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The prince is born insolent, the first and the second time.
It is an occurrence doubly insufferable to those who by the grace of their gods still politick. Gone for so long, the prince had slipped into memory, if not rose-colored at least awash in less blood and general academic distaste, and been more than half-mythologized as cleverer than he was intolerable. The prince was brilliant, the prince was cocksure, the prince was dead—but now again the prince was alive and, to hear it said in the drawing rooms of the former high king who succeeded him, nearly as miserable to suffer as before.
(This is hyperbole, perhaps unfair but justifiable as the bemoaning of a younger brother tolerant for centuries too many. The prince is forbidden from the creation of all but trinkets, simple earrings and hair adornments, and has thus far refrained from any repeat offenses involving the forging of swords. He is suffered more gladly in the absence of any immediate threat of bodily harm.)
But chiefly the prince is insolent, most notably so in her appearance on her former wife’s doorstep, gesturing invitingly with a corked bottle of gold Vanyarin wine, silhouetted pink in fresh sunset and only half as ashamed as she ought to be for such an intrusion. She knows it, attempts to look sufficiently cowed, and only looks desperate.
She is desperate. This has always been the case in most things. Nerdanel, the former wife in question, is likely unsurprised.
“Fëanáro,” she says, and her gaze is flat. “You were not expected.”
“No,” says Fëanáro, who is no less handsome for having been dead. She knows how she looks: unworn, denatured, eroded lovely and smooth by unearthly divinities that still have no conception of beauty in imperfection. Her calluses are vanished, her mouth unscarred, her brow unlined. It’s an unnatural beauty for one whose function as ancient historical touchstone is so belabored, even as far as the Amanyar are concerned, who have in recent centuries done little to interrogate the animal unease felt in a confrontation with the new youth of those long dead. The absence of treelight in their faces has been unkindly called doll-like; those born for the first time beyond their wretched blessed land are described similarly (only more pityingly, and more frequently in hushed company). “But I thought I might be let inside anyway.”
“Did you think so?” Nerdanel does not lean against the door frame. Her posture is rigid, her mouth tight. Fëanáro could drink her anger, it flows so freely. “Because you brought me wine?”
“You favored this one. I remember that.”
“I did,” says Nerdanel. “Unfortunately, the quality has decreased notably over the centuries. The terroir changed when the Trees died, did you know.”
“I did not.” A rare thing for Fëanáro to admit. If that endears, Nerdanel’s expression belies it.
“If you have come at last to plead my forgiveness—” Nerdanel pauses. Perhaps what has occurred to her is that Fëanáro rarely pleads—or the specific scenes in which she had once done so. Fëanáro cannot subtly enough encourage this latter avenue of memory, but she trains a penitent expression at the glazed blue tile at the sculptor’s feet. Nerdanel studies her face, evidently finds her lacking. The sculptor makes her wait.
“Nerdanel—” the prince begins, but this is not quite pleading because she swallows the remainder of her words. Her throat is aflame. Her long fingers twitch.
Abruptly, Nerdanel pulls the door wide. Fëanáro steps back minutely, though the arc of it swings back into the sculptor’s home and she is in no danger of being struck. Nerdanel moves aside, vacating the entryway for Fëanáro’s inevitable counterplay.
“Leave the bottle. My tastes have changed in the millenia since you last wined and dined me,” says the sculptor. She gestures inside the modest house. “But do come in.”
*
Apologies are due. Fëanáro, proud to his last, rarely imparts them.
In the sculptor’s house, the prince is given a stemmed glass of a sloshing bitter red, bidden with a silent nod to claim a seat. She does so just as reticently on a tapestried chaise, spreads her knees, then reconsiders and crosses her ankles. There is a low table, a bulwark between them, upon which someone has recently burned incense and neglected to sweep away the cold ashes. This receiving room of Nerdanel’s little house—hardly much more than an airy studio and a cluttered sunroom, its reclusivity plausibly deniable on Tirion proper’s fringes—is neither dusty nor stagnant. She is regularly visited, the prince’s wife.
Fëanáro sips her wine. The sculptor had cast a death mask for the prince’s father, a handful of ages ago, and had it delivered to the prince’s northern keep. Fëanáro imagines such a work conceived in a worn, intimate space such as this house, tred by so many that have not been herself, and tightens her jaw.
“Nerdanel,” she says. “I have indeed come to…offer apology. If you will hear it.”
Nerdanel barks a laugh, short and cynical. “I am not quite of a mind to accept apologies from you, Curufinwë.”
