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“Must you?” asks Elenwe.
Idril does not answer, simply shoulders the pack and kisses Tuor on the cheek. His hand is warm on her wrist, though he doesn’t say anything more; they’ve both spent too long in this dance to regret their decisions, or to unmake them. The only thing to do is to continue.
(When Gondolin burned, Idril did not weep. She was too busy to weep: her people needed her strong, and she knew far too well the worth of a strong beacon, a bright symbol. But she spent her nights staring into the dark flaming ruin of her father’s city. It was Tuor that wept; it was Tuor that wept, endlessly, staggeringly, and kept them moving grimly southwards.)
(One of them looks back. One of them grieves. It works for them.)
“She must,” says Tuor gently, and releases her.
Idril does not smile- this is not a week in which she can smile- but her relief must show on her face. Tuor nods to her, and she turns, and she walks into the sharp juts of the Calacirya.
…
By the time they learned of Earendil’s arrival, it was too late. Idril had ridden her horse harder than she’d ever ridden it before but still came to Mahanaxar after it was decided: the Valar had made judgment, and offered her son a choice, and he’d made it, though Elwing had not yet chosen. She had been in tears. They both looked so young, Idril remembers; young and afraid, the brightness of the Silmaril highlighting every mark of fear and grief carved into their faces. But then Elwing chose to be immortal and let the glitter-shine of the Silmaril touch her breast, and Idril knew that she’d lost a daughter in that moment as well as her son.
The Valar were kind. They allowed Earendil to live in Aman if he so wished it, and he built a home for himself twice-over: once in Tirion, to be with Idril and Tuor, and once again on a seashell-ridden beach near Alqualonde for Elwing. But his greatest love had been neither the glass-silvered city nor the wave-echoing tower, but rather the path between the two homes: winding between the mountains, sandy and salt-winded, shrubby and icy and stunningly beautiful. He spent more time traveling between their homes than spending time in each one, and that was how Idril’s son liked it.
It’s where they bury him, at the end: a small hollow in the Calacirya, tucked away from the elements but with fresh wind and cool shade.
…
Every year, Idril travels to her son’s grave. She doesn’t take much with her, but each piece matters: a fresh cut of goat meat, two worn boots, a cookpot and herbs, a cloak rolled up small, a multitude of mint in neat pots. She sits in the hollow. Hangs up the cloak, places the boots at the entrance. Starts a fire. Cooks the goat and the herbs into a slow, thick stew. Plants the mint in a semicircle. Closes her eyes, breathes in: this is what Earendil had done countless times. The cloak is his. The boots are his. The mint filtering into her hollow is sharp and sweet: all as close as Idril can get to her son’s scent. If she closes her eyes and lets her imagination take her, she can imagine they’re in Sirion once more, Idril and her golden-haired son, and that he’s stepped outside- gone to wash the dust from his hair, that hair that he was always so particular about- that he’ll be back any moment, smiling that crooked smile that he inherited from his father.
The vision breaks, of course, as it must. But this week- the week of her son’s death- is Idril’s deepest, most truly-held faith. She’d never been one to adore the Valar- that was Tuor, of the two of them, and he has faith enough for both now- but even her desire to adhere to the old traditions has withered beneath her grief. What kind of a mother can watch her son die before her eyes and remain assured of the ineffable sanctity of their gods? Well: there are a multitude of examples in Idril’s own kin, but she doesn’t count herself among their number. Idril has always loved those she chose to love too dearly. Her husband, her father, her son, her aunt- Maeglin had never been among them. She does not dream of his death, but Tuor does, even now, and wakes, shouting.
Idril loves few, but those that she does are loved with the whole of her fea and hroa.
And now Earendil is gone, sundered from her permanently, and all Idril has are the sprigs of mint that die over the course of the mountain winter, the worn boots that her son will never wear again. A part of her soul is buried beneath the dust at her feet.
…
Nobody knows what she does for this week. Not even Tuor: though Idril would tell him, if he were ever to ask, he does not and she does not volunteer the information.
…
It is even crueler, how Aman burns Earendil from the inside-out. They should have had so much more time with him; in the end they have less than three more decades. A respectable age for a Secondborn, but young for them too, for this kind of illness: barely sixty summers. His hair has only just begun to be frosted. It’s an illness that takes him: the healers that Idril drags to Elwing’s tower all tell her the same thing: this land is not meant for mortals, and there is a reason for it. Too much of anything is a poison. The air and soil and water is poisoning her son with too much life, and his frail body is rejecting it. When Earendil hears that, he goes very quiet, eyes closing, body reeling with the despair. Then he nods, and he tells Idril, very politely, that he’d like to die in the mountains. Elwing does not say much nowadays but she faces down anyone who mentions the difficulty of a mountain burial with flashing eyes made all the brighter for her Silmaril.
They take a pallet up the mountain when the time comes, borne on Tuor’s and Idril’s shoulders. Elwing flies above them, gleaming, star-ridden. At the hollow, they meet Finarfin and Anaire; Elenwe and her two brothers. It’s just past dusk and her son’s breaths are rattling in his chest and Elwing still must leave for her duty: to keep hope alive for the world.
There are few times that Idril has hated someone quite so bitterly as she’s hated Elwing for leaving that night.
