The fliers were on every damned lamppost, and that made them incredibly hard to ignore, but Carnistir was trying. He took extra care on the stairs to keep from looking. He picked at his cuticles as he walked and he watched the blood well to keep from looking. He tapped at the face of the timepiece on his wrist and held it to his ear; he imagined the clever upstart youth who’d invented it and pondered how quickly it would have taken for his father to have snatched her up as an apprentice, had Fëanáro been Returned (which he most decidedly had not been), although he’d heard that she’d refused all apprenticeships in favor of the new university system where one studied with many masters. Such thoughts kept him from looking for the last long climb to the Upper Circle of Tirion where the government offices resided. There was a wall along the stairs and the fliers were pasted every armspan or so.

It used to be his relatives resided there, in the Upper Circle of Tirion, and it was still strange to arrive there now and see the ancestral homes of Grandfather Finwë and Uncle Nolofinwë and Uncle Arafinwë made into offices and museums fit for the public to traipse through (which they did, with the expected voyeuristic delight). His memories were superimposed upon those unimaginably (to an imagination tamed by Middle-earth) grand houses: arriving for festivals with the metallic taste of dread in his mouth, the itch of embroidery against his throat that meant affairs of state, watching his brothers’ backs as a seemingly endless stream of baby cousins were presented, watching those same brothers receive commendations and applauding slowly, watching those cousins receive commendations and finding a loose bootlace or pendant turned awry—anything to do with his hands. His father’s trial. Torchlight, the Oath. The last departure from these gates, looking back despite himself when he thought no one was looking.

The Upper Circle of Tirion at their departure had looked a lot like it did now, actually, in the pre-dawn hour before the lamps (invented by another clever, university-schooled youth) doused themselves. They were stone but flickered like fire; they simultaneously lit the way and deepened the shadows. The statue of Finwë the King that stood at the center of the square, added by Arafinwë before he had the notion to unking himself, and meant to look placid and beatific, instead looked grieved when the shadows carved his face. Carnistir sat at his grandfather’s feet and waited for the sun to rise over the mountains in the east.

Such gestures as sitting at the feet of the statues of slain kings were hotly debated in Arafinwë’s new Tirion: whether the gesture was a sign of disrespect or whether the opposition to the gesture was the disrespect. Carnistir cared little for either side. It was his routine, and he clung to it the way he would a line that guided him in from sea to shore. There was a tea shop on his way, and he always stopped and always waited to take the first sip at the moment when the marble beneath his backside stopped feeling cold and damp. By that point, the tea was hot enough to warm him but not so hot to sting. He knew precisely where the sun would rise and when, consulting his timepiece with its tiny mechanical beating heart as the eastern sky bled away the night’s darkness. He crossed his ankle over his knee and took the second sip. His foot jiggled. It felt good, like ripping at his cuticles with his teeth or feeling for and pulling loose strands of hair, like the tension was flowing out of him. In the sharp angle where two midsized mountains overlapped, a rim of fire shimmered.

He waited until the sun rose to where one of the steep-sided mountains cut a slice like a piece of pie from the full orb. The marble beneath his butt was warmed by now. A last swallow and his tea was gone. He stood and turned back to what was once Royal Tirion. In the sun’s light, it looked nothing like he remembered it.

Someone had taped a flier to King Finwë’s marble knee. Carnistir stared at it for a long moment. He lifted his hand to his mouth and found a loose ridge of skin to work with his teeth and he walked into sunlit Royal Tirion and went to work.

His position within the government building of Tirion had been Uncle Arafinwë’s generous idea—backed by the encouragement of his therapist and further sanctioned as high as Námo Mandos himself (or so he heard)—and he hated it. After Carnistir’s Return from Mandos (he always felt the event deserving of capital letters, even though Nelyo would have insisted such was incorrect), Arafinwë had called him forth to make a wide-eyed confession of how he’d always known of Carnistir’s strange Gifts (also seemingly deserving of the majuscule) and always pitied him, being possessed of them himself, and how he’d spent the last several thousand years emotionally flogging himself for not being more assertive in guiding Carnistir through an understanding of said Gifts in youth. In fact—and Carnistir had wanted fiercely to say this but, despite his formidable reputation for having a temper, never quite knew how to wound another’s self-esteem in such a way—Arafinwë’s sons, at least the younger ones, had used their own Gifts to exact cruelty upon Carnistir. Arafinwë would have been mortified to know this. But now, apparently, he was committed to not repeating this mistake again. Carnistir’s Return, it seemed, offered both of them a second chance.

But Arafinwë’s came in the bizarre form of offering Carnistir a job in his newly formed republican government. The job was not prestigious and couldn’t have been a worse fit for Carnistir if a deliberate attempt at such had been made; for the first several weeks, he operated under the conviction that Arafinwë was resurrecting his younger sons’ cruelty against their strange, baffled older cousin. For he worked at the information desk: an octagonal structure painted a cheery blue color and with four signs pointed in each of the cardinal directions and shouting out, in livid red letters: INFORMATION. Even worse, they'd been contrived to glow dully so that the color reminded him of the hot itchy pain of a fresh bugbite. As one might expect of a government powered by a highly detailed bureaucracy, the job required the mastery of a color-coded system of ledgers, each divided into sections within sections within sections, which was not itself much of a challenge. Rumors to the contrary, Carnistir was not unintelligent, although he was certainly the son of Fëanáro to receive the least recognition for his accomplishments (simply because no one knew he had any); by now, he had the ledgers nearly memorized. He’d secreted them home, one by one, under his shirt during the first few weeks of his employment and studied them each night until his eyes would not stay open any longer. It wasn’t the work itself that he detested but the manner of its accomplishment.

The space in which he worked was the high-ceilinged atrium of what had once been Arafinwë’s palace and was now the central government office. Arafinwë had instructed the engineers to demolish the floors that divided the front of that palace (which had once included the rooms of none other than the illustrious Findaráto) into three stories. The result was an echoing, glassed-in monstrosity of a vestibule, where footsteps rang loud and voices carried far and Carnistir sat right in the middle, in his cheery blue kiosk below the itching, screaming sign: INFORMATION.

He remembered Nelyo, the only one of them with an experimental interest in the life sciences, used to present specimens beneath glass cloches that allowed a 360-degree view of the object—the organism—the life form—within. Carnistir had attended many such presentations with his brother, either showcasing Nelyo’s work or the work of someone else whom Nelyo felt he owed attendance. He used to feel sorry for the creatures under the glass, who could not turn in any direction without meeting eyes.

And now he was such a creature. Most of his inquiries came from people who entered via the high glass doors that admitted the citizenry in need of INFORMATION, but that did not mean that employees within the building did not sometimes seek him as well, alarming him from behind by calling his name. Or people who, having completed their first order of business, found they had still more and returned for direction, appearing from all sides. And if he turned his attention there, he frequently turned back to discover a small queue had formed in the absence of his attention to the front. He felt the kiosk deserved at least two—maybe three—people in order to avoid being surprised by approaches from unanticipated angles, but the size of it forbade more than one. It was just Carnistir, his row of color-coded ledgers, and a chair that had been engineered to turn 360 degrees—proof, he believed, that Arafinwë knew the impossibility and anxiety-inducing nature of the task when he assigned Carnistir to it. For one who professed to understand him, that intention betrayed that he did not.

