"Tales Unheard," for Jenni
Jenni asked for a story involving grown up Celegorm in a romantic heterosexual relationship. With sex. Hott sex.
I must say that I love friends who ask for Elf pr0n for Christmas!
Set after the fall of Nargothrond, Celegorm returns to a Himring that buzzes with shameful rumor. Amidst this, though, he finds the most unlikely haven of comfort.
And, to quote Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that. If you want to know more, you have to read the story.
Oh, and tarion_anarore, I believe that you volunteered to be one of the women in this story? Just let me know which one.... ;^P
Do I really need to put a warning on this story? The fact that it was requested by Jenni should be the first clue. If you don't know Jenni, the presence of hott sex and the implication that more than one woman is involved should be the second. Still, if you're that dense, this story is rated for adults only for reasons of graphic sexual content.
Tales Unheard
I. Prologue
The last time Celegorm and Curufin had ridden to Himring, the gates had been in sight when Celegorm had reined his mount to a violent halt, so violent that Curufin nearly collided with him. Amid his brother’s curses, Celegorm threw his hand into the air and shouted for silence. “Do you hear it?”
“What?” the irate Curufin had asked. It was a bitter night, even for Himring, and his brother’s city was a ruddy glow on the horizon, only a quarter-hour’s ride away. Curufin had heard naught but the lonely cry of the wind and the chattering of his teeth, and he said as much to his brother.
But Celegorm insisted: “I heard a cry. Like a child.”
“You are mad.” But Curufin paused and listened. Nothing. “You are mad,” he repeated. “Come, hurry. I am freezing.”
But then it rose, cutting the silence of the cold, clear night: a strange cry, though, Celegorm knew, who had seen the births of four baby brothers. Still, it was unmistakably a child’s cry, and before Curufin even realized enough to shout after him, Celegorm had dismounted and was crunching, running, through the snow, searching beneath trees and calling out in his folly, until he found the half-dead baby girl swaddled in a blanket and left in a bank of snow.
~oOo~
She was human: the shapes of her frozen ears showed that even if her ugly, shapeless face did not make it clear. Even in the warmth of Celegorm’s arms, held against the heat of his body beneath his cloak as he kneeled in the snow, she screamed tonelessly. Curufin ran up from behind him. “Varda’s stars!” he shouted, forgetting in his surprise that Varda no longer listened to the exiled kinslayers.
Maedhros had not been particularly surprised by their discovery. He had awakened a healer and a nursemaid-for it was very late by the time Celegorm and Curufin made it to the fortress at the top of the hill-and given the child to them. “Time will reveal that there is something wrong with the child,” he told them. “That is what they do, the Edain, when their children are born with the mark of disease upon them. They leave them in the snow for the wolves to find.” He’d smiled cruelly then at Celegorm and Curufin’s shocked faces. “There will be another in a year, they figure; a chance to start anew. They are pregnant more than rabbits.”
“But-but what will become of her?” Celegorm had asked.
“And why should you care, Tyelkormo?” Maedhros asked. “It is not as though you have not killed children before.” And he’d tossed his splendid red hair and strode from the room, to bed, their once beautiful eldest brother, now an imperfect ruin despite his ornate clothing and proud stance. But made that way-not born as such-unlike the child.
II. Celegorm
It is many years later when Celegorm and Curufin again ride to Himring-and under far different circumstances.
Maedhros will not see them right away; he defers them like servants or lesser lords, not like the princes and brothers that they are. “He is holding council with King Fingon,” says the quaking Edain servant who leads them to their chambers, and Celegorm knows that news of their latest deeds have preceded their arrival. Ignoring the servant, Celegorm strides into his chambers, slamming the door in the frightened man’s face, and throws his bow and sword across the room, uncaring whether he ruins them, whether he ruins the room Maedhros has so “generously” given him, and throws himself-muddy clothes and all-onto the bed. He reeks. He reeks of dirt and horse and blood-and shame. He rolls onto his back and takes pleasure in smearing his filthy boots across the meticulous furs atop the bed. “Well,” he says aloud, angrily, to the ceiling, “Maedhros will just have to send a servant to change them.”
As though his thoughts are heard, the door opens then, and a plain-faced Edain girl in an apron and heavy shoes comes in, hauling a kettle of water. She averts her eyes from Celegorm, who stunned, astounded, is watching her and wondering…. But, no. There is something familiar about her face…but, no. This girl is actually a woman, with a heavy bosom, Celegorm notes, constrained inside a stiff muslin dress. Her mud-brown hair is tied back in a bun. She is so plain…but still familiar.
That quickly, her work is done, and she is leaving. “You!” Celegorm calls after her. “Girl!” But she does not stop and lets the door slam rudely behind her.
~oOo~
“They grow faster than we do-the Edain-would you believe?” Maedhros tells him the next morning, over breakfast. All night, Celegorm waited up, anticipating Maedhros’ certain anger with the same cold dread cloaked in ire as he had once dreaded Fëanaro’s rage. But his brother never came, and Celegorm received a summons to breakfast this morning, as though naught had happened.
