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Irissë has followed the deer for hours, and she knows what she is following. She has ridden with Oromë's hunt enough to know his sister, who runs with them or before them often enough. She knows she is being led, and she knows her quarry could escape her any time it chose, leave the lesser deer behind and speed further and faster into the wild than Irissë would have any chance of following. And yet, on and on they go, and the gleam of white through the shadow of the wood beckons Irissë ever on.
She had companions on the hunt, but all of them fell behind her long ago. She is alone, herself and her horse and her bow, and always ahead of her, the flashing tails of the retreating herd, and, every so often, a bright gleam in the shadow, the tall white doe that leads them.
They break out of the trees, and on the wide open heath she sees the white doe outlined against the sky, poised on top of a little ridge, and Irissë breathes, and nocks an arrow to her bowstring, and draws it back to her ear, and whispers a prayer, and releases.
The doe founders, blood blossoming at her breast, clearly visible even from a distance against the white of her coat.
When she reaches her quarry, the doe is still alive, lying on the ground with head thrown back, panting, blood pooling around her in the dirt, where Irissë's arrow juts toward the sky.
She looks up at Irissë with wide open eyes, and in them there is no trace of fear, only a deep, welcoming ecstasy. Irissë kneels beside her, blood and mud soaking into her skirts, staining deep, and looks into the doe's eye, a puddle of blues and purples around the slit of the pupil that is no normal deer's eye, but then she knew already that this was no normal deer. She draws her knife, and holds that gaze reverently as she slices the blade across the deer's throat.
Blood spurts, spatters Irissë, and there is a shimmering to the air, and what lies before her is no less a deer, but at the same time, is a woman, bleeding light from her chest and throat, smiling blissfully up at Irissë. Nessa reaches out, draws Irissë's hand to her, presses it to the gash at her throat, and Irissë feels blood over her fingers, feels smooth unbroken flesh. Drags it down her chest, and Irissë feels fingers locked over hers, and beneath her palm a deer's sternum, sweat-clogged hair, the last failing stagger of a heart, and at the same time, the smooth soft curve of a breast, and no heart beats below it because its owner needs no heart to live.
Irissë leans down and kisses Nessa on the mouth, and her lips are warm.
"Claim your kill, if you would have me," the Valië whispers, and Irissë, thrilling to her, obeys.
When they are done, Irissë's damp and filthy dress is long discarded, and she reaches with trepidation to try and re-dress, not relishing the thought of the long trip home in it. Nessa stops her with a hand on the arm, pulls Irissë to her; and kisses her.
What drapes itself around Irissë then is pulled from the fabric of everything around them, woven together from leaf and air and ground and from Nessa herself, a thought from the mind of one of those who sang the world into being, reweaving a little part of it into a fabric that feels as if it has always been cloth, has never been anything but cloth, could never be anything else.
Irissë looks down at herself as Nessa breaks the kiss, brushes her hands over her sudden, white skirts, the simple elegance of them in mystified wonder. "I - "
"A token," Nessa says, smiling.
Irissë wears the white shift, smooth and light as fine silk against her skin (and yet, she would never mistake it for silk, or for any other fabric woven by hand and loom), almost always, after that.
It sits as well under carefully layered brocade and velvet, peeking through slashed sleeves, as with boots and hard-wearing riding gear, a falconry glove or an archer's arm-guard. With jewels and lace and trailing silver jewellery, and her hair pinned in careful, artful swoops.
Irissë is what she is, always, and what she is is - stainless, white, beloved, free. The whisper against her skin reminds her always of everything that she is, that she is light and wind and dancing feet as much as she is courtly grace. It makes it easier, that knowledge, the tangible reminder of it, to be all the versions of herself she can.
She rides out to hunt, and she fights through bracken and bushes with her friends and her cousins, and she shoves Tyelkormo in the mud as if they are children still, and if as she does her hair tangles and her face is red and mud-smeared, still she can splash herself with water and finger-comb her curls from her face, and be presentable, bear herself like a noble lady. Nessa's gift is always unmarred - no stains cling to it, nothing tears it. Blood, or mud, or spilt wine, and still, she can always peel away a layer and be spotless. And in her grandfather's court, where she still feels, all too often, like an awkward, clumsy child, it reminds her of the grace she knows is hers, until she can move through the intricate, stately steps of the formal dances and the political manoeuvering with all the confidence that she has on horseback or dancing barefoot on the grass, and she does not feel the childish urge to run for the woods and the wild, because she carries them with her.