The government office opened after sunrise. There was nothing to prepare aside from climbing astride the rotating chair and setting his fingernails into the wood that edged the counter of the kiosk and waiting. All around, in 360 degrees, little crescent-shaped dents in the paint betrayed his nervous habit.

To make matters worse, as he pushed through the tall glass doors, more fliers greeting him. There was one on each door and not only one on each of the pillars that supported the atrium but one on each side of each of the pillars that supported the atrium. There was even one on the front of his kiosk. BATTLE OF THE BARDS, said the text in a highly ornate, old-fashioned script, so choked with flourishes that it was difficult to read; a more sedate, typeset text spelled out the details beneath. He didn’t bother to read them.

He climbed astride his rotating chair, set his fingernails into the wood, and waited.

Carnistir lived on his mother’s land just outside the city. She’d long ago forsaken the Fëanorian family estate several hours ride beyond the gates, choosing a parcel of land within sight of the city walls and building a small cottage on it large enough just for one. Carnistir wondered sometimes if that gesture was one of optimism or hopelessness: that her husband and sons would meet with such resounding success in their new land that she’d never have need to accommodate them in her home. Or: that their deeds would be of an awful degree that they’d meet with a swift death from which there was no release.

In the early days after his Return, Carnistir found a place (and Nerdanel, naturally, made room) within her tiny home. Even for a misanthrope such as himself, the close contact was comforting: to glimpse her in passing, to always be able to hear her noises, to live amid the scent of her. He once, grotesquely, thought of it as the comfort of a return to the womb. The loneliness of the Halls lingered upon his feä like a wound festered and refusing to heal: a undertone of pain so omnipresent that he forgot its existence until he first heard her familiar voice, as he stood on her threshold, gasp, “My prayers!” But within weeks, he began to itch with the need for solitude, and he began foraging for scrap boards and constructed his own dwelling, smaller than his mother’s, behind a stand of trees on her land.

Carnistir had always had his father’s mind for invention but thought in terms of form and not beauty. In Beleriand, he’d related to the Naugrim, for whom everything did not have to be resplendent with crystals and color, but whose work was engineered with a sparse efficiency that, to Carnistir, had its own spartan beauty. Carnistir worked the most hours in the forge of all of Fëanáro’s sons, yet Fëanáro had no appreciation for his skills, assigning him the rote, unlovely work that he felt wasted his talents and Curufinwë’s. Yet as Carnistir pounded out plowshares and axe heads and hoe blades, he knew that the farmers and woodsmen who used them would find greater efficiency for less effort. He didn’t even need to imagine them feeling thankful for that; the swift efficacy of his work smote his heart like a well-turned passage of poetry.

His lack of notability granted him an anonymity in his father’s laboratories and workshops that allowed for free experimentation. His brothers’ work was under constant scrutiny by Fëanáro, who was always suggesting revisions, but Carnistir was permitted to tinker endlessly without comment or interference, working on projects for as long as he desired with no pressure to make progress. He’d watch tension feather his brothers’ spirits with darkness whenever their father entered the room, and he breathed his gratitude that he was left alone to quite literally work behind Fëanáro’s back as his scrutinizing face turned to one or another of his other sons’ projects. Perhaps Carnistir might have developed a sense of artistry, he sometimes consoled himself, but the risk to his freedom seemed too great.

So he pounded plowshares and built elaborate, delicate machines that offered all manner of common conveniences. Some were even adopted into the flow of the household by Nerdanel, who never revealed whence they came, giving only a secret smile to Carnistir as though she had intimated his preference for anonymity: the synchronized timepieces that chimed at key hours to summon the household to meals and chores and bed; the writing desk with a pedal system for churning the wash while one studied; the device that wandered inward from the perimeter of a room with a mop attached to its belly, washing the floors as it went.

Carnistir began his work with lightning shortly before his father’s creation of the Silmarils. He watched Fëanáro at work with light and stone, perfecting the art that would eventually bring forth the Silmarils. Camping rough one night with Tyelkormo upon the coast and watching a lightning storm out upon the sea, he wondered if the power of lightning might be similarly harnessed and preserved, much as his father had captured a moment’s passing of light and made it linger eternally within the confines of a stone. Others had researched the properties of lightning—he’d be made by Fëanáro to attend enough scientific lectures with Nelyo (in hopes that, if exposed to the right stimulant, some unexpected talent might flourish forth from his barren hands and mind) that he knew the basics of the science—and upon his return home, he visited his eldest brother in Tirion and begged his help in procuring the manuscripts describing the science. Nelyo, as ever kindly discreet, did not ask why but took a day of leave from their grandfather’s court to raid the royal libraries for what Carnistir needed. He even diverted enough scribes from their work that, within the week, Carnistir had his own copy of the most important texts. (Carnistir had begun work on a machine that would remove the need for scribes, but knowing his father’s own attachment to and affinity for chaotically beautiful calligraphy had kept that project very secret.) Carnistir busied himself with study; his absence from the workshops in those weeks went unnoticed and unnoted. The science was not particularly difficult, and it did not take him long to master it and begin, in his mind, to imagine how it might be manipulated to serve his purpose.

But then came his father’s banishment to Formenos. Carnistir followed dutifully. The books and manuscripts they brought from their home outside Tirion necessarily had to be sparing, and the full space in the trunks was given over to the papers of his father and mother and brothers Nelyo and Curufinwë, who were doing worthy work. Carnistir did not think to protest. He would resume his work when the term of exile passed; without the conveniences of Tirion at hand, he knew that his efforts would be put to use in other, more practical ways. Even though the future sometimes shadowed his dreams, even Carnistir could not imagine that he’d never again return to their Tirion home to collect his papers, and in Beleriand, without them and the tools he’d grown accustomed to using, to resume his work seemed an insurmountable inconvenience.

After his Return, his mother did not comment when he began the construction of his new domicile and, once it was marginally habitable, even helped him move his few items into it without being asked. And so they began their separate lives. Rarely, she invited him to a meal with her; he always accepted when she did (because she so rarely asked). His house was mostly given over to a workshop, for he still enjoyed tinkering with machines. The necessities of life—the dining table, his bed—folded away against the wall to allow him maximal space to work. He collected rainwater and had a small open fireplace for cooking, just outside the door. (There was only one door.) He dug a latrine in the woods, like the less civilized Wood-elves of Beleriand. He had few personal effects. But when he went to his job in the city, he sometimes returned to find that she’d placed items inside his residence: items from his life before their exile to Formenos, salvaged apparently from their Tirion home. There were the riding boots he always thought made him look dashing (though he naturally confessed this to no one), the odd piece of once-cherished jewelry, the sketch done of him by a young Curufinwë that looked wincingly awkward not because of Curufinwë’s lack of skill but because of his skill that so deftly capture Carnistir’s actual awkwardness. His house was small but he found space for each of these items when they came.