But it would. It was only a matter of time. Fingon was still there, eating silently beside Maedhros, having barely greeted his other cousins, and Maedhros would not conduct family business in his presence. Let him linger long and not leave angry, Celegorm hoped, ashamed at his fear of his older, one-handed brother, as though Maedhros had any power to do anything to him besides humiliate him with a verbal lashing. But when Fingon left angry, Maedhros stayed in a foul mood for weeks, and Celegorm very much wished to avoid this, for the certain chastisement would then likely become a daylong affair loud enough to serve as fodder for the servants’ gossip in the washrooms.
The girl, Celegorm had learned, was none other than the one he had saved in the snow. She was Maedhros’ personal servant, apparently. “A woman?” Curufin had asked, a dark, perfectly arched eyebrow twitching skyward. “And this is not…scandalous?”
Also, apparently, the girl was completely deaf.
“She hears not my private councils,” Maedhros had said, smirking at Fingon. “And neither can she speak of me to the others.”
And this, Celegorm knows, is the reason for her prestigious appointment. In their youth, Maedhros had delighted in the feeling of air on his naked skin and had often worn his tunics loosened at the throat, his chest bared. His body had been beautiful, perfect; artists sometimes came, wishing to paint the beautiful son of Fëanaro, and were subsequently driven out of the house by none other. Girls collided with lampposts in the streets, turning to watch him pass.
Now, his tunic is fastened snugly to his chin; his sleeves cover the back of his remaining hand to the knuckles, and as soon as the meal is over, he will don a tight, black leather glove. Celegorm had seen his brother’s body in the days after he’d first been returned from Thangorodrim, before being driven from the room by Maglor, who had wanted his younger brothers to visit with Maedhros yet not to see him. But Celegorm had-and knew that such scars could never heal entirely, even upon the body of an Elda as mighty as Maedhros.
Aside from a single whisper of a scar upon his right cheek-so faint that it was barely detectable, even to Celegorm, who had traced it with his finger while Maedhros was still unconscious and modestly ensconced in blankets by Maglor-his face was unmarred and still perfect. The broken teeth had been repaired; his hair had grown back thicker and redder than before. Only his eyes betrayed his torment-they blazed so coldly that they burned.
And this is the reason for the girl: She, too, is imperfect. And even if she finds reason to mock her master’s disfigurement, she can speak of it to no one. And so he trusts her to intimacies that he does not even trust to his own brothers. She appears behind him then-her hair today in two knobs over her ears-and sets his plate upon the table with a rude clatter, the food already cut into tidy, bite-sized squares, and Maedhros raises his hand to squeeze hers in gratitude as it passes over his shoulder, the cuff of his tunic momentarily slipping down to expose the puckered scar on the back of his hand that was once a burn. She bows and leaves, and he quickly tucks his hand beneath the table.
III. Girl
From the moment he awakens in the morning until she goes to sleep in the room beside his at night, she is with her master.
Mostly, she stands in his study while he holds council. She does not know what goes on in these hours, only that there is a lot of movement of lips and waving of hands; for years, she has tried to decipher this code that everyone else seems to understand so easily. She knows that Master’s lips sometimes move in a shape and he gives her a very pointed look-and Master has beautiful eyes that make her blush if they linger on her for too long-and taps her with the fingers of his one remaining hand: Her Shape. She moves her lips in these shapes, sometimes-or tries to-in the darkness, in her room at night. She wishes that she possesses the courage to put her fingers upon Master’s lips as he moves them in Her Shape to better know their movement. Master has beautiful lips-but she does not possess such audacity.
She alone of the servants is trusted to help Master dress and bathe. It is difficult sometimes, for he has only one hand, and he cannot tie his boots or braid his hair without her help. She’d once punched an impertinent serving girl who’d tried to break in during Master’s bath; she’d broken the girl’s nose and bruised her own hand quite badly. Later, Master had had ice brought to his chambers and held it on her injured hand for a long time, and she’d blushed and wanted to pull away for his hand was very warm and his fingers were long and nicely shaped, but she was afraid that he would misunderstand her unease as disgust for his body and be hurt.
For Master’s body, despite the beautiful, regal shape it made beneath his clothes, was hideous when naked. It was crossed with scars and puckered in places with old burns; his bones had been broken and set crookedly, then rebroken and set properly, making knobs beneath his skin. Also, there was the stump where a hand had been that had frightened her when she’d first seen it as a child; she’d been careful to hide her disgust and save her terrified tears for when she was alone in her bedroom that adjoined Master’s. She tried not to look to look at him while helping him dress or while he was in the bath, for he was also male and she was female, and she knew from the crude drawings that the stableboys made and waved in front of her face in the washroom what those different parts were used for.
But he liked for her to sit in the room while he bathed. He would lean his head on his left arm-the prettier one-with his damp hair like a wet streak of blood against his pale skin. His face was beautiful, and with most of his body hidden beneath the water, he was a clever illusion. And his lips moved the whole time, sometimes forming Her Shape and making her jump as though stung with a spark.