“You could simply listen to them,” Fëanáro suggests. “Your acceptance is not necessary, or even expected. I only…would like to say them to you.”
“My consent to your theatre is unnecessary?” Nerdanel hums blandly. “Then why ask? Drink your wine, prince.”
“It’s not theatre ,” the prince retorts, though she obeys and takes a mouthful of wine. “Theatre would be a public tour of penance, kissing the hems of Olwë and my brothers with a citywide audience—”
“Have you not done that tour already?” At the prince’s rancorous look, Nerdanel frowns. “That reflects poorly on your presumed rehabilitation, Fëanáro.”
Fëanáro snarls. “ Rehabilitation . I am not some foaming horse in need of breaking.”
“Nor are you a king,” says Nerdanel. “Anymore. Some prostrating is required.”
“Then allow me to apologize.” She knows Nerdanel is partial to pleading. Fëanáro slips off the chaise and sinks to her knees. She trembles there, on the cool tile. There is only a little theatre involved. “Please.”
“To what end, Fëanáro? Your comfort?” Nerdanel’s curled lip is a borrowed expression, disdain learned from the prince herself. “Get up.”
Fëanáro does not get up, though she sits back on her heels. She braces a palm against the cold tile floor. Genuinely, she says, “You deserve apologies, Nerdanel.”
“I do not need you to tell me what I deserve.”
“No, certainly not. Only—”
The sculptor interrupts. “Do you want to be forgiven, little prince? Or are you seeking punishment, and that is why you are badgering me so?”
Unexpectedly, the well of the prince’s jaw fills. She says, haltingly around an obscene wet mouth: “Repentance is…a new expectation, you see.”
“It really is not.”
“For myself . I—I want to—”
“Beg forgiveness?” Nerdanel scrutinizes her. She has changed only minisculely since she was Fëanáro’s wife. She keeps her hair in the old artisan’s fashion—many cut theirs short now, like Fëanáro had back when the style was shocking, but Nerdanel’s is long, twisted out of her face with a thin silk scarf. Her scattering of reddish freckles has grown darker and more expansive since the sun began its first cycle. Her mouth still twists a tad grimly when she entertains a cruel thought.
“Entreat you, yes,” says Fëanáro. “Give you the—satisfaction of my apology, and of denying it if you wish.”
“Playacting,” scoffs Nerdanel, but more mildly now. “What weight is there to that satisfaction, if you don’t mean it when you ask my forgiveness?”
“I mean it.”
“You fail to convince me of that.”
“Nerdanel—” Tearing at her clothes in mad grief is too much. Weeping, perhaps, is not. But Fëanáro cannot summon insincere tears, nor can she parse sincerity from desire. She settles: “I missed you.”
“And I cursed you, little prince.”
“I know that—”
“You don’t .” Her voice is a hiss. Fëanáro, wholly occupied by her navelgazing, had missed the shift in her expression, the darkening of her eyes and baring of her teeth. Nerdanel stands, and paces, and still Fëanáro kneels. “You don’t. You imagine that I did, you infer that I did, but you do not know because you were not here to witness it, and still you have not asked me why—”
“I presume it was for my sons,” says Fëanáro, on the floor. “I killed them.”
Nerdanel’s laugh is thin, lightheaded. “They killed themselves, more or less. Do you have another presumption?”
Somewhat cowed, Fëanáro shakes her head. She is untrained now in the opaque, dissembling sort of spoken conversation, after so long in silent Mandos. But it is likely the question is rhetorical only.
Standing, the sculptor considers her with a curled lip. The prince affects a softly bare expression—not exactly contrite, but inviting. Nerdanel scoffs. Strides forward, around the low table, and takes Fëanáro’s jaw roughly in her hand.
“I do not care for this perfection,” she says lowly, but her tone no longer bites. Her movement has adopted a certain somnambulance in this instant; she pins her own lower lip with her teeth and sucks. “They still think we want you pretty.”
“Pretty,” echoes Fëanáro, before Nerdanel grips her tightly enough to obstruct further speaking.
“The Valar,” the sculptor says, “ought to learn the appeal of a little rot.”
“Ah,” says the prince, or attempts to. Her tongue is thick. The bruising hold on her face, the gentle brace of knuckles against her throat, is pleasant. This, of course, is what she has wanted.