And then one day, there were the manuscripts.

He’d ordered from the foundries dozens of tiny cogs and wheels and was building a machine—a sort of timepiece—that matched the rising and setting of the sun and would alert him at the last possible moment at which he could arise from bed in order to be on time for work. The daily vagaries of the sun made this task difficult, and he’d built a score of designs only to tear them down again, leaving his worktable strewn with the evidence of his failures. Then, one day, he’d come home to discover, upon this scattering of gears, the manuscripts piled in a neat stack, tucked inside a ledger to keep the dust and damp from them. He paged slowly through them. The old-fangled calligraphy provoked a sort of nostalgia, a dull ache for a time when ordinary copywork was believed worthy of embellishments and flourishes. The lack of urgency found in naïve immortality, he realized, was itself a type of bliss. He paused to read some of the texts; the words tickled his memory and made him recall his work, mostly solitary save for the rare occasions when Nelyo, visiting from Tirion, would bring him a glass of spirits and coax him to talk about it. He remembered gesturing with uncharacteristic grandness and speaking with uncharacteristic passion and volume and Nelyo suggesting manuscripts he hadn’t yet read and promising their imminent arrival. But then they were banished. And then—

He closed the ledger and went to busy himself with something else.

On Isilya, Amarië came into the government office around noon. When she pushed through the tall doors, Carnistir was just beginning to extract the wooden placard that announced BREAK; the law permitted him a half-hour for his lunch, and he never took less, even if most of it was spent feeding the pigeons by the Fountain of the King (now the Fountain of the People). When he saw her moving toward him, he swiftly dropped the placard back into the cubby he’d created for it to keep it out of his way. (Otherwise, he bumped into it regularly enough that it became distracting and interrupted his workflow so, shortly after beginning to work here, he brought in a small saw and retrofitted his workstation to accommodate the sign in a more logical fashion.) He dug his fingernails into the wooden edge of his desk.

As she approached, he considered that he should possibly look busy. Or perhaps he should swivel around in his chair and turn his back like he was waiting for someone from the government offices to come and speak to him. That way he could look startled when she called his name, not like he’d been waiting on her to approach. Certainly, he should get his fingernails out of the wood. Hands freed, he poked at the BREAK placard, lest she detect that he was missing his law-mandated break for her, but it was snug in its cubby and he only succeeded in rattling it a little bit.

“Hi, Carnistir.”

She was small—she had always been small (a stupid observation! of course she was the same person she’d always been, with no need for rebirth because she’d stayed in Aman!)—and had to stand on tiptoes to rest her forearms on the counter of the kiosk. He imagined the way her slippers would fall away from her heels and the graceful arch of her feet and the way the muscles would make little bunches in her calves. Her presence momentarily yanked away the interceding ages of exile and confinement in Mandos, bringing the two halves of his life together like he'd never grown past awkward adolescence and, his guard dropped, his caught a ripple of yellow from her before remembering himself and all that had happened in between, including the centuries of disciplined training in Mandos to not exist open and raw to every emotion passing through the people around him. He poked again at the placard and it gave a disgruntled clatter at being ill-used. Finally, he looked up and intended to say, “Hi,” but his tongue was seemingly cemented to the roof of his mouth.

The clatter of the placard and his silence thereafter had the effect of making her look at the placard, and although she couldn’t read it from where she stood, she was savvy enough to eject, “Oh, me! How could I forget it is noon and your break!”

Carnistir felt blood furnacing to his face. He imagined it growing red and swollen like an engorged mosquito; he imagined his feet going numb as the blood left them to flood his stupid red face. He kicked the legs of the chair to restore feeling before realizing he looked crazy and stopping. “Doesn’matter,” he managed to mumble (and instantly regretted it).

Amarië’s eyes widened. “It most certainly does matter,” she said. “For months and months, I led a boycott each Menelya to protest for the rights of workers to a full thirty-minute break by law rather than the twenty minutes they were guaranteed. I did not do so to infringe upon that right myself a mere year later.” She dropped back to the flats of her feet. The counter was now at chin height. “I will wait,” she said, pivoting to walk swiftly to one of the benches at the edge of the vast atrium and taking a seat.

He was wrong. She wasn’t wearing slippers to delicately slip away from her feet but the heavy black boots he associated with forgework. Her calves were as strong as he imagined and furred with fine golden hairs.

He pushed through the door and out of his kiosk, trying not to look at her settling herself on a bench with a book that was probably something radical and brilliant that she’d use to reshape the world the way his parents had once taken plain, ugly rock and made it into something soaring and graceful. The sun was coming through the tall windows and made her hair glow like molten gold. She wore it short now, and at first he hadn’t liked it, but he abruptly decided now that he did.

She looked up from her book and caught him watching. He jerked his head back forward and walked faster toward the door. He could feel his face blazing again.

He’d always loved her, Amarië of the Vanyar, from the first time he saw her as a young man when she was just come of age and being presented in his grandfather’s court. Carnistir hadn’t realized it then but this was the first overture that she and Findaráto were intended for each other; indeed, their love had weathered the ages, including hundreds of years of separation due to exile and death—and they still loved each other.

Carnistir had a wife still in the Halls. Taryindë had accepted him in a way that few did outside his immediate family; they’d grown up together and she truly hadn’t found him strange. That had been powerful. His strangeness was an awkward feedback loop: He perceived dimly how strange he was—enough to be aware but not to know how to behave differently—and that made him nervous and stranger … and so it went. Taryindë hadn’t cared. He was comfortable with her in a way he’d never imagined possible with anyone besides his parents and brothers. They had their first fumblings at romance and sex in late adolescence; when she went to the South to serve her apprenticeship, both of them used the momentum gained from each other with other partners, and when she finally returned, the passion between them the first time they were alone together surprised them both: a fire suddenly flared anew from embers by the barest breath. It was one of the things he remembered best about her: his desire for her, which never ebbed in hundreds of years. Despite the endless war that was the First Age, they’d been talking about a third child when the Union of Maedhros collapsed at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and she died defending his unconscious body.

Amarië was different. The attraction was not sexual, and she was merely kind, never so unguardedly accepting of him as Taryindë. Instead, Amarië was an ideal: an exemplar that gave him comfort to know that such as she existed in the world. It made all of the drudging, wearisome, squalid efforts of life worthwhile, to know that they supported a world with room for the likes of her.

For Taryindë was worldly and flawed like him: with a raunchy sense of humor and prone to yelling and slow to forgive. He knew of her all of the intimate imperfections as one might expect after producing two children with her. He loved her despite, with a love strengthened by acceptance versus idealism. Of Amarië, he could scarcely imagine (and determinedly never did) such things.