Master had a brother who lived nearby, and besides her, he was the only one allowed to see Master without his clothes. Indeed, when he stayed with them, she was left with almost nothing to do, for he grabbed her arm and marched her from the room, his lips twisting violently at the same time as Master’s, as though they were both angry about something. A door was closed in her face-and she guessed that Master’s brother did what she usually did, for Master emerged dressed and with his boots snugly tied onto his feet, and he did not smell foully, like he did when he returned from hunts or patrols, having not bathed or changed his clothes for many days.
She had known Master as long as she’d been alive, but she’d only worked for him since her twelfth birthday. Not long after, her body began to thicken in some places and narrow in others, and she’d awakened one day with blood in her bed and a pain in her belly. Master had one of the healers show her how to put the cloths inside her undergarments and later wash the blood from them and hang them to dry. When she was doubled over with cramps, Master gave her an herb to chew that made it go away.
The stableboys liked to bother her with their drawings, and sometimes, they pinned her in the corner in the washroom and kissed her and felt her breasts, but only when they knew that Master was nowhere near. She sensed that they feared Master-most people did.
Sometimes, in her room at night, she thought about the drawings and about Master’s body beneath the clothes. If she closed her eyes very tightly and concentrated very hard, she could imagine what he would look like without the scars. He was the only real man she’d ever seen naked, and she thought he looked better than the drawings. Certainly better proportioned. As to what the drawings told her he would do with those extra parts with which she had to be careful when lacing his breeches: she convinced herself that it would hurt, but there was a strange throbbing heat also at the thought of it, and she made herself go to sleep, sensing that such thoughts were improper and forbidden.
She was surprised to discover that Master had at least two more brothers; they were alike to him in face, with the same high, noble cheekbones and straight noses. One, though, had golden hair and the other very dark. They’d arrived last night. Master was taller than both of his brothers, but the blond one was broader in the shoulders and more muscular-at least, this was how he appeared in his clothes. The dark one looked like the painting in Master’s office that he usually kept covered but sometimes unveiled, pacing before it and moving his mouth in angry shapes. The dark one was very beautiful in the way of the porcelain dolls always given as gifts to the lords’ daughters. She’d never had such dolls.
But the blond one, for all his rugged impertinence-smearing his feet on his furs so that the serving girl had to be awakened to change them, sending back his beef three times for being overcooked-captivated her. He even made her forget to watch for Master’s waterglass to become low, so engrossed was she in watching the way his mouth moved. His mouth was chiseled and a lot like Master’s, but his lips were fuller and never seemed to stop moving, his quick tongue flicking to lick them, his blue eyes blazing. And then she was being nudged by the cook in Master’s direction, for he was sucking on the dregs in his glass after she’d been neglectful of refilling it.
~oOo~
Master holds council with the dark-haired Elf who comes sometimes, he who wears his hair twined with gold, and his two other brothers. Of course, she stands in the corner, watching their mouths move. She wonders how they decode with their backs turned to each other. Fists pound tabletops; hands flutter through the air. She can sense emotions charging the air in the same way that an oven will make the space in front of it shimmer. Master stands and paces, his mouth moving frantically. The other three sit motionless. Master rakes his hand through his hair, messing the neat plaits she’d put in it this morning. He gestures sharply in her direction and makes a sign with his hands. Wine. Good wine.
She hurries from the room for the wine cellar, lights a lamp, and descends the wooden steps into the dank darkness. Halfway down the stairs, she feels them vibrate with extra footsteps. Whirling in fear, expecting one of the stableboys-for they have been known to accost her down here too-she discovers instead the blond brother, paused expectantly at the top and watching her with a strange expression upon his face.
He flicks his fingers at her to tell her to go about her business, and blushing, she does as she’s told, taking the last few steps and going to the racks that hold the Good Wine. She feels him moving behind her; he is standing, watching. She wonders if his lips are moving. The cellar is drafty, but there is no chill upon her back. He stands close.
She selects a bottle and turns, but she keeps her eyes on the packed-dirt floor. She bows to him, hoping that he will move out of her way, but instead, he lifts her chin with his fingers. His eyes move over her body, appraising her. His lips are unmoving, but suddenly, they smile and move to form:
Her Shape.
The wine nearly slips from her hands. He takes the bottle and sets it aside, taking her calloused hands in his larger, smoother ones. His hands are warm like Master’s and at least as beautiful. The backs are not burned and he does not cover them with his sleeves. His tunic is half-unlaced at the throat, and she finds herself staring at this smooth triangle of bare flesh, wondering what lies beneath the soft, embroidered blue cloth. A bit further down, there is a bump at the front of his breeches, and she knows that this is his maleness, just as Master has maleness down there. She wonders if his is nice and proportional like Master’s or hideous like the stableboys’ drawings. She stares for a long time, wondering, until she realizes that he is aware of her gaze, and he is watching her watching him with a smirk upon his face, and she quickly averts her eyes and feels her face fill with the same heat as between her legs.
