Chapter Text
Yavanna's dwelling did not appear to Artanis to have been built so much as persuaded into being. Its pale walls rose from the green slopes without breaking the harmony of the land, curving around ancient trees whose branches passed freely through open galleries and pillared halls, while roofs of living leaf and flowering vine spread themselves above chambers floored in smooth stone. Water moved everywhere through the house, whispering along narrow channels carved beside the corridors, gathering in clear pools beneath windows open to the western air, and spilling at last into the gardens that descended in long terraces toward the orchards. The place possessed none of the severe beauty of Tirion, where every tower declared the skill of the hand that had raised it and every polished surface caught the light as if eager to magnify it. Here, craft concealed itself within growth. Doorways seemed shaped by the roots of trees; lamps opened like flowers at the coming of dusk; walls that looked bare at dawn were veiled in blossoms by evening. It was beautiful, Artanis thought, though it was not a beauty that sought admiration. It existed with an ease she found both restful and faintly provoking.
She had been glad of Yavanna's invitation. The great house offered a welcome distance from the courts of Tirion, from the endless formalities of kinship and rank, and from the quiet but persistent expectation that the daughter of Finarfin, son of King Finwe, must eventually become what others had already decided she ought to be. Artanis had no objection to duty, nor to the place of her house among the Noldor, but she had grown weary of being observed by those who believed they understood her merely because they knew her lineage. In Yavanna's halls, little attention was paid to such things. The gardeners spoke to her plainly. The attendants came and went with baskets of fruit, armfuls of herbs, and soil beneath their fingernails. No one seemed concerned with whether her hair had been braided in the style of the Vanyar or whether she had remained too long in conversation with one lord and not long enough with another. She had imagined that she would spend several quiet weeks among the orchards, learning what she could from Yavanna and allowing the peace of the place to settle the restlessness that had followed her from Tirion.
She had not expected to hear the name Mairon spoken here.
She encountered it first not as a figure but as a sound, a word dropped into conversation between two of Yavanna's people as they carried newly sharpened tools toward the lower gardens. Artanis was crossing a stone bridge above the channel at the time, and the name reached her clearly enough to halt her steps. They spoke of the speed with which he had repaired a broken waterwheel, and of the peculiar precision with which he had restored the channels feeding the eastern terraces. There had been affection in their voices. That, more than the name itself, had caused Artanis to remain where she was until the two had passed beneath her and out of sight.
Mairon was not a name commonly spoken with affection. It had been uttered in Tirion with caution, with anger, or in voices lowered by the memory of Melkor's treachery. Yet here, in Yavanna's house, it had been spoken as one might speak of a difficult but valued craftsman whose presence had become unexpectedly useful.
That night, in the chamber given to her, Artanis sat long by the open window and considered what she had heard. The breeze from the gardens carried the scent of bruised herbs and wet stone. Somewhere below, water moved through its appointed courses with the patience of a thing that had been set right. She told herself that one overheard name warranted nothing. The Valar kept their own reckonings. If Yavanna chose to shelter one of Aulë's former servants, that was Yavanna's affair, and no business of a guest who had come seeking quiet.
She did not sleep well.
Over the following days, Artanis became aware that the name was everywhere in the house, though the figure attached to it remained oddly elusive.
She heard it from the master gardener, who praised the care with which a certain drainage trench had been reopened. She heard it from one of the cooks, who mentioned that the great oven's cracked lintel had been mended without the kitchen being asked to cease its work for even a single afternoon. She heard it from a young woman who tended the vines on the western wall, and who described, with the particular warmth reserved for someone who has been quietly helped without asking, how a trellis that had leaned for years had been set straight overnight, the posts replaced and the living wood bound back into place so gently that the plant had not suffered a single wilted leaf. Each time the name appeared, it carried the same note: gratitude, lightly worn, and a faint puzzlement, as though the speakers themselves were uncertain what to make of the gratitude they felt.