Nerdanel, she entreats, admittedly pretty with lidded eyes and winedark mouth, and finds the sculptor’s mind yet shut to her. Rejection curdles the scene. Fëanáro pulls, caught in her wife’s grip, but Nerdanel does not release her.
Istarnië , she pleads, but only halfheartedly. Is this not also what she had wanted?
Nerdanel dips her fingers in the ashes on the little table, closes her fist to paint her palm with them. The sculptor tilts Fëanáro’s face upward by her jaw and smears a thick line of ash down her cheek.
“Oh,” says Fëanáro, when the sculptor relinquishes her grip on her face, and again when she drags another line of pale dust over her mouth. Her lips part, and Nerdanel places two fingers on Fëanáro’s tongue and smears her insides with ash just as dispassionately as she had her outsides. Around a mouthful of fingers and burned, bitter myrrh, Fëanáro chokes: “ Istarnië —”
“Finwion.” The sculptor removes her fingers and wipes them clean on the prince’s brow. “Is this what you came for?”
“Penance, yes—” She coughs. Fëanáro remembers burning, flame devouring up her larynx from cremated lungs, the smell of her own boiling fat and blood, silver eyes turned rapidly to fluid from the incredible heat of a spontaneous star. The ash on her tongue is both like and unlike the memory. “ You— ”
Nerdanel kneels before her. “Then do it, Curufinwë,” she snarls, and the prince himself ignites.
*
She is feverish with repentance. She kisses the sculptor’s ankles, her shins, and is rebuked whenever she aims higher. Occasionally Nerdanel orders her to drink, and she does. The tannin-rich wine becomes more pleasant with each mouthful.
Her mouth still tastes of perfumed fire.
And the sculptor strokes her brow. It is not a tender touch, but an absent one, like one might stroke a pet. She does not address the prince except to make demands of her; she taps the space between her eyes to win her attention, and says, “Open.”
Promptly, Fëanaro tilts her head. Opens her mouth. Nerdanel does not place a cup to her lips, but pours a slosh of red wine into her mouth from a free distance, taking no care to avoid the staining of her trousers. Fëanáro starts at the wet spatter in her lap, has half a mind to recoil, and instead places a winestain of a kiss to Nerdanel’s shin. She is drunk. She is very warm. She trembles a bit, without theatre.
“Forgive me,” she says into linen, and Nerdanel only hums. Consonants unspool into vowels, form into color; the prince bumps her cheek against the sculptor’s knee and slurs petulantly, “At least let me put my mouth on you.”
“You would enjoy that,” says Nerdanel, in a manner that certainly means no.
“I am enjoying this,” Fëanáro mumbles into the soft edge of her kneecap. “Are you not?”
Silence, above. Fëanáro looks; Nerdanel’s expression is complicated, mostly illegible. There is a vague impression of grief in her mouth, which Fëanáro has certainly caused. She rushes on.
“Let me fix it,” she says, low and soothing. She shivers—Nerdanel also shivers. “Not my mouth. It has better uses. But my hands, my cunt—”
“Fëanáro,” interrupts Nerdanel, sounding strained. “Fëanáro, this is not penance.”
“Hurt me then.” She is climbing her lap. The matter is very urgent suddenly—Nerdanel is looking uncertain, and uncertainty brooks no lasting forgiveness at all and she suddenly needs absolution now as much as she needs fingers on her own cock. “Humiliate me—you know I hate a mess— please, Istarnië—”
“What is this for?”
“Anything.” Oh, her voice wobbles. First prince of the Ñoldor, and she begs for a fuck with a tremble in her throat, for forgiveness in a hand against her cheek. “Everything—for your home, your name, Light devoured which I refused to rekindle—” Even debased, she is cosmically arrogant. Nerdanel had liked that, more often than not.
She fumbles for the sculptor’s wrist, molds her fingers around the prince’s bobbing throat. She says, low so the sculptor can feel it in her palm: “How many times have you thought about this since, of bloodying my mouth?”
The sculptor inhales thickly. “You are a wicked little viper, prince,” she murmurs, and tightens her fingers.
It is not as if they have never played cruelty before. Still it tastes different when it is genuine, when it is a simpler, more vicious drive than an exciting preamble to dazed and contented petting. Nerdanel grips her throat with intention, blunted nails driven hard into flesh, and then releases her too soon. Fëanáro has no time even to choke.
She warbles, an involuntary sound cut short when Nerdanel shoves three fingers unceremoniously into her mouth. Now she gags, surprised, and saliva streams down Nerdanel’s wrist. Her wife shoves her off her lap; Fëanáro falls backwards, and her skull strikes the low table with a dull noise.