His cousins, the sons of Arafinwë (and briefly, through naïve association with them, his brothers Tyelkormo and Curufinwë), had detected his love for Amarië and were cruel to him about it, yet despite their purportedly heightened insight as the scions of Arafinwë, they hadn’t discerned that he’d never hoped. He knew that Amarië would never love the likes of him (and shortly enough he grew wise to the eternal love story that was her relationship with Findaráto). He never even dreamed of it. The thought of himself ungainly and stammering beside her ruined the perfection of her. Had she loved him, it would mean she was not worthy of the exalted station he’d assigned her.

He took his lunch to the Fountain of the People and sat on its rim. From the outside, the vast windows of the government building were strange: One could not see beyond them but saw oneself reflected back as tidily as if in a mirror. Carnistir saw a small image of himself, dark-headed and swarthed by exposure to the sun, with knees squared and methodically lifting and lowering a sandwich until it was gone.

When he returned to the kiosk, he saw Amarië lay her book aside and extract a timepiece on a chain from her pocket. She pursed her lips—he had returned five minutes early—and returned to her book. Other customers were not so conscientious, and he directed three people who’d been waiting for the end of his break before she finally slipped a bookmark in place and came back up to the counter.

She didn’t greet him again. Her face popped fully above the edge of the kiosk as she rose to her tiptoes and plunked her forearms down on the counter. “You should take your full break, Carnistir. I and others fought for you to have that break. Not that it’s about us; it’s for your wellbeing. There’s research about it, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, and it’s also morally correct to recognize you as fully human and not merely a worker, a convenience to our State.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I have a question for you.” She propped an elbow on the counter and plunged her hand into her shortened hair as she spoke.

“That’s my job to answer those,” he said and felt stupid before the words were even out and then worried that it might have sounded snarky and sarcastic; more than once, his bumbling ways were read (and repeated, with inevitable inflation) as such.

But she smiled, radiantly, as though he was actually funny. “It’s not so much about this place.” She sketched around the atrium with her fingers. “I know quite a bit about this place; I read the same literature as Arafinwë, although he has a more muted view of it than I do. Regardless. I heard rumor that you have a way to reproduce government forms without a scribe.”

The full splendor of her gaze was turned on him. It was like sunlight on the sea. He squirmed a little, and his mouth opened and shut a few times as he considered how to respond.

“You probably want to know how I know. Look, Carnistir, I know you are a private person. I fully respect that. You alone of your family are willing to do things just to see them done, not to receive any accolades for them. Even when your mother named you, she hid your gifts from the world. I used to think she was unimaginative or even cruel, but I know her now and therefore know better.

“She spoke to Findaráto of you, of your work. Please do not be angry with her. He was her apprentice, once upon a time. And he knows of my aspirations and encouraged me to talk to you. That’s all. He gave me few details; he said they were not his share, and I agreed that they were not mine to know—not from him anyway.”

A small queue was forming behind her: other workers using their lunch breaks to handle State business.

“I’m aspiring to the Battle of the Bards,” she went on. “And as strange as it sounds, government forms are part of it. I plan to recite the forms in the place of lyrics. And pass the forms to my audience as I do. But I don’t want even a pinch of artistry that would come from a scribe. I want them made by machine—a symbol of what this republic risks becoming, a rote set of unfeeling procedures and rules, if we lose the imagination that produced it and the ideals that imagination dared uphold. Can you do that?”

He felt a moment’s alarm at her mention of the Battle of the Bards that he’d been trying not to think about and a moment’s sorrow that she thought his printing machine wouldn’t offer so much as a pinch of artistry and a moment's panic that he was lost on her philosophy and didn't even know if he agreed with her. He looked over her head at the queue of people shuffling with a little more impatience as their half-hour (and chance of actually eating a lunch) trickled away and then back and quickly away; meeting a person’s eyes was hard enough; looking at hers would leave the world blotched with darkness for hours after, in comparison.

“I will help you,” he mumbled to the countertop. She said nothing but smiled as she slipped away to cross the floor in strides broader and more commanding then her petite legs should manage.

"Next please," he said.

Carnistir dusted off the printing machine that night. He had not used it in a while, having been lately consumed with his work with capturing and employing the power of lightning. He appreciated what Nerdanel had tried to do: She had likely mentioned the machine to Findaráto in hopes that he would mention it to his father, and the invention might find some space in Arafinwë’s new government (which admittedly used large amounts of paper. Foresters were raising the alarm with the population—and therefore government—of Tirion growing by the day. Class I Scribes, as they were now called, were among the most in-demand professionals.)

Shortly after his Return, he'd spent most of his spare time carving wax forms of letters and casting them in metal. The work was menial and easy on his body and mind, tender and new after reembodiment. It let him stay busy without committing deeply to anything, much less appearing in front of other people. First he cast his brother Nelyo’s and his mother’s flawless scripts and, from those, devised others that marched in a similar orderly fashion across the page. Fëanáro’s wild penstrokes refused to be tamed, though he tried. He used Macalaurë’s to forge musical notation. Tyelkormo’s was messy and awful, so he skipped it without even trying. Curufinwë’s he used to make formal blocks suitable for titles. He made one for the twins as well, mingling their letters together, but kept them sealed in a box; he took them out only when he wanted to punish himself with nostalgia.

He made letters and numbers and notations and symbols in varied sizes and forms and entertained himself for a while by printing out his favorite writings of his mother, father, and brothers—even the mundane: the note, crisp and decaying with age, that shouted: “FËANÁRO DO NOT DARE COME IN THIS HOUSE IN THOSE BOOTS” that Nerdanel used to post on the door during the mud season in Formenos and that he found secreted away in a pile of her papers. The squabbles and affections conducted via paper—Curufinwë’s artless confusion over why Tyelkormo had gone hunting without waking him, the young twins’ enthusiastic missives to Nelyo in Tirion, Macalaurë’s rages poured onto paper so that he maintained the deceptively outward calm that, in the histories, reduced the most passionate of the brothers to the most even-tempered—which Nerdanel seemed to have kept when she found them. Under the guise of testing his machine, he printed these onto page after page of paper (the foresters be cursed) and pasted them to the walls of his tiny workshop, layer upon layer, as though surrounding himself with the inked voices of his lost family might approximate the clamor they once brought everywhere with them.

But he lost interest in the endeavor over time. He would still, from time to time, peel back through the layers of paper and imagine the conversations and conflicts that had produced the notes—which he’d rarely witnessed—and lose himself in the illusion of his family’s ongoing existence. After a while, the silence overwhelmed his imaginings; then—in typical Fëanárian fashion—he’d become involved with his work with the lightning, and he almost gratefully abandoned the printing machine until it became furred with the thick layer of dust he was now removing.

