwinter Light Festival. She lays Idril onto her bed and traces all the grooves worn into her body from the press of stays and eyelets, the squeeze of silk, the drag of her heavy jewelry. There are raw patches under her arms and the dips of her shoulders that need salve. She cleans the blood crusted on some of her piercings for the weight and grip of her earrings.
How Idril had shone, how every eye turned to her; she’d worn their gazes like the pearls in her hair. She’d warmed the rooms, lit the rooms. If this had been Lómiel’s first winter on earth, she would have believed in spring on Idril’s word alone.
Lómiel had not realized what it took from her till now.
When Idril is finally bare of everything but the sheerest nightgown Lómiel could find, she is trembling faintly.
Lómiel smooths a hand over her hair. “Surely,” she says carefully, because she has seen Idril brittle with exhaustion before, but never so fragile as this. “It should not cost this much.”
Idril tries feebly to pull the bedclothes over her head. “It must,” she says, muffled. “Or I lack the skill–” her voice hitches. “Or the disposition– to do what I was born for.”
Lómiel’s eyes prick and burn for loving her.
“Itarillë Celebrindal,” she whispers. “You lack nothing.”
This time, when Turgon receives word of an outsider at the Gates, he sprints. The messenger who comes to him has real fear on her face and he will not have Idril on his heels for whoever has come to the Hidden City now.
There is no hint of morning in the sky when Turgon confronts the ghost that is waiting for him at the guard house. Waiting is perhaps not the right word for the elf pacing the room like a starving cat. His countenance is ghostly, white as hot ash. Turgon thinks he has not seen such barely-concealed rage since the hordes of Morgoth. And lurking somewhere in his pale eyes, there is a second specter: a fleck of Treelight–
“I have come for my wife,” Eöl growls, without preamble. “And my son. Return them to me and I will go.”
The ground tilts under Turgon. He hears his own voice protest: “No such persons have–”
“The Lady Aredhel,” Eöl cuts in, his expression jagged as a broken bottle. “And Maeglin, my only son.”
From beneath his shirt, he draws out a silver locket on a long chain around his neck. Sindarin marriage custom, Turgon thinks faintly.
Eöl opens it with some hidden trigger on its ornate surface. Encased in glass on each side is a coiled braid of black hair, one of them interwoven with fine gold filament, not quite as flashy as Fingon’s gilded ribbons; she’d always been more reserved.
He reaches out his hand, but Eöl snaps the locket shut possessively.
Heart heaving with hurt and love, Turgon swallows hard and nods his acknowledgment.
“Kinsman,” he says thickly. “I welcome you to Gondolin, but I have not seen my sister since she left here, nor ever met my nephew–”
“Liar,” Eöl spits, advancing on Turgon and jabbing a finger at his chest. “I would know his work blind. I am the one who first set the tools in his hands!”
Turgon touches Lómiel’s clasp on his cloak as a guard, then two, drag Eöl back.
He sends a runner to fetch Lómiel and a pair of guards to barricade Idril’s door.
“What– what is this?” Eöl demands, leaping to his feet. The guards flanking him on either side step forward, but he does not advance, only seethes, outrage rolling off of him like miasma. Hovering at the doorway, Lómiel shrinks. Turgon braces himself for her to entreat to him and waits with dread to see Aredhel in her face– but she clenches her fists and stares at the floor.
“Only tell me if it is true,” he says to her softly. “That this is your father and my sister Aredhel is your mother.”
Silent, trembling, Lómiel nods.
Turgon exhales shakily. “When you came to Gondolin, you lied about your parentage,” he says slowly. “But not your intentions. Not your name.”
Lómiel is frozen in place, except that she shakes her head vigorously.
“You left your home because you were unhappy there,” Turgon says, over Eöl’s snarl.
Lómiel nods again. A tear dots the floor near her feet.
“Wretch,” Eöl hisses, all teeth. “You will come back with me at once, where you belong– and you will watch me break your tools to pieces, I’ll not have a woman in my forge, you treacherous–”
“Your daughter she may be,” Turgon thunders over him. “But if she will not see you, her uncle will not permit it! You may live peacefully in my city so long as you stay far away from her.”
Eöl’s laughter is a cracked, ugly thing. “My– no matter what she is, she is mine. You think I would remain in your gilded cage, kinslayer?”
“You have little choice,” Turgon says gravely. “The enchantment on Gondolin will not permit you or her to cross the Gates a second time. You must remain here or perish.”
Eöl sees the truth of it in his eyes.
He combusts.
“Then I make my choice, and my daughter’s,” Eöl spits the word and strikes fast as a snake– faster, certainly, than Turgon– with the blade of his hidden knife glinting like a viper’s fang.
Lómiel throws up her arms and it tears a long, jagged line into her flesh before Turgon can pull her out of the way. The two guards yank Eöl back, but it takes many more to wrestle him to the floor.
Though Lómiel weeps and clutches her wound, she neither makes a sound louder than a breath, nor takes her streaming, horrified gaze from her father until Turgon has him dragged from the room.