Artanis listened, and said little, and found herself watching for him without quite admitting that she was doing so.
She glimpsed him, once, at a distance, a dark-haired figure crossing the lower orchard with a length of timber upon one shoulder, plainly dressed, without ornament or device. He was too far away for her to make out his face. She saw only the unhurried stride, the easy balance of the load, and the way he paused to set the timber down beside a damaged arbor with a care that suggested he had already measured the place in his mind. Then a gardener crossed between them, and when the path was clear again the figure had gone.
She did not see him again for two days, though she felt his presence in the house the way one feels the turning of a millwheel through the vibration of the floor, present, unobtrusive, and constant. Hinges that had stuck now swung smoothly. A path that had begun to erode under the lower terrace had been redirected. A section of stone wall whose mortar had crumbled stood whole once more, the new work so closely matched to the old that only the sharpest eye could have told where one ended, and the other began. The estate seemed, in some quiet and inexplicable way, to be holding itself more firmly together.
This irritated her.
She could not have said precisely why. The repairs were harmless. The gratitude of the household was genuine. There was nothing in any of it that she could name as wrong. Yet the very ease of it troubled her — the sense that a servant of Melkor, however reformed, should not have passed among Yavanna's people so smoothly, should not have become so quickly necessary, should not have woven himself into the workings of the house as though he had always belonged there. It was, she thought, too neat. Too convenient. The labor itself might be honest, but the swiftness with which it had made him welcome struck her as a kind of skill she did not trust, the skill of making oneself indispensable before anyone had time to ask whether one ought to be there at all.
She told herself she was being uncharitable. She told herself that Yavanna's judgment was older and wiser than her own. She told herself that suspicion born of a name heard once on a bridge was not worthy of her.
None of it quite settled her mind.
On the fifth morning, she sought Yavanna.
She found the Vala upon the upper terrace that looked out over the orchards, where the climbing vines stirred at her approach as though in greeting, and the air smelled of rain upon warm earth. Artanis had not decided what she meant to say before she came, and so she said the first true thing that occurred to her.
"I did not know that Mairon was among your household."
Yavanna did not turn from the railing. "He was not delivered to my gates in chains, if that is what you imagine."
"That is not what I imagine."
"No?" Yavanna's tone remained mild. "You have been imagining a great many things since you heard his name."
Artanis disliked being read so easily. "He served Melkor."
"Yes."
"He served him willingly."
"For a time."
"He aided him."
"Yes."
The absence of argument sharpened her unease. Artanis stepped to the railing beside Yavanna and looked out over the orchards, though she was not, in truth, seeing the trees. "And that does not trouble you?"
"Of course it troubles me. Mercy is not the same as forgetfulness, Artanis. Nor does forgiveness require blindness."
"Then why is he here?"
Yavanna rested both hands upon the rail. Her expression had changed, though not greatly. The warmth remained, but beneath it lay a gravity Artanis had noticed in the Valar whenever they spoke of wounds that could not be healed merely by the passage of years.
"Because he was released," Yavanna said, "and release is not restoration. He broke himself free of Melkor's service before Melkor was taken to Mandos. That choice did not erase what he had done, nor did it spare him judgment. He submitted to that judgment and remained in the keeping of Námo until the appointed time had passed. Yet one may leave a prison and still carry its shape within oneself. Mairon knew obedience, power, fear, and the ordering of others. He did not know how to live without a master, nor how to use his gifts without turning them toward domination. Such things must be learned, if they can be learned at all."
"And you believe they can?"
"I believe that no creature should be denied the labor of becoming better merely because the labor is difficult."
Artanis was quiet for a moment. "You make him sound like an injured animal."
"He would dislike that comparison."
"I am not concerned with what he dislikes."
"No," Yavanna said, and the softness of the answer made Artanis suspect she had heard more in the words than Artanis intended.