But Earendil holds on, grimly, though his face pinches and his eyes droop. And at dawn, as Arien spreads her fingers over the canvas of the sky, as Elwing finally returns to them, hair a tangle about her shoulders, tears already in her eyes, wings never quite returning to flesh: Earendil holds out a hand, and smiles at her, at the greatest love of his life, and he breathes out a puff of air that clouds above him in the cold mountain air, a cloud that glows dawn-gold, and he doesn’t breathe in again.
They bury him there. They mark it with chalk-stone and with mint plants, and Tuor weeps hard enough to choke, but there is only empty, black dust in Idril’s hands and eyes and mouth. She does not know when Elwing leaves. Elenwe guides them back to Tirion, and that year- that decade- passes as if in a dream, grey-lashed and grieving. But slowly Idril survives. She does not recover- it is not possible, to recover from the death of your only child- but she survives. She mourns Earendil for a week, and she spends the rest of her year calm, cool, collected.
…
And then the Numenoreans come.
…
As if Idril cares for them! Her descendants they may be, but they are fools, they are madmen, they are not hers, not in any way that matters. She would not have cared about them at all, had they not marched across the Calacirya, had they not forced an evacuation of Tirion. It isn’t even the inconvenience. Idril had been a leader of both men and elves; she knows how frustrating the Edain can be. She holds a little resentment of them, but not much. No: much of her resentment is reserved for the Valar.
For Manwe, specifically, who did nothing, not until they crossed the Calacirya, not until they marched across her son’s bones, not until his only answer was to swallow all of the Numenorean’s army whole.
Earendil’s grave is gone, now.
Lost amid the bucking of the mountains.
Disappeared in this land of permanence.
Erased as if it had never been.
Idril has accepted every other burden the Valar have placed on her shoulders, every other cruelty and every other bitterness. This-
This is one burden too many.
…
Elrond comes to Aman, and she does not visit for a long time. When she finally does, Idril does not think he looks like her son at all; Elrond is all Elwing, dark hair and large eyes and thin lips. Then he smiles and it’s like a sun rising: her son, her Earendil, alighting in the bones of Elwing’s face.
“Grandmother,” he says. “Please, be welcome.”
“Thank you,” she replies, and takes the tea he offers her, and doesn’t bother to look at the minstrel in the corner. “Tell me, how do you find Aman?”
“Warm,” he says, but it’s more rehearsed an answer than genuine. Earendil- and Elwing, in truth- had been the same in politics: grimacing their way through it, never at ease. “I enjoy it, of course, but it is very different from my home in Middle-Earth.”
“Yes, Tuor mentioned it to me.” Idril sips the tea. “It was in the mountains, was it not?”
He nods. “Very easily defensible, which was how we wanted it. Though here there are few enough reasons for such preparations, I suppose.”
It has been an entire Age since losing her son’s grave, but Idril does not forget these things, nor forgive them. She smiles at Elrond, just as practiced and cool, and says, “You might be surprised.”
Elrond frowns.
“I’ve spent much time in the mountains,” she explains, voice just as pleasant as always. Three thousand years. Three thousand years. Tuor knows that there’s been something burning in her breast for all of them, but he’s gotten more or less used to it. Idril does not. Cannot. She had one thing of her son and now she has none, and she’ll burn the world down before she lets that fact go. “Earendil loved them too, more than Tirion or the sea. Perhaps you should accompany me on my next trip?”
“I,” says Elrond, clearly startled. “I couldn’t-”
“You should,” Idril tells him firmly. “And you should bring along a harp. Or a harper. Earendil would have wanted to hear of your exploits.”
Something spasms in his face. “He chose death.”
“So did your brother,” says Idril. “Do you loathe him, too?”
“I don’t- loathe-”
“Good, then.” She rises, and places her teacup on the table. “I’ll meet you at dawn tomorrow. You and a harper. Don’t be late.”
Elrond still looks baffled. Idril kisses him on the head and sweeps out before he can work up an answer.
…
The next morning, she smiles grimly at Elrond’s face. The march is fairly silent. They stop, the three of them, in a natural hollow that could have been Earendil’s grave but is not. Idril smiles.
(This is what people do not realize: Earendil inherited his smile from his father, and Elrond from his. But Idril’s teeth are older than that, are cut and hewn on the grinding grief of the Helcaraxe. Her smiles are dangerous, dangerous things.)
Elrond flinches.
“The mistake of the Numenoreans was greed,” she says. “And the folly of the Feanorians was impatience. The Valar are not so easily defeated.”
“Grandmother,” says Elrond faintly, “you do not- whatever someone has said to you-”
“You are no meek follower yourself,” she says coldly. “Stop pretending. You think I remain ignorant of your actions? I know. And I am here to tell you that I would have forgiven much: I would have offered even more. But I was not asked. I was not even in the room. And I have spent a very, very long Age paying attention, looking for allies, and creating plans. What I want to know is how far you are willing to go.”
The harper throws off his hood to laugh. “Itarille,” says Maglor, eyes gleaming, “oh, darling Itarille: you have changed.”
Black dust beneath her nails. A thousand hollows she’s explored in the mountains, and none of them have dead mint or a chalky gravestone. The mist of Maglor’s question, golden as Earendil’s last breath.
“How far, Uncle?” she asks. “How far?”
And he smiles: like Itarille, who’d learned it from Aredhel, who’d learned it from Celegorm, who’d learned it from Feanor.
“All of it,” he says, and dawn paints his teeth bloody. “The whole fucking distance.”