The north side of the palace overlooks a sheer drop from the side of Caragdur a thousand meters above the rocky valley below. Enormous crystal pillars crown this ridge and spike out of the naked rock like jagged teeth all the way down. Turgon had the grand ballroom built against a formation that resembles a great, many-fingered hand of crystal points, and carved an expansive terrace into the rock. Revelers could enjoy the breathtaking mountain views, protected from the edge by gleaming spires of quartz clear as ice.
A hidden door in the Palace takes them not to the ballroom, but through a winding passage to a rock shelter perhaps a hundred feet below, where the remains of a large geode embedded in the cliffside created a natural outcrop and overhang. It is not only the innumerable facets of crystal that scatter and bend the light, here. An old, strange magic, long trapped in the ancient gem bubble, still veins the quartz that grew within it.
Eöl stands upon the ledge with his back to the mountains. A full complement of guards brought him hence, but they stand down now, flanking Turgon and Lómiel.
The pillars of crystal that have emerged since they placed him there are thicker around than his arm. He will not escape them.
They started as little fingers of quartz that broke out around his feet like spring shoots and advanced steadily skyward, encasing him like prongs around a diamond. He is immobile from the waist after only a minute, and they continue to grow.
He has long ceased struggling and lifts his head proudly, a cold, venomous stare fixed on Lómiel.
“So,” he says, almost conversational, but for the crystal point expanding against his abdomen that begins to obstruct his breathing. “You forsake your father and his kin?”
Lómiel has stood silently by Turgon all this time, eyes wide, bloodshot, steely with something like determination. Her mouth works, but does not open.
Too heartsick to watch her cry any longer, he turns to the closest guard and starts: “Take her back to the palace–”
A sharp, agonized sound from Eöl cuts him short.
He has pulled the silver locket off its chain and flicks it open, held high above his head.
“Ill-gotten daughter!” he calls, smiling strangely, even as the crystals stretch steadily up the length of his arm.
He jams his thumb into one of the glass panes of the locket, and somehow the breaking glass rings out louder than the crackling growth of the quartz.
“Here,” Eöl rasps, riveted on Lómiel. “Shall you fail of all your hopes–”
A drop of his blood falls from the silver rim of the locket.
“--And here may you yet die the same death as I.”
It dots the crystal crimson.
The clear quartz clouds immediately, growing a smoky, yellow-grey like foul water.
Eöl cannot gasp any longer, there is no more space for his lungs to expand, but Lómiel does.
A steel-dark crystal breaks out of the ground over her foot, thin as a finger. She snaps it easily enough, but another emerges, reaching for her. Another. The stone crackles with life beneath her.
Turgon drags her bodily back into the winding passage, away from the shifting quartz. Once her steps catch on rough granite, like landing a long leap across dangerous water, Lómiel crouches low and hugs her knees, shuddering.
In all his years, Turgon has never seen a blood curse like that.
He kneels next to Lómiel to search her face and doesn’t hear the faint sound like settling.
“Lómiel,” he says softly.
A broken piece of quartz cobble, not bigger than his thumbnail, whips through the air and only just misses its mark. Lómiel doesn’t move fast enough to keep it from grazing her cheek.
All around them, loose rock begins to rattle.
They race up the winding stair and do not stop until they reach the surface and bolt the heavy door.
But it does not stop at the surface, or the hall beyond it, or the courtyard beyond that. All of Gondolin is built on stone. The distance only slows it down.
Turgon takes Lómiel to the infirmary and there is enough bustle in the room for a while that no one notices the veining in the chalcedony wall begin sprouting tiny frost-like crystals that point toward her like compass needles. But as the chaos settles, Turgon catches the faint crack of a hairline fault in the stone spreading fractionally along the wall behind Lómiel’s head. He pulls her to her feet.
Outside in the garden, Lómiel buries her face in her hands. “I could have felled the whole building,” she says, shaken.
She might have the walls down if she’s out here too long, Turgon thinks darkly. He scrubs his brow, mind racing.
Intention counts for something in magic, but it must be spoken into the world. Accordingly, a spell become law is bound to the letter, and a word might just undo it…
“Then I make my choice, and my daughter’s,” Eöl had said.
All his acrid hate concentrated into a drop and poured into the stone…
You will watch me break your tools to pieces, I’ll not have a woman in my forge–
But Eöl had not despised his son.
My only son. I would know his work blind.
Words have power. If an oath made an ocean away was enough to sustain poor Maitimo on Thangorodrim all those years, surely one could fool a stone.
“You must prove,” he says slowly. “That you are someone else.”
Ill-fated daughter!
“I will acknowledge you at court and restore the rank of your birthright. You must swear on your life that it is true.”
Lómiel is silent, but when she raises her eyes, it is not Aredhel’s grit or Eöl’s defiance there, but something her own. Something iron-wrought.
He will accept her ire if it will save her life. She is better off safe than free.