Below them, far down among the terraces, a dark-haired figure had emerged from behind the old arbor. Even at that distance, Artanis recognized the unhurried stride. He knelt beside the base of the structure, placed one hand flat against the earth, and after a long moment the soil itself seemed to shift, almost imperceptibly, like a breath drawn and released, and the roots that had been prying the wall apart curled away from the foundation and drew themselves down into a healthier path beneath the stone. The gardener standing with him smiled with unmistakable relief and clapped him once upon the shoulder before carrying the broken fragments away.
The figure did not acknowledge the gratitude. He merely continued.
"He appears comfortable here," Artanis observed.
"Not comfortable," Yavanna said. "Useful."
"There is a difference?"
"To him, very little."
Artanis watched the dark head bent over the work, the precise and unhurried hands, and found that she had no ready answer. The figure below did not look like a servant of Melkor. He did not look tormented, or defiant, or even particularly penitent. He looked occupied. That, she thought, was the most unsettling thing about him; how ordinary the labor made him seem, how the care in his hands could almost make her forget what those hands had been used for.
She did not say so to Yavanna. She only said, "I have not met him."
"No," Yavanna agreed. "You have not."
There was something in the way the Vala said it, a lightness that did not match the gravity of the rest of the conversation, that made Artanis feel, with a faint prick of unease, that the meeting was being arranged for her whether she wished it or not.
It came about three days later, and not by Yavanna's design.
Artanis had taken to walking the lower gardens in the hour before dusk, when the light turned the orchards to gold and the household was busy with the evening's work and no one troubled her. She had a particular path she favored — along the stream that fed the eastern terraces, beneath a row of old pear trees whose branches interlaced overhead into a green tunnel, and out to the small stone bench at the head of the cascade where she could sit and watch the water fall.
She came around the bend in the path and found the bench occupied.
He was sitting with his back to her, a half-finished length of carved wood across his knees and a small blade in one hand. He had been shaping a new handle for some tool, the old one lay in pieces beside him, split cleanly down the grain. He did not turn at the sound of her step. He continued working for the space of perhaps two breaths, the blade moving in short, precise strokes, and then he set the knife down with a care that suggested he had long since known she was there and had chosen to finish the cut before acknowledging her.
He rose and turned.
Up close, he was not what she had expected.
She had imagined, without quite admitting that she had imagined anything, something marked by his history. A shadow, perhaps, or a flicker of the fire that had served Melkor. Some visible sign of what he had been. There was nothing. His face was composed and unremarkable in its features, neither beautiful nor harsh, and the only thing in it that she could have called striking was the eyes. They were not the warm gold of Laurelin, nor the pale gleam of polished metal, but something deeper and more severe, like ore held at the threshold of melting. They settled upon her with an attention that she felt rather than saw.
He did not bow.
"Artanis," she said, since he had not spoken and the silence had begun to feel deliberate. "Daughter of the Golden House of Finarfin."
"I know who you are."
His voice was quieter than she had expected, and very even. He did not add a courtesy. He did not add an offer of the bench. He merely looked at her as though she were an unfamiliar object whose purpose was not immediately apparent, the same evaluating attention, she realized, that she had sensed from the terrace, though she had not understood until now that she had sensed it at all.
"Yavanna's guest," he said, after a moment, as though identifying her to himself.
"Yes."
"I had heard you were here."
The words were correct. The tone was not unfriendly. Yet there was something in them that struck her as curiously flat, as though the fact of her presence were a piece of information he had filed and was now simply confirming. She found herself oddly wrong-footed. She had come upon him suddenly and had not decided what she meant to say, and the conversation was already proceeding in a direction she had not chosen.
"You are Mairon," she said, because she would not let him be the one to name her without naming himself.
"I am."
"Of Aulë's people."
A pause, slight, barely a breath, but she caught it. "Once."
"Once?"
"I do not claim what I have forfeited."
It was the right answer. It was, she thought, exactly the right answer, and she disliked it for that reason. It was the sort of answer that closed a question rather than answering it, that placed the matter beyond discussion by conceding the worst of it before anyone could press. She had heard such answers in Tirion from courtiers who had learned to make a virtue of confessions they did not intend to examine.