He catches her face as she turns away, and his mouth is moving again until, perhaps, he realizes the futility of it, and he stops and presses her hand to his chest, over the rich blue cloth. He moves his lips again: Her Shape. She feels herself draw a sharp breath and-horrified-she sees the fingers of the hand he does not clasp rising, stretching towards his mouth, to press his lips and feel them move in Her Shape.
But he does not indulge her. His eyelids flutter closed and she feels him sigh, then his lips part and he moves his tongue over her fingertips, sending a spark of fire down the length of her arm, where it explodes in her gut and fills her groin with a heavy heat. She knows that she should jerk her hand from his mouth but she cannot, and she is rewarded, for he forms Her Shape with his lips, and at last, she fully understands.
IV. Celegorm
Celegorm paces his room, thinking of her, the servant girl. He cannot stop thinking of her, despite the fact that he knows that such fancies are silly and clichéd; he’d mocked Caranthir for the dalliance he’d had with one of the maidservants after the death of his wife, and that girl had been blond and thin and far prettier than Maedhros’ girl, and Caranthir had the excuse of grief.
“How quickly you’ve forgotten, Tyelkormo.” He jumps, whirling to face Curufin, who stands just inside the door, smirking. Curufin enjoys a talent for walking and entering rooms nearly soundlessly. “Forgotten her. Luthien. And after I’d nearly died to protect your honor.”
“Yes, from being choked by a mortal.” Celegorm sniffs, and Curufin’s face blanches, then flushes a dangerous red color. Now it is Celegorm’s turn to smirk.
He finds himself in council with Maedhros and Fingon, staring at the two of them across the table and seeing their mouths move but hearing their words no more than does the girl standing behind him, the girl of whose presence he is uncomfortably aware, forming an image in his head and Fingon drones on about some tactical nuance in the way typical of Fingon. In his imagination, he lets his eyes rove over her body; he strips from her the clothes that hold her bosom in check; he takes her breasts in hand, then between his lips that still burn with the memory of her fingers upon them.
He is aroused by her naked flesh but it is her eyes that captivate him, for they look at him in a way that he has not known for too long now-and the look is so fervent that he almost believes them, almost believes that he is a good man.
But of course, to her, he is: She cannot hear the tales that tell otherwise.
~oOo~
There is a place, Curufin had said: It is whispered about, between the servants. He’d overheard-or so he claimed. It is hard to tell when Curufin is lying, but Celegorm hadn’t seen the point in wasting his efforts on that at the moment. All it takes is two gold pieces, Curufin had said, and she will rid you of your “curse.” He’d grinned and said: “She is supposed to be the best in town.”
Under the disguise of evening, Celegorm goes to the lower streets of Himring, where most of the Edain live in their ugly stone houses. Filthy creatures, they are, yet they stare at him; they scowl at him. Tales have spread quickly: of kinslaying, of exile, and-most recently-of betrayal. The people do not stop to question him, but he feels their stares upon his back-yet when he turns, there is no one in the street to watch him.
Their voices rustle like rats in the gutters, speaking of his treachery and his shame.
The woman lives in a dark hovel; she stands on the crumbling threshold with her hand clutching the doorframe and her bony chest thrust forward. It is a cold night, yet her skirt is torn at the sides, baring her leg almost to the hip; her body is bound in some contraption that pushes her meager breasts upward. She is thin and has a flat bottom; her cheeks are rouged and her lips smeared with something red, like she has been eating berries; her hair is too oily to be of any discernable color.
She is less interested in Celegorm than his two gold pieces, holding them to the candlelight inside her one-room house, scratching their surface and squinting at their size. Her lips peel back and he sees that she is missing some teeth in the side of her mouth. He forces himself to look elsewhere, feeling a wiggle of nausea in his gut.
The room is empty but for a bed; indeed, it is not large enough for much else. Beside the bed is a table holding vials whose contents Celegorm doesn’t know and whose purpose he pretends to be unable to guess. “Well enough,” she says, her scrutiny of the gold pieces complete. She lifts the mattress and puts them in a box beneath it, watching Celegorm mistrustfully as she does so. The mattress-nothing more than a flimsy straw tick-flops back into place, and with an expert shimmy, she slides out of her skirt. She wears nothing underneath, and she lies on the bed on her back with her legs spread and her knees raised, while Celegorm flushes and quickly looks away. Her legs are covered with wiry hairs that thicken on the insides of her thighs, becoming a black mat at her groin. “Well?” she calls from the bed. “Are you a virgin or what? You will need to take off your clothes too, you know.”
“I am not a virgin,” he mutters. His trembling hands undo his belt and fumble the laces of his breeches. She laughs. “You Elves never are. You pretend to be so chaste and so much better than us, but trust that yours is not the first Elven cock inside of me. Nor will it be the last.”
Naked, he goes to the bed and climbs atop her. His body is quite splendid, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She grins and ducks away from his attempt at a kiss. “Does your wife know you are here?” She grins. Her breath is sour and her missing teeth seem a black smile within an already rotted grin.