“Istarnië,” she gasps, vision blooming with fiery stars, and tastes ash. Her tongue crumbles into ember, her throat melts to a warped seal, and tears, impossibly cool against the flame, prick at her eyes.
But Nerdanel is occupied, shucking fabric from her waist, yanking away layers, and hurriedly Fëanáro pushes to her own knees and orchestrates her next fall into Nerdanel’s naked lap.
“Arrogant,” Nerdanel is hissing, alight in anger like she so rarely was in their youth. “Thousands of years, and you still have no notion of repentance, could not identify shame if it had you by the throat—”
Fëanáro cannot speak—the prince’s larynx is a mangled ruin of flame and smoke, flesh melted to flesh, and her mind is on fire—and so she puts her mouth to the sculptor’s cock and takes her to the root.
She is not hard in earnest yet—noble of her, since Fëanáro has been wet since Nerdanel first fed her cold ashes on the floor—and it is an easier mouthful than the prince remembers. Above her head Nerdanel gasps, and there is a sudden burst of sensation as her mind brushes up against the prince’s and withdraws, knife-shy.
“Oh,” says Nerdanel at the gentlest bump of teeth, a broad pass of tongue. One hand fumbles at the back of Fëanáro’s skull. Fëanáro catches the hand in one of her own and places it firmly against her hair. She braces her palms against Nerdanel’s thighs, and is for once gleeful at her new and not simply refurbished hröa, for her old shattered knee would already be buckling at the roughplay. This version of the prince feels delightfully youthful, even as her skin blisters and peels from the throes of star death, as the vitreous humor of her eyes ungels and weeps boiling down her cheeks.
“Fëanáro,” says Nerdanel, miserably, and sets to fucking her mouth.
It is a breathless affair. Nerdanel yanks her forward onto her cock, pulls her back by her hair. Her tear ducts have boiled dry, but her eyes stream regardless, and when she gags her wife does not release her. Fëanáro squeezes a handful of soft pale thigh with intention to break skin, but her nails are short and leave only tender crescents of ash across freckled flesh.
“This is what you had begged for?” The sculptor sounds unhappy. The prince’s mouth is full, but she hums an affirmative noise regardless. “This is why you brought your oversweet wine and got on your knees to plead my forgiveness? So I would—” She pants raggedly, reconsiders. “So I might fuck your face?”
The prince is desperately, violently pleased with the course of this parley. She nods, threatening teeth, and when the sculptor releases her hair, the prince takes her cock whole in her throat and noses at the curve of her belly. She can be sweet, if it wins her. Sweetness never did buy the sculptor’s affections in the past, but the prince—half-dispossessed, over-mythologized, unwilling to beg in any of her kindred’s homes—has little else to offer.
But her admission to such an intentional transaction has upset the sculptor, and Nerdanel pushes her off by her shoulders. Fëanáro sways backward, dizzy and sex-softened, then lurches forward to lick her erect cock clean. Sweetness less so than diligence had often won the day, and Fëanáro has always been famously diligent.
But Nerdanel shoves her again, yanks a knee up to her chest and a foot up to the chaise cushion to brace herself against further cocksucking. She is unfalteringly hard still, panting still, but her expression is stolid.
“Lie on the table,” she says, in a tone that brooks no argument. Still, Fëanáro lists, blinking like the sunblind. “Little prince. Do not now play the idiot. Get on the table.”
Her old weak knee does protest at the sudden shift in orientation, though the ache is likely psychosomatic only. Fëanáro climbs onto the table, which is too low and too small for a comfortable recline. Incense ash scatters across the surface; when Nerdanel pushes Fëanáro backward it clings to her voidblack hair.
“You are angry,” Fëanáro murmurs. Her tongue is thick; her mouth tastes of her wife. “For a new reason. Have I done something?”
Nerdanel’s laugh is high, near hysteric. She takes Fëanáro’s hips in her rough artist’s hands and hoists her further up the length of the little table, so her pelvis cants uncomfortably high and her head drops heavily over the table edge. Her mind’s brush against Fëanáro’s open and tumbling thoughts sears, cauterizes in its cursory disinterest. “I am not your wife, Finwion.”
Her neck aches, both from her previous endeavors and the new weight of her skull over empty air. “We are engaging in a marriage.”
Nerdanel rucks Fëanáro’s shirt, cups a breast perfunctorily in
one hand. Her other hand loosens Fëanáro’s trousers and yanks them with her smallclothes down her thighs. “Not so. I am inaugurating your tour of public penance.”