Gradually, her whole wardrobe becomes white. Even if she does not wear Nessa's dress, she is, perhaps, always wearing it.
She wears nothing but the white dress when she runs with her lady; her hair unbound in the wind. Sometimes, Nessa runs with all her companions, a wild dancing band of them, and sometimes, the sweetest times, with one alone.
Nessa runs untiring, fleeter than the deer, swift and light as the wind, and to be her companion is to be tireless as well; Irissë runs further and faster in her wake than she could ever run alone. The miles fall away behind them, and Irissë's heart is pounding behind her ribs, her breath harsh in her throat, the muscles of her legs burning - burning, but never failing, only the sweet welcome burn of effort rewarded, the fierce wild joy of movement incarnate. When they reach her chosen stopping-point, Nessa, of course, is not even breathing hard, because she does not need to breathe. Irissë lets herself fall to the soft green sward, and lies there panting.
Nessa laughs and kneels over her, and brushes her thumb over Irissë's lower lip, traces down the line of her throat where Irisse's pulse beats hard and rapid below the skin. One fine brown fingertip smears through the sweat glistening on Irissë's collarbone, clinging to her skin though it never stains her gown. Nessa's hand glides downward, and the dress falls away like a thought, parting before the hand and mind that shaped it, so that when the heel of Nessa's hand comes to rest low by Irissë's sternum, it is the bare skin above the pounding of Irissë's heart that she touches, no barrier between them as her fingers sweep to cup the underside of Irissë's breast. Irissë's panting breath catches in her throat. She had just begun to steady the heaving of her chest into a controlled rhythm, and now she loses it, gasping as she arches up into Nessa's caress.
Nessa's form today is almost all Elda - two hands, two legs, flowing hair that falls all around both of them. She is, if anything, a little shorter than Irissë. But it is impossible to forget what she is, and impossible to keep the thrill of the knowledge from twisting and settling low and hot in Irissë's belly.
Nessa gazes down at her, doe-eyed - huge, dark deer eyes, with dark, fluttering eyelashes. She smiles, and lowers her mouth to Irissë's naked body, laps the salt sweat from the plane of her chest above her breasts, licks up her throat, and presses a kiss against the leaping pulse in her neck, racing now from more than the aftermath of effort. Irissë reaches up for her, and Nessa, gentle but implacable, wraps a hand around her wrist and pins it to the grass.
Irissë's thighs fall open, her hips twitching upwards without any instruction from her, and Nessa laughs and shifts to set one of her own firm, tight-muscled thighs between Irissë's legs, bearing her weight down against her, sliding slowly back and forth as Irissë bucks up against her.
"Beautiful girl," says the most beautiful woman Irissë has ever known, who is not a woman at all, who is so much more than that, who is bare feet on green grass and the little wild flowers in the woodlands, who is the flashing leap of the deer and the leap of the hare from cover, who is bent over her with the light of the Mingling dancing in her russet-dappled hair. Irissë lets her head tilt back, her eyes drifting closed, her mouth softly open.
"My own girl," Nessa murmurs, her thumb brushing gently, achingly, over the tender skin of the inside of Irissë's wrist where she holds it pinned to the soft sward, and closes her mouth over Irissë's nipple, flicks her tongue against it as Irissë moans.
On the ice, they wear as many layers of the clothes they have packed as they can; shuffling along swathed into unrecognisable heaps of their own and each others' garments. They are all wearing a lot of both, everyone borrowing larger garments to layer over their own. Irissë is wearing one of Arakáno's tunics over her own clothes, because it is large enough to fit her even with several of her thickest dresses layered under it, and Arakáno is wearing one of Turukáno's over his own. Turukáno himself, taller and broader than anyone else, so that no clothes will fit him but his own, bundles himself in layers of cloaks and furs whenever they stop to rest.