“Carnistir?” She who was so brave in reshaping the world stood in the open doorway of his small house, almost timid in the way she linked her hands in front of her. He’d folded away the signs of his sleeping and eating, yet he felt his face flush to see her here, in his home: Amarië whom he loved, forever loved. The quivering intimation of her golden color enlivened the space the way a beam of light will turn dust—a hindrance to be banished—into a shimmer of gold in the air. He almost opened his mind to the perception of the gold of her. She came forward. “Is this it?” She placed her hand on the back of the printing machine like she was stroking a large domestic beast. Her hands were tiny like the rest of her, their little moon-shaped nails painted black.

And then her gaze caught the layers of printed pages and her eyes widened. “Is this what it can do?” She went to the wall and touched one of the yellowing pages. “It’s precise, it’s beautiful—it’s exactly what I need.”

He showed her how to set the type. She was an attentive student and, when he allowed her to try setting her own line, careful and dexterous. Both surprised him—he’d always imagined the Vanyar were most skilled in matters of abstraction, not in the cold, unyielding work of physical objects that so enthralled the Noldor—but her work was acceptable, especially for a beginner, and her critical mind, when turned to her own work, caught her imperfections before he could say a thing.

He sponged on the ink while she watched and shut the machine and printed a page. As the paper spooled out, she caught it like she might some newborn thing and held it equally tenderly in her hands.

“You can use it whenever you want,” he heard himself saying, and he was surprised and dismayed.

She was scarcely gone and he regretted his offer, and keenly. His work with the storage of lightning-energy—the work that made his eyes skip away from the notices of the Battle of the Bards, lest he admit how the thought of it goaded his work—was ongoing, and he didn’t wish to share it or even acknowledge it to another person, and besides, he liked the privacy of his space. Even Nerdanel visited only infrequently and, when she did, briefly. He wondered what he’d been thinking.

As it turned out, it was irrelevant, for she did not come at all for many days. He went to work and sat like a bug in a jar in his kiosk at the center of the glass-paned atrium; he answered questions about forms and floor numbers; he dug his fingernails into the wood until they became tender and sore (and then some); he ate his lunch slowly so that he’d take his full half-hour break. As he’d been trained in Mandos, he shut his mind to the constant wash of thoughts and emotions that poured from the people he served in his uncle’s new government; he went home, exhausted by the effort, and only unguarded his mind before thoughtless and cold machines that operated under predictable laws that never hurt or betrayed him.

One Menelya, he did not have to work; the night before had brought violent storms and livid lightning, and he had found the stones he’d made crackling with stored energy that morning. He was deep in his work when there was a gentle knock on the doorframe, and Nerdanel entered his house.

Her eyes always skipped over his work, and he could see her trying to take apart and figure out what he was doing, but she never asked (even as she was learned enough to certainly make viable inferences). “Carnistir, Findaráto’s betrothed Amarië is performing tonight in the city. I would like to go and was hoping you might accompany me.”

Nerdanel was clever. She knew if she asked him if he wanted to go than, no, of course he wouldn’t. But if she turned her question to herself, he might oblige. He could sense her satisfaction when he agreed.

(He was also amused at her use of the old-fashioned and rather quaint betrothed, since he knew from the rumors that steamed in the air of republican Tirion just as avidly as they had in monarchial Tirion that Amarië no longer believed in marriage.)

Neither of them had the time or desire to keep horses, so they walked to the city that night in the rainbow twilight. The first stars eased out of the darkness as they climbed toward the gates of the city.

“Carnistir, are you happy in your new life?” Her hand was light on his arm: another old-fashioned proclivity. He felt a lurch of nostalgia; he’d accompanied his mother to gallery openings and concerts from time to time before the Darkening, walking much like this. He never knew why she asked him, of all of her sons, and though he’d never said so, he somewhat liked it.

“I suppose so,” he answered.

“Are you lonely?”

He said nothing. I suppose so.

“I have petitioned for the release of at least one of your brothers or perhaps Taryindë, but I have heard nothing.”

“It doesn’t … exactly work that way,” he said. “It’s not a privilege or something to be bestowed but something accomplished. Like reaching the summit of a mountain; only the climber can achieve that.”

“And you were the first in our family to achieve it.” Her voice lacked incredulity or pride, though the simple fact she stated cloaked a question.

“I was in many ways the least traumatized of them.”

He felt her wince as a pulse of red. He closed his mind, a tense, tight gesture like squeezing his eyes shut. His training in Mandos had been thorough, but the occasional emotional reaction slipped through, despite his best discipline. He wondered, at times, if he'd ever be fully free of the feelings of others. He wondered, at times, if it was possible.

“I mean that I had a happy life there,” he said quickly, trying to slow the churning thoughts he sensed in her. How many times had she turned over the precise manner of the sufferings and deaths of her husband and seven sons? He kept his thoughts firmly locked from hers. “My land was beautiful and plentiful and, for the most part, at peace. I had good trade relations and allies with many people. I had my wife and two daughters; I was near enough to visit any of my brothers when I wanted to.”

And his ending had been the quickest: He’d been the first to die, early in the second kinslaying, before he’d slain anyone himself, dispatched by the mercy of a stray arrow that lodged under his gorget. He’d bled out quickly, a death like falling asleep. He didn’t add that.

The music club where Amarië was to perform was in the lowest circle of the city, where the streets wove a warren that delved under the hill of Túna itself. The more squalid professions—the tanners and the vellum-makers and the butchers—used to do their work here, and even in the Days of the Trees, it was a place where one could discover art and ideas unrepresented in the tapestries and frescoes of Valmar, ideas that made Fëanáro’s radicalism seem almost conventional. Carnistir used to come here at times with Taryindë and listen to alternate folkstories proposing all manner of pasts for the Quendi: that the Quendi were sculpted by a goddess from clay, that the women arose first and the men awoke to an established settlement, that some of the Quendi found the sea long before Oromë’s arrival, that some of the arts known to the Elves were learned from the Dark One who later took them (and that was the price agreed upon). Carnistir had liked the stories as he listened, but walking home, hand-in-hand with Taryindë, the stolid past he thought he knew from his grandfather’s accounts began to shimmer and shift, and his feet felt unmoored upon the cobbled lower streets, like the earth beneath them might too begin to flake away and uncover something dark and different.

Carnistir expected to have to show his mother the way, but it was Nerdanel who led him, ducking into a low door that opened into a tall but narrow alley that was a natural crevice between the rocks and admitted only a silvery ribbon of sky, the stars drowned by the light of the city. Where the crevice failed there was a metal gate, the swirling vines long-diminished by oxidation. Nerdanel creaked it open, and he followed her into a wide underground avenue, lit by Fëanorian lamps tucked into every alcove. Shops and vendors opened off of the avenue; at all hours, people strolled the passageways, and Carnistir knew from experience that any visit might reveal a new turning in the way that brought arts and delights heretofore unknown. The smell of spicy food hung in the air, and from behind a curtain, someone scraped a bow across a viol, its aged strings crying out a raw, mournful song. From another alcove was the elocuted drone of a classical story, a shrill of flutes, the damp patter of applause.