“I am not wed,” he says. He is unable to become aroused, even cupping her small pancake-breasts through the contraption that she has not removed. With a sigh, she takes him in hand, and with a few expert tugs, brings him to tenuous arousal, although he must clench his eyes shut and pretend that her hand belongs to another.
Luthien….
But no, that is not the face he sees.
Before he can reconsider, he thrusts inside of her. Her hands lie limply at her sides; when he caresses her and tries to kiss her, she sighs and turns her face from his. “Finish,” she says, “or I shall charge you two more gold pieces.”
“But you have not-” he begins, before realizing that it is not the pleasure but the gold that has brought her beneath him. But his cock-though hard-is unfeeling, and he quickens the pace with no better result, and she growls in frustration, glancing toward the door, where shadows of other customers have begun to move. He grits his teeth and closes his eyes, picturing Luthien beneath him…but no, it is someone else; her hands are rising to caress the long, toned muscles of his back, cupping the swells of his buttocks; her voice is rising in an animal cry of pleasure that she cannot hear; her knees are tight on his slender hips-
And he cries out with climax and feels a foot suddenly kicking his chest, pushing him onto his back on the thin mattress, reflexively taking himself in hand and spending himself into his own palm, a forced, rubbery orgasm without pleasure, almost painful. Already, the woman has risen from the bed and is pulling on her skirt again, even as Celegorm groans in his frustration, unfulfilled. “Do not come inside of me,” she spits. “I do not want to be left feeding your half-Elven bastard with my hard-earned gold.”
Celegorm curls on the bed, the straw mattress poking and itching his skin, gasping with his unsatisfying exertion, tearing at the flimsy, stained bedclothes, his palm full of his own fluids. “Here,” she says, tossing a cloth at him, “clean yourself,” but the cloth is stiff with the fluids of the customers before him, and he casts it aside in disgust, grimacing and forced to use his tunic instead. “You are a proud one,” she says through her gap-toothed grin, “especially for a-”
He does not hear her last word as she goes to the door to welcome her next customer, but he knows it nonetheless:
Kinslayer.
V. Girl
She dreams of him, of being draped across his saddle and held in his arms, of watching Himring grow to fill the horizon, a dark, slumped city glittering with the lights of candle flames.
He wraps her in his cloak to keep her warm; his body blazes. Master’s blazes too, she has learned, from inadvertent touches, but this is different. Even as she shivers, he fills her with his unbearable heat, like the time the lower streets were overrun with plague and she thrashed in the delirium of a fever, but Master gave her something that made it go away. But Master is not here now; it is only the golden brother and she is fevered with him. He pounds in her blood and settles in the deepest recesses of her body. She aches with him; each breath drawn into her lungs hastens it, until she is filled with him and fears she might burst.
She awakens in a damp tangle of bedclothes, tossing and gasping, her fingers pressing into her throbbing flesh until she achieves the ecstasy of release-an ecstasy that remains unsatisfying.
For her bed remains empty and cold. He is but a dream.
~oOo~
He is in a foul temper that day-fouler than usual-tossing his golden hair and moving his mouth in angry shapes at the kitchen girl, making her crush her apron in her hands and run from the room in tears. He swipes one of Master’s exquisite goblets to the floor, shattering it in a scream of light on crystal, and Master-usually so dignified and collected-leaps to his feet, and they both move their mouths at each other and pound trembling fists into the tabletop, until the blond brother sloshes a goblet full of wine down the front of Master’s pale blue tunic and flounces from the room.
The porcelain-faced, black-haired brother sits, unmoving in body or lips except to smirk-and he stares directly at her, his eyes bright as though with secret knowledge, as she hurries to soak the wine from Master’s tunic, pressing her rag to his chest despite the urge to recoil from feeling the intimacy of his racing heart and heaving chest beneath her hand.
In his chambers, later, she helps Master to untie the tunic and slip it over his head, revealing his badly scarred chest and deformed, improperly mended ribs. He makes a sign at her: Bath. Lavender. There are circles as dark as bruises beneath his eyes. She hurries to prepare his bath while he slowly undoes the laces on his breeches with his one good hand. While he soaks in the bath, she ponders the stain upon his tunic. It is a beautiful tunic, made of silk so fine that it feels like oil running through her fingers, the high neckline and low cuffs embroidered with exquisite patterns in gold thread. And the wine has ruined it. She will try later, in the washroom, to save it, but she knows even now that her efforts will amount to naught.
She puts the tunic to her face. It bears Master’s familiar scent, but the stain overwhelms it: It smells pungent and heady, of fermentation and the loss of inhibition, of the blond brother’s breath in her dream, mingling with hers as lips claim each other, as Himring remains naught but a cold apparition on the horizon.
~oOo~
The dark-haired Elf with the gold in his hair comes to Master’s chambers when Master is only half-dressed and dismisses her. Her face snaps in Master’s direction, waiting for his indication that she should stay, but his head droops-his scarlet hair falling like a curtain to cover it, his tunic only half-laced over the ruin of his chest-and he nods that she should obey, and so she reluctantly allows the door to shut behind her.