Nerdanel kneels, prising apart her legs to arrange herself between them. Then she places her mouth to the tender flesh of one inner thigh and bites.
Fëanáro bucks, whines at the sudden pain, and knocks the base of her skull against the table edge. “ Nerdanel ,” she gapes. The catch of blunt teeth shifts to a duller sensation, the suction of a bruise. “Nerdanel, please—”
“What, little prince?” Another bite, this one a nearly teasing nip higher than the last. “Do you want to fuck my mouth?”
She does, she does , but she knows that is not penance. Fëanáro places the flat of a hand to her mouth and stifles a whine, shakes her head furiously and miserably.
“Do not lie to me, Finwion.” A sharper bite, which almost certainly breaks skin. Nerdanel licks at the smarting bit of flesh, probes a heated spot with her tongue. Fëanáro imagines bright blood spilling down the wide expanse of her thigh, smeared hot and fragrant against heated bronze.“Tell me what you want.”
Teeth graze at the crease of the prince’s hip, bite at lighter, tenderer places. The sculptor pinches the sensitive flesh behind her knee, and the prince yelps, squirms, babbles in a tongue too arcane and too familiar for the current age and scene: “Your mouth , Istarnië, I want your mouth, please, please—”
“Hm.” A pointed exhale against her damp, bruising thighs, then another puff of cool air directly before her slick cunt. Fëanáro snaps her teeth. “How much of Tirion knew, do you wonder, how the prince would beg for his cunt eaten?”
“ Nerdanel—“
There is a strike against the wet meeting of her thighs, which makes her hips buck. Nerdanel tuts, and though she teases the mood is unmistakably vicious. She drags a desultory finger through the folds between Fëanáro’s legs. “How many, do you think, know he begs even now?”
“No one,” moans Fëanáro, grinding her hips fruitlessly downward. “No one knows, knew—”
“Now that is patently untrue.” She purses her lips and smacks a noisy, bracing kiss against her cunt. “You were never subtle, little prince. And once you were dead, and I fucked your brother’s wife as often as we met each other for tea—she asked, did you know?”
Do not be cruel. Her voice fails her. Nerdanel pinches at her hip.
“I am being astonishingly civil, prince.” A hum, a toothy nip at her warmed inner thigh. “Alternatively, I could eat you right before the Mindon, in your father’s square, and all of Tirion could watch you weep for me.”
“ Weep, ” Fëanáro scoffs, but weakly. Her head spins. Her fingers drum restlessly, desperately on the tabletop.
Says loveless Nerdanel, “Oh, beloved,” and puts her mouth on her.
The first rough pass of her wife’s tongue makes her flinch, skull cracking against the hard edge of the table. It is too much and too little agony to be teased, one of Nerdanel’s hands splayed over her freshly unscarred belly, another parting her lips wide for the ministrations of her wife’s mouth. Two of Nerdanel’s fingers crook inside her, filling the hot space beneath her tongue, and still. Fëanáro shudders easily, makes a mournful sound.
But Nerdanel fucks her with a slow rhythm at her fingers and a lascivious hunger to her mouth. She presses a kiss to the prince’s smaller, tender cock and sucks at it until Fëanáro’s voice climbs high. Her free hand abandons her belly and roams: the damp skin beneath her heaving chest, the slick small of her back, the shallow curve of her ass. Fëanáro wrings her own hands, shoves fingers in her mouth to scrape charred flesh off her tongue, snags Nerdanel by the point of an ear and does not ride her face but tears a hand through her russet hair, inconsolable. Then the sculptor abandons her cock, bites hard instead into her hipbone, and the prince writhes, raves, salivates at the corners of her heat-blistered lips.
Fëanáro loses two releases in this manner, grasping helplessly for climax as Nerdanel denies her, withdrawing instead to wipe sticky fluids from her fingers against Fëanáro’s belly. She murmurs things, not quite encouraging her but outlining her expectations: Fëanáro will not touch her hair, Fëanáro will make no demands of her, Fëanáro will under no circumstances come on her mouth. She listens well to the sculptor in bed, does she not, and is everything not better when she does? No rewards are offered except the pleasure of obeisance, no praise except that she is much easier to fuck when she is pliant.
By the third refusal, the prince’s cunt gapes, its sheath of muscle fluttering, and she opens her mouth and makes a ragged sound not unlike a breathless sob.