The archway that formed the door to the club was draped with the luminescent roses that his brother Nelyo had once grown: aberrations kept in Formenos and, Carnistir thought, entirely destroyed during Morgoth’s attack. Someone had told a tale of Ungoliantë gorging on them in great gulping swallows. He stopped and touched one. They felt as they always had: velvety and clammy, the light giving luminescence but no warmth. Nerdanel waited for him, a tiny smile on her lips.

“You can imagine my surprise when I finally returned there and found them covering everything,” she said. “Tirion was less repulsed by them than it was when Nelyo first devised them. We have learned at last, I suppose, to disdain no light, however strange.”

“I remember when he made them.” The passage leading back to the club was so narrow that they could not walk side by side. He let her lead. It was easier to speak to the back of her neck. “How so many people thought he’d tread onto forbidden ground. It was the first time he was truly disliked, I think. He did not take to it well.”

Carnistir remembered being thin on pity for his brother: Carnistir who had always been, at best, tolerated and more usually mocked and disdained. Seeing Nelyo’s luminescent roses again returned all of those emotions to him: a strange, aching jealousy he’d forgotten how to feel, a tiny thrill of satisfaction and a crushing grief at discovering that he’d allowed the cruelty of others to turn him cruel himself toward Nelyo, who'd done naught by love him unconditionally. Mandos had swaddled those memories thick with oblivion and tucked them away to be unwrapped and inspected at some safer time, perhaps—not here, certainly.

The passage widened suddenly and wrenched his thoughts back to the present. The club was located in a natural cave buried deep under the hill of Túna. Carnistir had been here before and, now as then, felt hyperaware of the weight of Tirion over their heads. Glowworms crept along the ceiling in ever-shifting constellations of pale green and blue; small, dim lampstones were strung along the walls. On each table, a candle flickered in a small brazier. So deep beneath the skin of Túna, the air was chill and damp. The din of so many voices thundered amid the stones. Carnistir began to worry that he should not have come.

“You came!” Amarië appeared suddenly from the gathering crowd and swept Nerdanel into a hug. Nerdanel was a good bit taller than her and much bigger in the shoulders, but Amarië seemed to capture her completely. Nerdanel tucked the smaller woman under her chin and they rocked in each other’s arms for a long while.

“Of course I did. I have been too long away. I’ve heard you have an entirely new set, and I’ve heard none of it.”

Amarië’s eyes landed on Carnistir then. He felt his heart clutch in panic and willed himself to be calm and relaxed if she also hugged him, but she just reached out her hand. Unsure, he reached too, and she squeezed his fingers. Her grip was warm and stronger than he expected. “Carnistir. Welcome. I am glad you came. You can hear some of what I am doing and can perhaps advise me about the best script to use on your writing machine to capture my words as I intend.” She released his fingers and turned to slip her arm around Nerdanel’s waist. “I saved you a table—I always do! I always hope!—right up front.”

“It is the nature of your people to hope,” Nerdanel said as they began to stroll toward the stage, and Amarië laughed loudly at that.

“I do not think Arafinwë finds me much a source of hope lately so much as irritation. I have been highly critical of his government; I do not think he has gone far enough. I feel us slipping back toward autocracy as surely as a wave sliding back to the sea.”

The table was right at the foot of the stage. Findaráto was already there; he also caught Nerdanel in an embrace and managed not to look surprised at Carnistir’s presence, instead disappearing briefly and returning with a chair that he placed between Nerdanel and himself. Amarië departed to ready herself for her performance, and Carnistir’s mother and cousin conducted a lively conversation across him, discussing some sculptor Carnistir had never heard of. A waiter brought wine and three glasses, and Findaráto poured.

Carnistir felt like he was in his fishbowl at work, only multiplied by more people. Their gazes brushing against the back of his head felt nearly tangible; he reached back to smooth his hair. He wanted to turn to confirm that they were staring but dreaded doing so; he clamped his mind down firmly to bar their thoughts. It was a feeling akin to standing poised for some exuberant action; with time, it would become aching, exhausting, but the alternative was so much worse. What they must think! The first Returned Fëanárion in their midst! He could not bear to know their thoughts; his closed his mind until the silence was a roar.

He worried his cuticles, became conscious of the habit, twirled the stem of the glass between his fingers so that he stopped. His knee jiggled. He forced himself to cease but found he'd resumed as soon as his attention wandered. Under the pretense of looking about the room, he checked behind him. No one was looking at him.

Nerdanel reached under the table and grasped his knee, firmly but tenderly. He surfaced enough to become aware of their conversation: They were discussing the Battle of the Bards. “I know Amarië wants to enter,” Findaráto was saying, “and it seems wrong to enter too because of that? But she certainly doesn’t think it wrong; she became angry when I suggested it!”

“I’m not surprised.” Nerdanel’s hand retreated. “She needs to win on her own merits. Your implication is that you rob her of her chances by your entry; it confers superiority.”

“But the judges have always tended conservative, toward melodic pieces that are tastefully upbeat or sorrowful, and Amarië—”

“Pardon me.” The table wobbled as Carnistir stood.

So near to the start of the performance, the washroom was deserted. Carnistir slowly turned his hands under the cold water that flowed into the basin from the rock itself; the tears of the mountain, Taryindë used to call it. “It freaks me out to pee into the mountain,” she would say. Curufinwë or Turukáno would then explain the system of pipes that fed throughout the rock and into a natural chamber where waste disintegrated as naturally as it did in the wells they dug in their back gardens, and Carnistir would stand rigid and ever-so-lightly touch his laughing mind to hers.

Carnistir didn't have to go but peed into the mountain to draw out the time a bit longer. Outside, he could hear the murmur of Amarië being introduced and a loud wash of applause. When he went to the door, the sea of heads was as impossible to cross as a stretch of burning sand. He snuggled against a wall with the firm, indifferent rock at his back and watched Amarië perform.

What she did was not exactly music. He didn’t know why she aspired to the Battle of the Bards—if he didn’t fit, with his lightning-work, then surely she should not—but the sounds of her words did have a way of clashing and sparring each other that was almost percussive. Then they’d drop into something susurrant, like the first low notes of the viols, rising in volume and almost dancing to a melody—the applause. It was over. He didn’t know a word of what she’d said—some faces were rapt; others were angry—but the sounds of it struck almost as deep as the emotions he’d once watched roil off of people in textured waves of color.

Nerdanel found him at the back and, arm in arm, they went back the way they came. Night had fallen; a nearly full moon was edging over the Pelóri. Nerdanel did not say much, but Carnistir—easing open his mind—felt her joy at having heard Amarië perform. Her emotions were nothing like the others he’d perceived: She was not inspired but neither was she angry. He recognized the deep wells of love.