“I'm sorry,” Turgon says, voice dropped to a hush.
Lómiel nods once. She says nothing.
She moves all night, changing location on the hour, as far from Gondolin’s north side as she can. Turgon sends her with an escort– an implicit suggestion to leave the palace, and an unspoken warning not to do anything rash, Lómiel thinks.
She has until dawn to find proper attire before the court convenes. Easy enough to assemble a provisional ensemble of funeral black.
When she goes to her room to change– though it won’t be hers for too much longer, she supposes– Idril is waiting at the door.
“Cousin,” she says in greeting, expression empty.
Turgon has given her the synopsis, it seems.
“Cousin,” Lómiel agrees reluctantly.
Lómiel holds the door, and it occurs to her, meaninglessly, that Idril has never seen her room before. It is unutterably sparse compared to Idril’s grand rooms. In truth, it is sparser than Lómiel’s quarters back in Nan Elmoth, too– because this room is not where she spends her days, nor where she would choose to. It is only where she goes to sleep at night. Where she sleeps alone. It is not truly hers.
The next one won’t be either; not hers.
“I cannot be your handmaiden,” Lómiel starts. “But I will still be myself.”
“I am not certain I know who that is,” Idril says coolly.
She ought to be stung, but indignation rises in Lómiel like bile. “I have never been truer in my life than I have in your service–”
Idril catches like a match and Lómiel is almost glad to hear her hot instead of cold, except that she grips the least important sentiment out of Lómiel’s mouth: “My service!” she grits out. “You have only ever served yourself! All this time you have known– but if you’d told me, I wouldn’t have gone to bed with you, is that it?”
The heady swoop of anger is such a sweet relief from the grey gnaw of despair that Lómiel could kiss her, truly. “You chose me, my Lady!” she shoots back. “For your service and your bed!”
“I suspected you!” Idril hisses. “And you ingratiated yourself to me, you sought to charm me when you knew–”
“I wonder, are we too close in kin, or too close in status? A charming servant is an amusing novelty, but when I might rival you–”
“So you would rival me!” Idril cries. “It has all been for your ambition!”
As though she has uncovered some seditious plot! Ridiculous, laughable, and Lómiel begins to tell her so.
“Enough!” Idril cuts her off, stamping one foot like a child. “I have heard enough, I am through with this!”
She does not command Lómiel any longer, she cannot decide that this is over but…
Her body shakes. Her narrowed eyes are tear-bright as Lómiel has never seen before, not even at Idril’s most vulnerable.
Oh, Lómiel thinks. Idril has never tasted betrayal before, only read it in books.
“I was a fool,” Idril says at last, as though waking from a dream. Her voice falls soft and serious. “To imagine that I could choose– No, I remember my duty now. Perhaps I should thank you for reminding me.”
Idril shakes her golden head as if to clear it, and dries her eyes on the back of her hand.
“I do not wish you dead, cousin,” she says tonelessly. “We will each be who we must. Nothing more.”
Lómiel looks at herself in her mirror one last time, vision so blurred with tears that her reflection might be gazing back from the bottom of a lake.
It is probably better this way, she thinks. For Idril to hate her. Better not to hold onto a foolish hope. What did Lómiel think was going to happen when it came time for Idril to marry and make heirs? That a first cousin or a handmaiden would qualify as an acceptable suitor? Did she really imagine that Idril would sneak out of her spouse’s bed to tryst with her? That Idril would split her heart?
Lómiel has already twisted her fate as far as it will stretch. Her mother is free, Eöl is dead, and she will spend the rest of her life in Gondolin. All she must do is fill the role she was born to.
Turgon presents his nephew before the court and the whispers sweep through the hall like a great wave.
Maeglin steps forward, his face scrubbed bare as a Noldo’s, his hair loose down his back.
“I swear,” he says. “On my life and all the Powers that I am Maeglin Lómion, son of Eöl of Nan Elmoth and the lady Aredhel Ar-Feiniel of the House of Fingolfin.”
He presents his mother’s seal and letter to Turgon and bows his head. He has rehearsed his part well. “I submit my proof to the High King and his Council and beg only their discerning judgment and my rightful place as Second Prince of Gondolin.”
After an hour of deliberation, they are all in agreement.
“My nephew speaks true,” Turgon proclaims solemnly. “And so it shall be.”
Idril, staring straight ahead, moves to Turgon’s left side and Maeglin steps to his right: prince and princess. Nothing more.
But not, as they might have, forever after. Told enough times, a tale wears at its boundaries, begins to twist and bow and braid.
This is erosion at work: It happens at such a gradual and geological pace as to be invisible to the brief lives of its inhabitants– but surely, there must be a moment of perceptible change. A sense that the story has shifted, or will shift.
A precipice.
When Tuor, son of Huor, crosses the Gates of Gondolin, he bears in his arms Voronwë Aronwion, passed through the Gates, impossibly, for a second time. And for the first time since Maeglin Lómion surrendered to his fate, he begins to imagine a different one.
And the story starts to change.