Waiting

Eldarion

When I left Ithilien I was boiling with anger and fear: anger at Fíriel for having spurned me, anger at Faramir for refusing to bring her back after she fled, above all fear that she might not return soon, or at all. There are stories in both Gondor and Arnor of mortals who go to dwell among the Elves and are never seen again, or return only after many years, when all those who knew them are long dead. My mother had taught me to laugh at such tales, which to her certain knowledge were not true; but even she agreed that no mortal could dwell long among the Elves and return unchanged, and I feared change in Fíriel more than anything else except the loss of her. I wanted her as she was, save in one thing:  I wanted her to love me, and that she could and must learn only from me, and not from the Elves.

I said nothing to anyone about what had happened, not even to my father at first. I wondered that nobody in the City seemed to find me changed; I wondered at finding everything at home so apparently unchanged, for the whole world had changed for me. After what seemed an age I received word from Faramir that Fíriel was safely returned and that was sorry for any discourtesy she had shown me and any anxiety she had caused me. Fíriel herself sent no word, but the thought of her walking once again in the gardens of Emyn Arnen, or dancing to the moon under the night-skies of Ithilien, drove me into a fever. I had thought her lost to me, perhaps for ever; now, given a second chance, I must secure her before she vanished again, or married some other suitor – you could say that she had as many suitors as there were men who had ever looked upon her – and so put herself beyond my reach. The fact that she had never been known to look with the slightest favour on any other suitor weighed with me not at all.

That day I spoke to my father.  He answered exactly as Faramir had predicted: that while the Steward was the noblest and most beloved of our subjects, and the highest in honour in the realm save the King only, the daughter of a lord of Gondor who had wedded a woman of Rohan, daughter of kings as she might be and valued ally as Rohan might be, was not a fit wife for me. I argued and pleaded in vain; but if my father remained immovable, so did I. My father said that I was too young to know my own mind, that with time I would learn discretion, and that there was no need to settle whom I should marry until such discretion had been learned. In the end I grew angry and swore before him, by all the Powers, that if I could not marry Fíriel of Ithilien I would never marry at all, early or late, and he grew equally angry and called me a great fool and dismissed me. It was only when I was outside the door that I realised he had never asked me if Fíriel wanted to marry me. Perhaps he assumed that fool as I was, my folly did not extend to seeking an unsuitable wife who did not even want me.

I understood his reasons, but I also resented them. My father, after all, had sought a bride who had been denied him by laws more immutable than those which divided me from Fíriel, and had waited in defiance of those laws for many long years; but, more fortunate than I, he had known as he waited that his beloved would be untouched by those years and would come to him, if she came at all, in the same shape that he had first beheld. Fíriel was a mortal woman and likely to be short-lived by the reckoning of Númenor; I must have her soon, by mortal reckoning, or lose her to the most inexorable of rivals, time.