Closest to her skin, Irissë wears Nessa's white dress, and perhaps it is only her imagination, but it warms her as much as the heaviest wool over it. The warmth of her own breath freezes into sparkling crystals of frost in the scarf in front of her face as she walks; her limbs are awkward and stiff with cold and bulky clothing, and yet - she is wrapped in her brothers' clothes and their care, and her friends and her cousins in hers, and perhaps, too, she still carries some shred of Nessa's favour with her, for all Námo's words of doom. Something of the Valar's favour, still with her, even in the harsh, unforgiving dead white of the Ice beneath the stars, a softer, cleaner, welcoming whiteness.
From the shores of Lake Mithrim, in the warm sunlight of the first Spring of the world, she rides out to hunt. The green grass beneath her horse's hooves feels like a miracle, and so does riding at all, after endless years of trudging. The horses came from the southern camp, and Irissë would have forgiven her cousins much for that. More than enough to meet them in the hills beyond the lake, to bring only those companions who are of like mind enough to meet Turko, Pityo, Telvo, and their folk there and say nothing when they return. To go out into the wild in train, as they did in the hills and woods of Aman, and to find the joy of it again, of horse and hawk and hound and of the rush of the chase and the triumph of the catch. Those of them, from both camps, who still wear the trophies of Oromë's hunt about their necks or in their hair, who touch them sometimes and remember, are few, but there are enough of them that this feels right.
Irissë wears her white dress, and her hair is braided with jewels and silver wire, but with bone and antler too, and she thinks - here, too, there is something of them, the Valar who she and her companions have loved. Who, perhaps, they might dare to dream could love them still.
They ride far and fast, out into the hills, and there, grazing in an upland meadow among scattered trees, a herd of deer crop the green, green grass. Among them, a white doe raises her head. Irissë has eyes only for her, even as her companions pick out the great red stag whose rack of splendid antlers are raised proudly to the blue - blue! Such a colour for the sky! Such a new world, with such colours in it!
She draws her bowstring back to her ear, whispers something that is half a prayer, half a plea, half a yearning for a vanished past and half an exultation in the glorious sunlit present, and looses.
Eöl sits behind her and unbraids her hair for her, his deft craftsman's fingers swift and sure as he sends it cascading down around her shoulders, loose and unadorned, and sinks his hands into it.
He has her naked and shuddering in his bed, and when she wakes from her exhausted sleep, some discreet servant must have come in the night to take their discarded clothes to the laundry, because there are fresh garments laid out for her. White linen, cut in the Sindar style, and once she is dressed, and he has done her hair to match, she looks at herself in the mirror, and sees - her husband's wife.
It is more days than Aredhel likes to admit to herself before she notices that, though there is a wardrobe full of dresses for her, none of the clothes she wore when she came to Nan Elmoth ever seem to make their way there, and neither does she ever see any of her jewelry or her hair ornaments again - not her Hunt tokens, not the earrings that Findekáno gave her once in Tirion, not the pendant she has worn at her throat since her mother put it around her neck on the first begetting-day she can remember. None of it.
He makes her new ornaments, silver accented with jet and galvorn, and so, later, does her son, when his father begins to teach him the art of the forge.
By the time Aredhel and Maeglin reach Gondolin, their clothes are worn and travel-stained. There are clean clothes in her old rooms, clothes she has not worn for decades now, alien under her fingers as she rifles through the chest, tries to remember her old wardrobe.
Freshly bathed and with the long wet rope of her hair combed and twisted into a simple braid, she sits in nothing but a chemise and tries to understand why everything feels wrong. Everything is alien, nothing sits quite right, her fingers fumble with buttons and laces, and somehow everything clashes. It has not been so long since she wore these dresses, surely? She is not such a different person? So why does everything look and feel wrong against her skin - the weight is wrong, the texture off, the drape somehow not right. The belt too tight, the bodice too heavy, the neckline constricting, the skirt hanging wrong.
Nothing is like what she has worn for years in Nan Elmoth, but all of it should be familiar. And she knows each garment she tries, and yet, when she tries to clothe herself in them again, she feels as if she is dressing up in some stranger's ill-fitting clothing. Something is missing, a gap that makes dressing feel like trying to eat with a missing tooth, something as close to her as her own skin.