Their lips begin to writhe at the same time, before she has even left.
With the door closed behind her, she realizes that she still clutches Master’s ruined tunic in her hands. She turns to head for the washroom but the chamber door at the end of the hall swings open, and she finds herself facing the blond brother across a length of floor.
He moves his lips as he approaches her. He is tall and smells of fresh winds; he wears a short tunic partially unlaced and riding breeches that show the long musculature of his legs to perfection. He comes to her and gentle are the hands that take the tunic from her to inspect the damage, regret twisting his beautiful face, making her fingers fly unbidden to his cheek, foolish in the belief that she can offer him comfort, that she should even try.
His eyes, though, drop shut with her touch, and with their fire removed from his face, she sees that he is surely kind, surely a good man. The wine, the tunic-perhaps it was an accident? Perhaps he is not the cause for the exhaustion on Master’s face? This she will believe, if it allows her to touch his face without feeling guilt, to feel the whisper of a breath on her palm that becomes a shivering kiss.
The tunic drops unnoticed to the floor between them.
His hands are warm and strong upon her waist, and she offers no resistance as he draws her into his embrace. This is not like with the stableboys in the washroom; she begrudges suddenly the space between them-however small-and the air that fills it, the air that knows what it’s like to touch his body where she does not. She wants it destroyed, made insignificant. She wants them to become one. She burns with the need, and he fills it, bringing her against his body in a single crushing instant, making her draw a sudden breath that is caught by his lips on hers, moving across her cheeks, her face, her eyelids, to her ear, where she feels his lips moving in shapes.
She understands. She nods.
With a tender hand cupped beneath her bottom, he lifts her into his arms and carries her to his chambers.
She opens her eyes when his gentle hands leave her, and she finds herself on his bed. Even in Master’s bedroom, when he is in the bath and is unwise to her actions in the next room, she has never allowed herself such a luxury. The bed is wide and covered in furs so luxuriant that her body craves the feeling of them on her naked skin. He has been here but a few weeks, but already, the bed smells of him, of the earth in the forest, of organic need. Her hearts pounds as it fills her nose and seemingly her head, until she is drunk with it, with him. He kneels before her, his blue eyes agonized and his lips writhing on his face, against her hands clutched in both of his. His tremble where hers are steady, as they lift to smooth his golden hair that is of finer silk than Master’s best raiment. His face relaxes into thankfulness with her touch; he kisses her callused fingertips, moving his lips against them.
How I wish I could know what he says!
But that quickly, he is gone from her, gone to lean against the vanity table with his hands clutching its edges so tightly that his knuckles have gone white. She can see his reflection, can see the agonized movement of his lips. His eyes shine with guilt as he watches her in the mirror, clutching even harder to the table as though anchoring himself from doing something terrible.
She rises and goes to him. He is not like Master, who she would never approach in this way. His golden hair is spilling over his shoulder, unfettered; in the candlelight, it is the luscious color of honey. She watches her hands move to circle his waist. In the mirror, his eyes shut as though with pain, and his warm hand clutches hers and pushes it lower, against the laced front of his breeches, against his maleness.
Sometimes, accidentally, she has brushed Master’s maleness while helping him to dress, and always, she finds it difficult to look at him in the days after, although he treats her no differently and seems never to notice. Her hand, though, seems to remember the soft heat of his flesh; she scours the spot until her hands become chapped and bleed-still, the memory persists.
Master’s golden brother, though, links her fingers in his and grinds his pelvis against her hand; his maleness is not warmly innocent but burning hot and as hard as a column of stone; his breeches are distended with it. His face in the mirror is contorted, his teeth clamped upon his lower lip, but his eyes are wide open and fixed upon her face. She wants to pull away, to feel disgust, but her dream is returning to her, her desire to be filled by him, and she opens her fingers to take him in hand, to stroke him through his breeches, watching him in the mirror to see the way his mouth falls open as he gasps with the pleasure of it.
She knows where these sorts of things lead. She is untouched but not naïve. She knows that he will take her to bed and have her chastity. There is hot heaviness between her legs at the thought of it; still, she knows, it will hurt. The size of him-even through his breeches, she can tell it. But she trusts that he will not hurt her.
His blue eyes in the mirror are gentle, perhaps even grateful? Not the kind of eyes that would watch her pain.
He turns to embrace her, to lower his face to hers in a kiss. His mouth is warm and soft; he coaxes her lips open and touches his tongue to hers; she expects to be disgusted by this, but the touch sends a spark of desire sizzling through her body. The kiss deepens, their tongues tangling; he nibbles her lower lip until it almost hurts, then slips his tongue across the place to soothe the pain. She feels the bed bump the backs of thighs; so engrossed in the kiss was she that she hadn’t even noticed that he’d lifted her and carried her back to the bed.