“I’m merely proud of her, Carnistir.” She answered his unspoken question. “I don’t agree with her and Arafinwë—I’m sure you know that. It’s a version of the argument I used to have with your father. The world was patterned in a certain way; we took our clues to governance from the way the Valar governed themselves, and that was correct … and monarchial. But regardless.” Her hand tightened almost imperceptibly on his arm. “After the Darkening, we started from nothing and rebuilt to this.” Her hand indicated the city soaring over their heads, a city that glistened with so much light as to outshine the stars. “It’s like having a child, building a new state. When you see it so small and vulnerable, when it seems more likely than not it won’t thrive, then you feel a bit of pride to see it succeed, even if it becomes other than you might wish.”

He had his vacation the next week: one of five legally mandated weeks throughout the year when he did not have to go into his fishbowl. He was grateful but nervous too: The Battle of the Bards was just a fortnight away now, and surely Amarië would appear this week to do whatever she needed his lettering machine for, and with his vacation, he would certainly be there. The thought had crossed his mind that, with his work, she might use his machine and he’d never need to even see her. He forced the sense of relief over the twinge of disappointment.

But now he felt a low sense of dread. He’d looked forward to working on projects he chose for no better reason than wanting to work on them, but he found his concentration unmoored by a hyperawareness of how exactly he would look if she came in and found him at his work. He was well aware that his face had a habit of falling into a grim expression when he was concentrating; his brothers used to tease him about this frequently. Even though he suspected that, of all the people he knew, she was among the most difficult to intimidate or frighten, he imagined her entering, hesitating at the specter of his face, and creeping away before he noticed she was there.

As his vacation spun toward its conclusion, he became convinced that this was what had happened. He hadn’t noticed: that was an essential component of the storyline he composed in his mind. The Battle of the Bards was just over a week away, and she was missing whatever she hoped to make on his lettering machine, supposedly a key component of her performance. She’d obviously decided that either his machine was less impressive than she’d originally believed or the product was not worth the unpleasantness of sharing a workspace with him.

He did not bother to imagine which was worse. With just two days left of his vacation, he realized she wasn’t coming.

He was working on his device—it might be called a musical device but for its strangeness. It did not manipulate acoustics through shape to generate sound, as had the instruments of old, the instruments his brothers and cousins had so lovingly turned from wood; instead, he was using magnets and metal wires and steel strings and the lightning-stones he’d made to amplify the disruption of the magnet when he plucked at the strings. It was an ugly thing that made ugly noises. He recalled Macalaurë’s harps and lutes with their almost feminine curves and the rosy luster of their wood and the sounds these devices made, sounds that swelled to fill any room, that seemed to press on the hearts and milk tears from the eyes of the most recalcitrant of listeners. His contraption with its sproinging tangle of wires grumbled and growled along the octaves, sounding a lot like Carnistir imagined he appeared to others.

He’d never been able to perceive what his own thoughts looked like. In others, he could perceive every color of spectrum and more, along with textures ranging from rough to silken. Sometimes, one color was shot through with another; sometimes—as with Nelyo, Taryindë, his father—there was luminescence of unconditional love. He never knew, though, how his own thoughts appeared. Considering how he was treated by his cousins who could see them, he imagined they must be hideous: probably red flaked with black like a fresh burn, moist and pulsating.

So the musical device—the sound-generating thing—was not an instrument and would never be permitted to fill the vast halls where the Battle of the Bards would take place, but Carnistir felt a kinship with it: an ugly, misunderstood thing driven by a power no one fully understood, making ugly, misunderstood sounds. He didn’t know what his thoughts looked like, but since making his device, he knew what they sounded like.

Macalaurë had written a scrap of song on the back of a page torn from an old exercise book. It would become one of his famous pieces—Carnistir heard it played even now, by street musicians—and this was the first fumbling melody; Nerdanel had kept the scrap among her papers, and Carnistir had put it aside without really understanding why. He’d never cared for the song, which was rather saccharine and quickly grew overplayed. Now, he took it out and let the melody crash out of his sound-generating thing; it was like hearing a lion roar a songbird’s melody as it tore flesh from bone: red, mottled and charred. He shuddered and it turned into a shiver.

As the last note died away in a groan that he coaxed with his fingers on the steel strings just so, he was conscious that there was a little smile on his face. If Amarië were to walk in right now, she would not be dissuaded; he would look like any man—even a vaguely handsome one—busy at and happy with his work.

“What was that?”

And she was there.

Her words were delivered in almost a whisper, almost suspicious. She stood in the doorway, her arms full of ledgers like those he kept in his kiosk in the fishbowl, and her eyes were wide and her jaw slack with surprise, her brow furrowed with an expectation of disappointment.

“What was that?”

The ledgers tumbled from her arms onto one of his worktables, and she stood over the device, her fingers spread and searching. “May I—may I try?”

She played the device and asked rapid questions on how it worked that he tried to answer with the right amount of words: not so few as to appear secretive and taciturn (his reputation) but not so many that he gushed on beyond what her interest could tolerate. Yet her interest seemed boundless, and she urged him on with, “How?” and “Why?” just as soon as he fell silent. He had a device partly assembled, and he dug out several embarrassingly sloppy crates to find it and show it to her, and he showed her his papers teasing apart the theories on how it worked, and she read them intently and confessed, “I barely understand a word!” and returned to the finished device. Plucking at its strings, she found the notes she wanted and arranged her fingers just so and struck the strings, and a chord roared forth and she laughed, a counterpoint of delight to the device’s rage.

“Carnistir,” she said. “Carnistir! I love this!”

“I—” He hesitated. “It’s just an experiment with magnets and lightning.”

“It’s music as I’ve never quite heard it before but imagined it. It’s beauty repurposed for rage.” She pressed the string as near to the wire-wrapped magnets as the fingerboard would allow and the sound that shrilled forth was that of one no longer asking to be heard.

“Can you play this?” she asked, and he considered a multitude of answers: to continue to insist that it was an experiment in magnetism only. To acknowledge its musical capacity but minimize his own skill. To allow his skill but maintain the device’s lack of readiness.

Or, the truth—which he chose.

“I can,” he said.

The Battle of the Bards was performed in the round, situated inside an auditorium shaped like a bowl with seats on all sides and a high, round stage directly at its center. Carnistir remembered an earlier permutation of this competition that Macalaurë performed in annually (and won, most times). It was called something different then, without the warlike connotation. (Naturally.) Macalaurë would complain of performing in the round and found it the greatest challenge of the competition. “I never know where to look,” he’d say. “And no matter where I do look, my body is blocking the sound for someone.”

“Look at the judges,” Fëanáro used to say, but Macalaurë wanted everyone in the room to hear his music at its fullest splendor, and the competition provoked an annual fit of angst until he'd won It so many times that he stopped entering.