Perhaps it is her own skin that is wrong, she thinks, a little hysterically, perhaps she never will fit back in here, perhaps Irissë, Ar-Feiniel, the White Lady of the Noldor, sloughed her skin like a snake somewhere in the dark woods, and Aredhel cannot climb back into it.
Her blood soaks red through the shoulder of her dress, and she thinks, oh, that's what was wrong, distant and calm. The stain will set, she knows, will never wash out, and it is wrong, wrong, wrong, and that is what she has lost, the white dress that never stained, the pure clean white she carried with her from Aman, her lady's favour.
The cloth that is only cloth sticks to her skin as the blood clots, and it stings as hands peel it away from her, baring her shoulder and collarbone to the air as they prod and examine and she is far, far away, drifting further and further. She feels as if she is lost in some dark wood, and as if the vaulted stone of the roof above her is pressing down to crush her, and as if the earth is coming up to swallow her, and she cannot run, she is pinned to her body as it fades, she is locked to stillness, and the darkness that creeps up from the corners to embrace her and hold her tight and still and unknowing in its cold embrace is the colour of clotting blood until it fades to grey.
In the endless grey halls, her bodiless spirit paces endlessly, like a trapped animal. She could gnaw her own limb off to break free of it, if she had limbs to gnaw.
Everywhere she turns, there are walls upon walls, and she cannot keep herself from turning. The Halls of Mandos may be many things, she has heard, a place of waiting, a place of healing, a place of contemplation. A place of stillness. A prison, a tomb, a cage.
She has never been good at waiting, or at stillness. The purest moments of contemplation, of insight, have always come for her in motion. Those moments when everything integrates, for a moment, when things seem pure and clear and right, when the world makes sense to her and she makes sense to herself - they have never come to her in stillness. They have come to her in her body and at speed, have come with the pounding of feet at the run, the pumping of her heart at work, the burn of muscles, and the wind in her hair. She does not know how to think still and bodiless, and so she paces and finds nothing, not even herself, only the twisting knot of black feelings in what is not her gut because she has no gut, and which she cannot pull out of herself or run from because her self is not all here and there is nowhere to run.
She paces, and winds herself tighter and tighter into herself.
Nessa's feet are as light on the cold stone of Mandos as they ever are on the sun-warmed grass beyond the walls, but the stones are hard and unforgiving beneath her. She does not belong here; nothing like her does.
It's why she has come.
Námo's attention turns to her as she enters his halls, and she feels it on her like a weight. She always does - sometimes welcome, sometimes not, but even for one of his own kind, the Doomsman's gaze lies heavy. And on her more than most, for Nessa is a being of the moment, of change and swift motion, and Námo of the long, slow march to a future already laid out in stone. In his regard she feels the closing of possibilities, the narrowing of the open fields before her to a narrow road.
She steps, carefully, onto it.
"She is not made for your halls," she says - not with words, but in the thought between them, as the Valar may, and it sits in the space between them, and they both know of whom she speaks.
"And yet, here they shall come, all her people," he replies. "You know their Doom - by weapon, by torment, by grief, they shall come to me, and they shall abide here, yearn as they may. Restless she may be, but I do not promise rest to those who do not seek it, and yet neither may they depart."
"Little pity they shall find, you said."
"I did,"
"Then know, Námo, I am not asking that you pity her. And neither do I offer her pity. I am telling you, she does not belong here: she is not yours. She is mine."
She raises her gaze to meet his, and knows he sees in her the mirror of what she sees in him: she is joy in life where he is grim death, and they will never be able to comprehend each other, but respect does not require understanding.
"Yours?"
"Mine. A maiden in my train since she was a girl, and I knew her then and I know her now; my servant and my sister, and it is as her mistress I ask for her."
Outside the gates of Mandos, the hillside slopes down gently into the quiet woods below. Clothed in new flesh, and in the wispy colourless robes that she was given with it, which feel like wearing fog, Aredhel steps outside. The sky overhead is overcast, clouds hiding the shape of the lowering Sun, so that the cool grey light seems sourceless, all the shadows soft and smudged and vague, and the spread of countryside below looks as it always did.
In bare feet that feel like ill-fitting shoes, moving as if in a dream, she drifts down the hill. She has no destination yet in mind except away, away from that maze of cold stone.