He lies her atop the furs and then begins to undress himself. He tugs his tunic over his head and tosses it to the floor. His chest is broad and muscular; his skin is deeper in color than Master’s and almost entirely unblemished. There is a white thread of a scar along his side but it doesn’t detract from his beauty but seems to enhance it, emphasizing the perfection of the flesh around it. His fingers move busily, unlacing his breeches; she feels her heartbeat quicken as his maleness rising from a patch of dark blond hair springs free. His legs are hard with muscles and glisten with golden hairs. As he comes to her, she reaches out to stroke his thigh, letting her fingers slip upward to the satiny skin of his hip and-growing bolder-crawl to the center, to bury themselves in the wiry hairs of his groin, to cup and knead the heavy sac beneath his rigid maleness, as he falls to his knees on the bed, his head lolling back until the ends of his golden hair brush the backs of his calves.
He falls to the bed beside her and begins to unfasten her dress, pushing it from her full breasts and nuzzling them, sucking first one nipple, then the other, making her body explode in goosebumps of pleasure. He pushes her skirt and her underpants from her hips with a single motion, trailing kisses from her breasts to her navel, then lower, until-with a thrill of pleasure-she realizes where his kisses lead in the instant before he lands a kiss with his tongue darting from between his lips to tease her at the source of her ecstasy, and her hands plunge into the silky warmth of his hair and hold him there, gently teasing and sucking her until she almost cannot bear it and he must pin her hips to the bed to keep her from thrashing too violently beneath him, until spasms of pleasure wrack her, and he does not stop until every last bit has been wrung from her.
He rises with a smile, brandishing his maleness in his hand, positioning himself between her parted legs and slipping a finger inside of her, then adding a second. Her flesh is tight around his fingers, and when he slips them out and thrusts himself inside of her, she is jolted by simultaneous pleasure and pain, clamping her legs around his hips in surprise, clenching his shoulders and raking him with her fingernails. He is so tall that her lips are at his throat, and it buzzes beneath her lips, his pulse throbbing rapidly as he quickens the rhythm. He lowers his lips to her ear; she feels his mouth moving against it and his breath caressing her, as though she can understand his meaning, but in the instant before he gives himself to climax, she realizes that she does understand, that his mouth moves over and over again, reverently, in Her Shape.
VI. Celegorm
His heartbeat against her back, curled around her damp, sleeping body, he tentatively puts his fingers again inside of her with different intent: They come away damp, but not with blood, and he is relieved.
I did not hurt her.
Night is falling on Himring, and one by one, candles blink to light like eyes in the dark. Taverns roar with life and families sit around tables for supper; tongues wag and speak of the gossip that trickles down from the servants who work in the fortress. Like a fistful of dry paper, Himring rustles constantly with rumor, each more astounding than the next, but lying in Celegorm’s arms, flesh pressing flesh, the servant girl hears-and so knows-none of them.
I must say that I love friends who ask for Elf pr0n for Christmas!
Set after the fall of Nargothrond, Celegorm returns to a Himring that buzzes with shameful rumor. Amidst this, though, he finds the most unlikely haven of comfort.
And, to quote Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that. If you want to know more, you have to read the story.
Oh, and tarion_anarore, I believe that you volunteered to be one of the women in this story? Just let me know which one.... ;^P
Do I really need to put a warning on this story? The fact that it was requested by Jenni should be the first clue. If you don't know Jenni, the presence of hott sex and the implication that more than one woman is involved should be the second. Still, if you're that dense, this story is rated for adults only for reasons of graphic sexual content.
Tales Unheard
I. Prologue
The last time Celegorm and Curufin had ridden to Himring, the gates had been in sight when Celegorm had reined his mount to a violent halt, so violent that Curufin nearly collided with him. Amid his brother’s curses, Celegorm threw his hand into the air and shouted for silence. “Do you hear it?”
“What?” the irate Curufin had asked. It was a bitter night, even for Himring, and his brother’s city was a ruddy glow on the horizon, only a quarter-hour’s ride away. Curufin had heard naught but the lonely cry of the wind and the chattering of his teeth, and he said as much to his brother.
But Celegorm insisted: “I heard a cry. Like a child.”
“You are mad.” But Curufin paused and listened. Nothing. “You are mad,” he repeated. “Come, hurry. I am freezing.”
But then it rose, cutting the silence of the cold, clear night: a strange cry, though, Celegorm knew, who had seen the births of four baby brothers. Still, it was unmistakably a child’s cry, and before Curufin even realized enough to shout after him, Celegorm had dismounted and was crunching, running, through the snow, searching beneath trees and calling out in his folly, until he found the half-dead baby girl swaddled in a blanket and left in a bank of snow.
~oOo~
She was human: the shapes of her frozen ears showed that even if her ugly, shapeless face did not make it clear. Even in the warmth of Celegorm’s arms, held against the heat of his body beneath his cloak as he kneeled in the snow, she screamed tonelessly. Curufin ran up from behind him. “Varda’s stars!” he shouted, forgetting in his surprise that Varda no longer listened to the exiled kinslayers.