Carnistir worried less about the sound quality—what, would he fear denying someone the full ugliness of what he’d made with Amarië?—because their performance was filled with much angry striding about, so everyone would be treated to the full force of noise they intended to produce. They also stood back-to-back for most of the performance while he played the device and she flung her forms at the audience and recited her poem. Amarië explained that their back-to-back stance symbolized antipathy but Carnistir reckoned meant that one of them would be facing the audience at all times and thus solved Macalaurë’s dilemma. He struggled more with imagining himself on that stage—a place he’d always been content to let others of his family occupy in his stead—and the eyes of so many upon him, and himself impersonating the necessary confidence of a performer. It was a place of power to be a performer, to demand the attention of so many people at once. When Carnistir multiplied the number of people who could sit in the bowl by the three minutes it took to perform their song, he realized that, put together, he was demanding the better part of a day from the audience. And that seemed more presumptuous than he’d ever dreamed of daring.

Yet daring he was. He slipped into a seat near the back as the first night of performances drew to a close. A half-Telerin girl was contorted over a harp, her fingers stretching beyond what seemed possible to extract sounds from her harp that defied imagination. In the interludes between solos, she sang love ballads in a high, wavering voice. The next performers played rousing Telerin sea shanties on four different types of viols, then a Vanyarin soloist attained notes that made the crystal chandelier in the lobby tremble near to breaking.

No one attempted anything approximating what he and Amarië had in mind. Every act succeeded because it looked back to a tradition and wielded that tradition with excellence. As Carnistir filed out with the rest of the audience at the end of the night’s performances, he realized that this was not the place—it had never been, even before it was given its warlike name—to push beyond the tradition.

And he didn’t possess excellence. Wasn’t that the whole point of his existence: to offer solid, dependable mediocrity in the midst of his family’s volatile genius? He’d sometimes imagine he’d been situated in the middle of his brothers for precisely that purpose, like the dull, stalwart pillar amid architectural flourishes, necessary but, ideally, unseen. What he did attain, in his experiments and his research, was conducted in secret, and yet here he was, flaunting his mediocrity for the best of Valinorean musical society to see, and using it to push entirely free of tradition, nonetheless.

Seated at the back as he’d been, he had to wait for the push of the front rows to exit before a gap opened into which he could slide, unnoticed, to depart. He didn’t want to call attention to himself by inserting himself between two other patrons or making eye contact until someone took pity and hesitated long enough to let him in. He fidgeted with the satchel he’d brought—he’d be sleeping at an inn in the city tonight, until their performance tomorrow—that contained the black silk shirt he’d chosen, until most of the crowd had passed. The last stragglers were coming up the aisle and among them—

Amarië.

Their eyes locked and he couldn’t glance away and pretend he hadn’t seen her. She grinned and hurried to catch up with him. “Wow, what splendid performances!” she breathed.

He resumed fiddling with the strap to his satchel, which he was pretending to untangle so that he could put it over his shoulder. “I’m surprised to hear you say that, considering—”

Her brow knit briefly in confusion. “Considering what? That we are nothing like any of them? Naturally we’re not … but I’ve still studied long at the feet of tradition to reach the point where I can do what I—what we—are doing.” She squeezed his hand briefly, and he felt his face blaze at her touch. “But surely you see how much they need what we’ve done?”

He’d seen no such thing, but he didn’t know how to dare to tell her.

The backstage the next evening was nothing Carnistir had ever seen.

Performers flounced about, looking for costume pieces or someone to lace up their backs or a pot of makeup to borrow. There was a cacophony of instruments tuning and voices trilling up and down scales. Three and four performers crowded around each mirror, checking eyelashes and teeth and other things Carnistir would have never thought to care about. A spread of fresh fruits and breads lined one wall, along with bottles of sweet red wine sweating into ice buckets, and went almost entirely untouched. There were little self-important rituals—prayers and tokens tucked into costumes and letters unfolded and read before being secreted away again—transpiring everywhere he looked.

He stood with his back to the wall; the door was a few yards away, and he could edge over to it and be gone before anyone noticed. He had no rituals. He wore his good black silk shirt and a newish pair of black trousers. He had never worn makeup and did not plan to start, although watching a slim Avar tweeze his eyebrows made Carnistir suddenly aware of his own heavy brows as he hadn’t been since his cousins used to wonder aloud if having a single eyebrow was a genetic defect on Fëanáro’s or Nerdanel’s side. And he was ravenous, but he didn’t want to disrupt the pyramid of cubed pineapple, the flower formed of sliced strawberries, or to be the first to uncork a wine bottle.

This was Macalaurë’s life, he found himself thinking. He wondered what other banalities of his brothers’ existences he’d never been aware of. He wondered what he was doing and why he thought this was an acceptable idea.

This is why I didn’t look at the fliers, he thought. Because even to the mediocre, unglamorous one sometimes thought to imagine another path, to imagine what if—

He edged towards the door.

“Carnistir.” And there she was: no longer the idealized Amarië of his dreams—not exactly, anyway. The dreams were different now. She tilted her head at him. “You look pale. Have you eaten?”

“No, I—”

She went to the pineapple pyramid and dislodged a cube that made an entire side slump into ruin. She piled a plate high with pineapple cubes and strawberries and slices of orange and returned to him. He felt a flush of shame that she should think he needed to be cared for like a little child but he accepted the plate from her with gratitude.

As he ate, she remarked, “Already, you’re getting your color back.”

“I didn’t want to disturb the display,” he said by way of explanation. “Someone took a lot of time on that.”

“True, they did.” She plucked a piece of pineapple from his plate. Speaking around it, she continued. “They took a lot of time so that we could eat it, not so that they’d have to throw it onto the compost later tonight. We honor their work by making use of it, Carnistir.”

For a disorienting moment, he heard his father’s words in her voice. Fëanáro was also opposed to letting the practical molder for the supposed sake of beauty. He prized usefulness above all else: beautiful usefulness, yes, but usefulness all the same. This was the heart of his complaint against the Valar, after all: that they’d brought the Eldar into a life without usefulness and therefore without purpose. That his Silmarils—the greatest accomplishment of the Eldar—should become trinkets drove him near to madness; Finwë’s murder finished the job.

“Amarië and Carnistir!” A stage manager stood on tiptoe, clutching a clipboard and scanning the waiting performers. Amarië took the plate from his hands and set it aside.

“That’s us. Hold out your hands.”

They were remarkably steady.

She smiled wryly. “Just as I thought. They’re probably not ready for what we’re about to show them, but we are.”

A curtain parted as the previous performers breezed back, flushed with exhilaration. Carnistir saw the fishbowl lined with faces before the curtain closed again.

So many eyes, so many minds—memories, perceptions, judgments—turned upon him.

He held out his hands again.

He dared to open his mind a crack. Her gold was all around him, as lustrous as silk—this he remembered, from his youth when he had no choice but to be whelmed constantly by the full power of her—but there were tiny oscillations now that he'd never perceived before, like waves upon the sea, and he realized with a start that he was seeing himself, reflected in her. He let his mind ease shut again.

She was smiling up at him knowingly.

"Let's give them music to crack this bowl wide open."

And he followed her, squinting, into the polite wash of applause and the lights that flooded over him like gold.