Slowly, she picks up speed, until she is running down the hillside, a steady, loping, ground-eating run at a pace that she can hold for mile after mile. She falls into rhythms, her breathing, the fall of feet on earth, the pounding of her heart, and falls into her body, away from the twisting, tangling knots of her spiralling thoughts. Left unheeded, they begin, gradually, to relax their stranglehold on her.
The evening shadows creep in, the trees of the woodland she is running through black overhead, blocking out the stars where they glint through the thinning clouds. The Moon has risen, and close and low, he sends brilliant white glints through the trees, limning the trunks silver.
Keeping pace with her, on the edge of sight, Aredhel thinks she sees a pale glint flitting through the dark trees, the leaping flash of a light-footed runner, pale and indistinct in the wood.
She does not know who or what is following her, nor how long they have been doing so, but the shapes that flit through the trees surely are following her.
She speeds up.
Like the hounds are after her, Aredhel runs, stumbling now down a slope, tripping over a fallen branch hidden in a drift of leaf-litter she should have leapt smoothly over. Her breath is coming ragged suddenly, as she slides from the meditative pace of simple motion to the headlong panicked scramble of flight; running from instead of merely running. Unthinking fear catches and pulls tight in her stomach.
She surges down the hillside, leaps a little stream, and scrambles up the far bank. Breaking out of the trees that crowd the banks into a wide open field, bathed in silver moonlight, she turns to look back. A herd of fallow deer pause at the edge of the trees, dark eyes and fine bones shadows against the shadows, dappled flanks a grey murmur in the moonlight. At their centre, a great white hind, as tall at the shoulder as Aredhel's full height, takes a single step out from the trees.
Aredhel knows her, deep in her bones. Yearns for her, so deeply and sharply that it feels like a physical tug, like a hook beneath her breastbone.
She bolts like a startled hare.
She comes, in the end, to Tirion; to her mother's house. Four hundred years in Beleriand, and everything there was changed beyond recognition, but the same centuries lie light on the streets here. There are new buildings among the old ones - a plaza remodelled, an old house demolished for a garden, a school built where a park was - but the bones of the city are unchanged. She pads down streets where her feet know every cobble, and it is as if she is stepping back into her girlhood.
But she is no longer that girl, and she feels herself a stranger here, more than she ever did in places she has never been before, more than she ever did in the woods and wilds, more than she did even with her husband, who loathed her kin and would not hear her speak a word of her cradle-tongue.
But her mother's arms are still her mother's arms, and when Anairë gasps at the sight of her, leaps forward across the courtyard to the gate to fling her arms around her daughter, Aredhel clings to her, and with her face buried deep in her mother's hair, believes for a moment that she might know what it is to be home.
It is strangely hard to venture out of her mother's house, once she is there. It is not her husband's shrouded woods, it is not her brother's guarded city - she can and should go out, there is all of Aman beyond the gates, and Aredhel shrinks from it. She feels, somehow clumsy, dirty, too large for everything, as if with her presence she will bruise and soil all the clean places of her memory.
There are a few of her old friends and companions here, who try to draw her out with them once they hear she is returned; but she does not make it easy for them. She feels the distance between them like a plate of thick glass, and all her responses come slow and awkward, and then she will curse herself in hindsight, remembering how fluent she used to be in all the dances of courtesy and friendship. How surely she still could be, were she not locked away from herself like this. But she cannot find her way out.
She is drawn out, finally, to a hunting party - and there she does find again a glimpse of her old self, and she hungers for it at the same time she finds she fears it: like a flame that beckons as it burns.
She hunts again with Orome's train, and there is a fierce and brittle delight in it. In the chase and the victory, and she thinks - this is not how she used to feel, not how she should feel, but she doesn't want to question it too much, because she is grateful to feel anything. She feels powerful, in the hunt and the kill, and she feels safe. To be the predator and not the prey, not to be caught, not to be trapped and held, not to be turned at bay, not to have the dart at last pierce her breast and know herself bested, broken.
She does not wear white. In browns and green drabs she rides into the woods; in blues and greys she walks the streets of Tirion; she vanishes herself into the background of the world she is no longer sure how to claim her place in.