And there is a weight against her trembling thigh; the sculptor lays her head there and regards her patiently. When the prince ceases at last to shake, the sculptor exhales. Murmurs: “I will not bloody your mouth, little prince.”
The prince swallows air greedily. Her skull is too heavy to lift again, her eyes too unfocused to look at the sculptor. She laughs. “You would like to.”
“Do not assume.” Sharply, she says it. The prince is chastised. “Perhaps I’d like for the prince to never bleed again. Perhaps I’d like him to while away a pretty captive existence in the city of gods he despises, with no injury to flavor his discontent. Perhaps I’d like you miserable with mundanity, Finwion.”
The proposal is simple, disconcerting. The prince’s mouth twists grievously. “Perhaps,” she says at last, quietly, “perhaps you would like to keep me.”
“No.” The sculptor traces protruding bone in the prince’s unshattered knee with a fingertip. “No, I do not imagine I would.”
The grief is not unexpected, no matter how unpleasant. Still, the prince must take a moment to tamp the ash on her tongue. She swallows. “Please—fuck me, then.”
It takes little convincing. Nerdanel reapplies her attention to her cunt, licks into warmth like one would a wantonly begging mouth. Fëanáro quakes.
A scene expands around her; she is too dizzy to recognize at first the sculpture and topiary of Finwë’s estate garden, the marble slab altar upon which the king made pretty and mournful offerings to Estë until his remarriage. Her wife eats her upon it, and when she notes this Fëanáro shudders.
“Oh,” she says, or thinks, and on. “ Istarnië—”
A murmur goes up around them. The sound is neither Fëanáro nor her wife, a susurration of mild distaste in varied court language. She has an audience. Nerdanel fucks the prince before his dead father’s retinue.
Fëanáro clutches at Nerdanel’s shoulders, cannot decide whether to yank her closer or shove her away. In her periphery she identifies the wretched busybodies of Námo’s Maiar, clucking behind opaque black veils and waving long hands in dismay. Nerdanel massages her cock, which makes her whine, spasm and then attempt halfheartedly to scramble up the altar, away from her relentless wife. Nerdanel does not restrain her, but cups a hip in one hand, thumbs repetitive circular shapes against jutting bone, and her panic begins to deflate.
Relax, the gesture soothes. Was this not offered in apology? Is this not deserved?
And it is deserved, and in the light of such a truth it becomes almost pleasant. Fëanáro knows she is submitting, softening to her wife’s will, and the familiarity of such a sensation warms her. They had played games like these in their youth, in love, and the terms are not so different in penance. The prince is good for the sculptor, and the sculptor dictates the prince’s rewards.
“There,” says Nerdanel softly, withdrawing from between her thighs. Her full mouth and her chin are slick. Fëanáro remembers licking her face clean after such recreations and secretly imagines doing so now before their audience, as if such a service would be any more obscene than the current tableau. Meanwhile Nerdanel does not cease her ministrations with her fingers, adding a third in absence of her mouth, seeming content to watch Fëanáro writhe. It is agony, this attention, and nevertheless she craves nothing more than to be swallowed whole. “Is this not better, and worse, than a bloodied mouth?”
Yes , thinks Fëanáro, wails Fëanáro. Please . She thrashes her head and feels her cheek land flush against the cool marble of the altar. Her vision is gauzy, even as she meets the pale eyes of Olwë amidst the press of the retinue and watches his mouth contort in distaste.
The fourth time she is denied climax, the prince begins to cry.
It is a quiet little weeping—awash in sensation and mad with longing, Fëanáro has little energy to divert for the great wracking sobs of effective dramatics. She cannot discern if the sculptor has noticed. Her thoughts are a spill of Vána’s festival wine, long treated as the catalyst for the heretical carnalities of such occasions, and she wishes to please. Surely, she thinks, her tears will please.
“Oh, beloved,” murmurs Nerdanel. Her face, suddenly, is close. A curtain of her reddish hair obscures the collected witnesses, conceals Fëanáro briefly, kindly, from their assorted voyeurs. Nerdanel kisses her brow, and Fëanáro’s begging mouth gapes, and then Nerdanel licks a broad stripe up her cheek and drinks her tears. “Is this penitent weeping?”
She could not lie even if she had the cognitive strength to do so. “No,” gasps the prince. Nerdanel nods.