She took a step nearer. The light through the pear leaves fell across them both in shifting coins. "Yavanna tells me you were released from Mandos."
"Yes."
"And that you have been given work here."
"Yes."
"Useful work, by all accounts." She had not meant the word to carry the edge it carried. Or perhaps she had. "The waterwheel. The channels. The wall by the arbor."
He regarded her without expression. "They needed mending."
"Many things do." She held his gaze. He did not look away, but neither did he press forward; he simply received the look as though he had been presented with it and was now considering what to do with it. "I wonder," she said, "whether you mend them because they need it, or because the mending is a thing you have been told to do."
The question had come out sharper than she intended. She heard it in the air between them and felt the heat of it in her own face. She had meant to sound curious. She had meant to sound measured. Instead she had sounded, even to herself, like someone setting a test she had already decided he would fail.
Mairon's expression did not change. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he said, with a care that she recognized as its own kind of edge, "I wonder the same thing."
It was not an answer. It was a mirror. He had taken her question and turned it back upon her; asking whether the asking itself was only obedience, whether her curiosity was merely another form of following orders, and the maneuver was so clean, so exactly placed, that a spike of anger rose in her, sudden enough to nearly take her breath.
She had been looked upon by many in Tirion. She knew the reverent glances of poets, the competitive appraisal of noblewomen, the interested attention of lords, and the speculative stares of those who measured every daughter of Finwë's house according to alliances not yet made. Mairon's gaze resembled none of them. He examined her the way a smith might examine a blade brought to him by another hand, searching, she thought, for the flaw that would tell him where the metal had been folded wrong.
She would not give him the satisfaction. "You evade the question," she said.
"You have not asked one worth answering."
It was said without heat. That was the worst of it. He was not angry. He was not afraid. He was not, so far as she could tell, anything at all except attentive, and the attentiveness itself felt like a kind of assault, as though he were taking her apart with his eyes and filing the pieces somewhere she could not follow.
"I know what you were," she said. The words came out before she could stop them, and she heard in them the sound of her own disappointment, at herself, at him, at the meeting that had begun badly and was now turning worse and that she could not seem to stop turning. "I know what you served. I know what your hands were used for, however gently you use them now."
He did not flinch. The green-colored eyes did not widen or narrow. He only looked at her, and after a moment he said, very quietly, "Yes."
That single word undid her more than any retort could have done. She had wanted him to defend himself. She had wanted him to argue, or to deflect, or to show her, in anger, in pride, in something, the creature she had been told to expect. Instead,, he gave her the smallest possible word and let it lie between them, and she found herself standing in the green light under the pear trees with nothing at all to push against.
The silence held.
At length Mairon picked up the half-shaped handle from the bench, retrieved his knife, and seated himself again, not turning his back to her, but returning to the work as a thing that required his attention more than she did. The blade resumed its short, precise strokes. He did not look up.
It was, she understood, a dismissal. Not a rude one. Not an angry one. Simply the acknowledgment that the conversation had ended, and that he had decided to end it, and that she was free to go.
She did not.
She stood there for a moment longer, the anger and the shame and the strange unwelcome recognition all tangled together in her chest, and then she turned and walked back along the path the way she had come. The light through the pear leaves was failing. The water ran in its channel beside her with the patience of a thing that had been set right. Somewhere behind her, the small steady sound of the knife continued, the same unhurried rhythm, the same careful strokes, as though nothing at all had passed between them.
She reached the upper terrace before she realized her hands were shaking.
She did not know why. She had spoken the truth. She had said what anyone in Tirion would have said, what her father's house would have expected of her, what caution and the memory of Melkor's treachery demanded. She had been right. She was certain she had been right.
Yet, when she thought of that single quiet yes, and of the eyes that had examined her so coldly and so completely, she was not entirely convinced that right was the same thing as what she had just done.