The Huntsman comes to her, and he asks: why have you not gone to my sister? Were you not her maiden? You rode with me, but you were never mine alone.
And Aredhel says, and only in saying it knows that it is what was in her heart, eating it out like the black in an apple core: "Would she have me, still?"
Oromë laughs, sharp and sudden, and cuffs her about the head, knocking loose one of the braids she has wound around her head in a tight, neat crown. It tumbles loose across the deep green wool of her riding habit.
"Go to her."
Nessa does not make Aredhel chase her down, and Aredhel is grateful. She does not think she could have brought herself to.
So many times she had done so, with all the unthinking, ingenious confidence of youth that makes it as possible to accept the miraculous as its due, because the tight boundaries of the possible have not yet been too closely felt. When she was younger, a child of Aman who had never known any other life, it was an honour and a delight to run and to dance with, or to serve at the table of one of the Powers, but it was a part of her life. Now, it seems so far distant from what she has become and what she has seen, after centuries of exile, of the narrowing of her world even in the wide new lands she had dreamed of, that she cannot quite comprehend that should ever have dared to take it so lightly. That she might be permitted to pursue and to catch, that she should have a place in that bright presence.
So she does not set out to pursue, neither as a hunter nor as a lover. She comes to petition, as she might have - as she has done - before her brother in Gondolin beyond the sea. As a subject to her liege, to ask for an audience.
The grass in the glade she comes to is short, and soft, a mossy lawn of brilliant green velvet, sprinkled with white flowers like stars. It is one she knows well, where she often came in those long-ago days, where Nessa was often known to dance: not one of the deeper, more secret places where the same was true, but to which few presumed to come uninvited. A place where any, favoured or not, initiated or not into the service of the Valië, might hope to at least glimpse the bright dancer.
Aredhel kneels there, her eyes cast downwards, and she prays. She pours water from the silver ewer she brought with her onto the grass, a ritual motion, and she speaks aloud to the waiting woodlands the words she said first a lifetime ago - the ritual supplication, the plea to be allowed to serve Nessa, to follow in her train, to step as swift and as sure and as light, to dance at her side, to run at her heel, to be handmaiden and cupbearer and companion. The first time she had spoken them, they had felt little more than words: already sure of her place. Already full and glowing from intimacy with the divine, and robed in the mark of her lady's favour, she had not needed to put it into words to bring it to life. Had almost resented that there even was a formula to it, that the transcendent experience itself, all hers, was not all that was needed.
Now, now she needs the words. Any answer or none, she needs to ask the question, to lay it out on the altar of the grass as an offering, and wait; her heart rising to a lump in her throat as she does.
With her eyes cast downwards, the first she knows of Nessa's presence is the hand on her head. Even when she goes clad fully in flesh, Nessa's feet are so light over the ground that they are barely noticeable, even to someone listening for them.
Nessa's hand comes to rest on the crown of Aredhel's head, caresses gently down the side fo her face, before a finger beneath Aredhel's chin gently tilts her face to look upwards, into the downing-deep twilight depths of Nessa's eyes.
"You do not need to ask," she says, softly, and presses a kiss to Aredhel's forehead. "You have never needed to ask, to come to me." Another, feather-light, this time to her lips.
Aredhel, very still under Nessa's hands, breathes out; a shaking, shuddering breath, halfway to a sob. Her eyes fall closed.
"You would still have me?" she whispers, words catching in her throat. "Even though I - "
All the ways that sentence could end hang unspoken in the air between them. Though she left, though she disobeyed, though far away and unheeded in the mountains and the woods of Beleriand she left parts of herself snared, though she has dragged the stains and shadows of that land back with her to these shores, though she is no longer clean or white or carefree -
"How should I not?" Nessa says, and her voice comes close by Aredhel's ear, cool breath against the hinge of Aredhel's jaw. "Are you not mine? Have you not always been? Do you think I should have held you, when you fled these shores, swift runner, far-ranger, you who were made to go free as the wind? Is it not the flight that proves you mine? We are not made to be contained, little sister."
Tears prick burning at Aredhel's eyes, leaking to catch in her lashes. She can feel them working hot and sticky channels from the corners of her eyes, as she tilts her head further back.