“A shame,” she says, and the pressure on her hips alerts Fëanáro to her rising. Her legs tremble. Her mouth works with voiceless pleading, a litany of fuck me s that would put the most zealous of Irmo’s revellers to shame. Her mind is aflame: she would give land, jewels, titles for release, and Nerdanel does not seem to care.
Her wife stands above her, not among the voyeurs but yet at a distance insurmountable. Her untouchable hair is wild, the scarf which had restrained it lost to desperate fantasy, and her mouth still shines with wetness from Fëanáro’s cunt. Her expression is dispassionate, even as she strokes her own cock to weeping over Fëanáro’s prostrate body.
But her voice wavers slightly, when she speaks. “I think you should beg for our witnesses, little prince,” and among the rustle of Tirion and Alqualondë’s courtiers there rises a hiss. Fëanáro’s mouth fills with saliva; her eyes stream.
“ Please ,” obeys Fëanáro, eagerly. She watches the sculptor’s cock, pink and pretty in her tightening fist, and the flood comes desperately. Please, Istarnië, make me a mess. On my face, beloved, I want it on my face—
The line, impossibly, must surprise. The sculptor’s pace falters, and a genuine sound falls from her lips. The nature of this sound is wounded, and Fëanáro’s hand flies in a base need to comfort that which is beloved, twining her fingers with those of Nerdanel’s loose hand beside her cheek. She turns her face to kiss the sculptor’s wrist and is thwarted by the distance and the heaviness of her skull, the impossibility of tugging her forward against the altar from such an angle. Her own mouth twists in grief.
It is humiliating, objectively. Her face is warm with blood not from the pleading but from being watched, naked and weeping, from the knowledge that the lady Eärwen—who had disliked the prince even before she ordered a slaughter of her fishermen and her pearl divers—has now witnessed the prince beg for spend in her hair.
But her mind is gentled by submission, and the humiliation registers only as a pleasant ache in her chest. And the sculptor does her a kindness, to deign to touch her as she is. And the prince still weeps, if only because her sculptor has requested it, if only because she aches, if only because it is the sweetest thing the prince can still do.
Blearily she watches the sculptor fuck her hand, and she is unoffended when the sculptor shakes the prince’s fingers from her own and withdraws the affectionate contact. This is only fair. This version of the prince craves so dearly a tenderness that the sculptor’s simplest recourse is to deny her it. Fresh, nearly repentant tears sluice down her cheeks.
And the sculptor sees them. The prince knows it from the bright foreign shock in her mind, a swell of another not-quite-remorse that puzzles her before she recognizes that it is not her own. Aggrieved, gasping, the sculptor says, Close your eyes , and Fëanáro does.
Nerdanel makes a pretty sound, of the sort that heats Fëanáro’s ears and turns her gut. It is almost a rattling sob, which awakens the need once more to soothe , and then warmth ribbons against Fëanáro’s cheeks, onto her brow, into her hair. She opens her mouth to the spatter, tastes the bitterness of spend on her lips and tongue and the inside of her teeth, and the sound she makes is also a sob, but a pleasant one, a desirous one, mournful only of her own neglected pleasure.
“ Fëanáro,” says Nerdanel, gasps Nerdanel, like she has just come all over the prince’s high cheekbones and cruel mouth, and like she has enjoyed it. There is a broad pressure on her cheek; Nerdanel smears wetness away from her eyes, into her hair, and Fëanáro makes a wordless noise of protest.
She is still weeping. Her chest heaves, and she is a filthy mess, and Eärwen watches with cool disgust the proceedings, the whoring of a crown prince turned high king turned deserving inferno, and Fëanáro could boil alive. She is, perhaps, boiling alive. Her eyes are jelly, liquid, evaporated steam. Weakly, she tugs at Nerdanel’s wrist, suggests an alternate direction for the sculptor’s hand, and blessedly Nerdanel obliges.
The sculptor smears come over her lips, coaxes open her teeth and coats her tongue, paints the roof of her mouth. Her hand is too large for this stretch of the prince’s jaw; Fëanáro’s face is slack, but even so she chokes when Nerdanel forces two fingers deeper to her throat.
Istarnië, she says, dizzily, aloud or not. Fire roars in her ears. Her eyes have melted entirely; she cannot see. Istarnië, Istarnië, Istarnië—
Her right leg jumps at sudden contact: she is being touched, tenderly, at her old wrecked knee. There is no wound there now, for this body has never been wounded at all. But someone—Nerdanel, presumably—is stroking her kneecap, massaging gently above her shin. Fëanáro’s mouth is open. It is likely she moans.