"But I was," she says, laying her shame bare as the pale, working line of her throat where she bares it to Nessa. "I let them cage me," - her husband, who took her and held her, her brother, who only wants to protect what he cares for, but who has never known how to do that except by locking it away, all the men whose houses she has lived in, whose rules and whose fears and whose bounds and borders she has lived by even as she chafed against them, these men who she has let rule her and shape her, and shave away parts of what she was, " - I let them lead me, let them hold me, I let myself be contained, let myself be changed, let - "
Nessa cuts her off with a finger to the lips, that as she speaks traces down Aredhel's neck, slow and gentle and light and unrelenting as her words, until it comes to rest in the hollow at the base of Aredhel's throat.
"You were caught. There is no shame in that, is there?" The almost-elvish face she wears seems to flicker then, a suggestion of the deer in it, there and then gone, at once alive and butchered and bleeding under Irissë's blade, the reminder clear.
Her palm flattens against Aredhel's chest, and she pushes her towards the ground. Aredhel cannot speak, only look up at her, wide-eyed. Nessa smiles, sharply.
"You have ridden with my brother and run with me too long for that mistake, Irissë," and her old name in her once and forever mistress' mouth makes Aredhel shudder with longing, settles back into her bones instead of sitting uneasily on her shoulders like an ill-fitting coat, as it has coming from every other mouth since she set foot back here. The name and the language that for so long were things to be hidden, guarded secret and safe in the deepest recesses of herself - her own name, the name she gave her son, hidden away like gems or sins, forbidden and precious - have become secret and intimate things, so that speaking Quenya in the streets has felt like walking there naked in front of everyone.
"It is no shame to be caught. You are not soiled by it. If we mourn the prey in the hunt, it is because it is dead and stilled, not because it is degraded by it. And you are not stilled, are you, fairest and furthest-faring of all my does?"
Aredhel mouths a "no," but she is not sure if it is agreement or denial. She cannot contradict Nessa, and yet, she cannot help but cling to the idea that she should.
"I am not what you - " she begins.
"Let me show you what you are to me," Nessa says, and unbuttons the front of Aredhel's gown. She traces kisses down the narrow strip of skin revealed, delicate as the kiss of a falling snowflake, or a passing sunbeam.
She peels away Aredhel's camouflage armour of blue and grey and shadow-colours, piece by agonisingly slow piece, with touches and kisses to every part she exposes, leaving Aredhel shaking beneath her as Nessa's touch brushes the inside of her wrists, the rising curve of her breast from her sternum, the softness of her lower belly above her hip, and the firm muscles of her thighs below it; the definition of her calves and the jutting bone of her ankle.
Even after her clothes are stripped away and discarded on the grass, and she is naked and shuddering, there is more of her to be bared. Fingers and tongue work inside her, and she is entered and filled as well by something that goes beyond the physical; Nessa filling and touching her whole being, so that every part of her feels illuminated. She is lit and filled with light; a dancing sunbeam that touches every hidden part of her and reveals but does not burn, a warm and welcome light that pools and settles in her, building alongside the physical sensation of being touched, held, caressed, until neither her body nor her spirit can compass all of it. She shudders, wordless, sobbing, filled to brimming with sensation she cannot contain or comprehend, until it overwhelms her ability to even try and contain it, and wordless, thoughtless, gives herself up to gasping ecstasy.
She comes to herself again after in a way that feels as if she is drawing the shattered pieces of herself together, and as if she is drifting in the wind, and at the same time, she is lying cradled in Nessa's arms, naked and pressed skin to skin, their hair falling loose over them, Nessa's golden mingling with her own dark waves. Irissë's discarded clothes lie scattered on the grass around them, empty as the shed skin of a snake.
She feels scoured pleasantly clean; like a room aired out; or fresh laundry warm from drying in the sun, and she stretches like a cat, naked and unashamed. Nessa laughs, somewhere above her, and Irissë looks up at her and smiles.
On the never-fading lawns of Valimar where Nessa dances, Irissë's white skirts swirl around her ankles as she dances with her; and through the wooded uplands of Aman they run with the deer, lithe and fleet-footed with the wind in their hair.