Pretty , muses Nerdanel, which surely does make her moan, vain and highly flatterable as she is. A lovely little pyre.
Ah, so she is burning then. Fëanáro could not tell. She turns her head, sees nothing but reddish dark, and pleads fuck me, fuck me, fuck me—
Ah, it is a bit late for that , says Nerdanel, as Fëanáro thrashes weakly on the altar. But I might use my hand.
“Yes,” she gasps, perhaps aloud. “Please, your hand—”
They have an audience; Fëanáro has not forgotten it. She does not care, presently, as her wife straddles her on the marble slab and shoves three fingers into her cunt, leans over her torso and bites hard into her left breast. Nerdanel need hardly touch her cock—the one she chewed so much cherry root for, the one which she made devotionals of a different kind for at this altar to Estë in her youth—before she is seized by trembling, a whole-body convulsion that arches her spine and throws back her head, and she sobs.
And she immolates.
*
When he has finished cremating, the prince opens his eyes, and he can see that there is no garden and no altar, and that he and the sculptor are alone. The sculptor has retreated, redressed and folded herself neatly onto the couch with a new glass of wine. She gestures with something bright and flimsy: silk, folded and dampened in her hand.
“For your face,” she says, and though the fabric is much too fine to wipe the spend gone tacky at her brow and her mouth, Fëanáro accepts the proffered thing wordlessly. Her limbs are very heavy. Her head spins.
“Nerdanel,” she says, when she has cleaned her face. Her hair is sticky, and she pins it behind oversensitive, twitching ears. “I apologize.”
“You do,” agrees Nerdanel, blandly. She looks beautiful, bright from sex, cruel with regret. “I do not accept your apology.”
Fëanáro nods. This is fair, though it hurts her—it is fair because it hurts her, truthfully, and she is not quite so proud that she cannot acknowledge this—and so she does not argue. She says, “May I kiss your mouth?”
Openly, Nerdanel considers this. While she does Fëanáro hauls herself upright on the table (she anticipates bodily protests, but her charred bones are beyond discomfort) and sways. Nerdanel offers her a cup, which Fëanáro drinks from eagerly long before she identifies the contents as plain water. The brush of their hands against the ceramic, as neutral a contact as it is, feels intimate and obscene.
“You may not kiss my mouth,” decides Nerdanel, softly, and then: “There is still ash on your face.”
Concomitant of the burning. Fëanáro makes no move to scrub it away. There is something of the old acid in her tone when she speaks next—for she is insolent, particularly when humiliated, especially once abandoned.
“Was this the appeal of a little rot? To fuck your dead wife filthy, but feel noble in doing it?” Her teeth are bared. She has always been desperate, always particularly devastated by a comedown. “Is the appeal in the abasement, beloved? In my deserving it?”
“Of course not,” says Nerdanel, simply. “You deserve nothing from me, Fëanáro.”
Nerdanel stands, setting aside her glass and stepping over the prince’s discarded clothing. She bends gracefully at the waist and meets Fëanáro’s eyes, too close for dispassion. Their noses brush; their lips do not. Nerdanel smells of wine, smoke, and the prince’s slickened cunt.
“And the abasement is your pleasure, not mine.”
“Then what is your pleasure, beloved wife? Because surely it is not to fuck your prince in pity and then condemn him after—” Oh, she is fragile. She always has been, after a good fuck. If she is not careful, she may begin to grovel again.
Nerdanel only considers her quietly, not particularly hatefully. There is little condemnation in her expression when she smoothes the prince’s dark hair away from her brow and places a soft, dry kiss between her eyes.
“I think, beloved,” the sculptor murmurs, as the prince begins again to tremble, and she may never stop, “that my pleasure is in watching the prince burn.”
“A fruitful marriage you have rekindled then, for all your talk of penance,” snarls the prince, and silently she pleads, keep me, keep me, beloved—
The sculptor traces a finger against her unbloodied lip. Her expression is loveless, not cruel. But her mind remains closed to the prince, and she says nothing at all.
She will turn the prince loose, devastated and trembling as she is. Perhaps there is satisfaction in her dismantling, vindication in the refusal to put her back together before putting her out. The prince cannot be sure—free from the diversion of sex, she is heatsick, dizzy, quite unwell. Reason and consequence are alien to her: she wants to be sweet, and to be treated sweetly in return.
But the prince is dead ember, smoldering ash. The sculptor will not keep her tonight, sweetly or otherwise, for there is nothing left to burn.