Maedhros had not been particularly surprised by their discovery. He had awakened a healer and a nursemaid-for it was very late by the time Celegorm and Curufin made it to the fortress at the top of the hill-and given the child to them. “Time will reveal that there is something wrong with the child,” he told them. “That is what they do, the Edain, when their children are born with the mark of disease upon them. They leave them in the snow for the wolves to find.” He’d smiled cruelly then at Celegorm and Curufin’s shocked faces. “There will be another in a year, they figure; a chance to start anew. They are pregnant more than rabbits.”
“But-but what will become of her?” Celegorm had asked.
“And why should you care, Tyelkormo?” Maedhros asked. “It is not as though you have not killed children before.” And he’d tossed his splendid red hair and strode from the room, to bed, their once beautiful eldest brother, now an imperfect ruin despite his ornate clothing and proud stance. But made that way-not born as such-unlike the child.
II. Celegorm
It is many years later when Celegorm and Curufin again ride to Himring-and under far different circumstances.
Maedhros will not see them right away; he defers them like servants or lesser lords, not like the princes and brothers that they are. “He is holding council with King Fingon,” says the quaking Edain servant who leads them to their chambers, and Celegorm knows that news of their latest deeds have preceded their arrival. Ignoring the servant, Celegorm strides into his chambers, slamming the door in the frightened man’s face, and throws his bow and sword across the room, uncaring whether he ruins them, whether he ruins the room Maedhros has so “generously” given him, and throws himself-muddy clothes and all-onto the bed. He reeks. He reeks of dirt and horse and blood-and shame. He rolls onto his back and takes pleasure in smearing his filthy boots across the meticulous furs atop the bed. “Well,” he says aloud, angrily, to the ceiling, “Maedhros will just have to send a servant to change them.”
As though his thoughts are heard, the door opens then, and a plain-faced Edain girl in an apron and heavy shoes comes in, hauling a kettle of water. She averts her eyes from Celegorm, who stunned, astounded, is watching her and wondering…. But, no. There is something familiar about her face…but, no. This girl is actually a woman, with a heavy bosom, Celegorm notes, constrained inside a stiff muslin dress. Her mud-brown hair is tied back in a bun. She is so plain…but still familiar.
That quickly, her work is done, and she is leaving. “You!” Celegorm calls after her. “Girl!” But she does not stop and lets the door slam rudely behind her.
~oOo~
“They grow faster than we do-the Edain-would you believe?” Maedhros tells him the next morning, over breakfast. All night, Celegorm waited up, anticipating Maedhros’ certain anger with the same cold dread cloaked in ire as he had once dreaded Fëanaro’s rage. But his brother never came, and Celegorm received a summons to breakfast this morning, as though naught had happened.
But it would. It was only a matter of time. Fingon was still there, eating silently beside Maedhros, having barely greeted his other cousins, and Maedhros would not conduct family business in his presence. Let him linger long and not leave angry, Celegorm hoped, ashamed at his fear of his older, one-handed brother, as though Maedhros had any power to do anything to him besides humiliate him with a verbal lashing. But when Fingon left angry, Maedhros stayed in a foul mood for weeks, and Celegorm very much wished to avoid this, for the certain chastisement would then likely become a daylong affair loud enough to serve as fodder for the servants’ gossip in the washrooms.
The girl, Celegorm had learned, was none other than the one he had saved in the snow. She was Maedhros’ personal servant, apparently. “A woman?” Curufin had asked, a dark, perfectly arched eyebrow twitching skyward. “And this is not…scandalous?”
Also, apparently, the girl was completely deaf.
“She hears not my private councils,” Maedhros had said, smirking at Fingon. “And neither can she speak of me to the others.”
And this, Celegorm knows, is the reason for her prestigious appointment. In their youth, Maedhros had delighted in the feeling of air on his naked skin and had often worn his tunics loosened at the throat, his chest bared. His body had been beautiful, perfect; artists sometimes came, wishing to paint the beautiful son of Fëanaro, and were subsequently driven out of the house by none other. Girls collided with lampposts in the streets, turning to watch him pass.
Now, his tunic is fastened snugly to his chin; his sleeves cover the back of his remaining hand to the knuckles, and as soon as the meal is over, he will don a tight, black leather glove. Celegorm had seen his brother’s body in the days after he’d first been returned from Thangorodrim, before being driven from the room by Maglor, who had wanted his younger brothers to visit with Maedhros yet not to see him. But Celegorm had-and knew that such scars could never heal entirely, even upon the body of an Elda as mighty as Maedhros.
Aside from a single whisper of a scar upon his right cheek-so faint that it was barely detectable, even to Celegorm, who had traced it with his finger while Maedhros was still unconscious and modestly ensconced in blankets by Maglor-his face was unmarred and still perfect. The broken teeth had been repaired; his hair had grown back thicker and redder than before. Only his eyes betrayed his torment-they blazed so coldly that they burned.
And this is the reason for the girl: She, too, is imperfect. And even if she finds reason to mock her master’s disfigurement, she can speak of it to no one. And so he trusts her to intimacies that he does not even trust to his own brothers. She appears behind him then-her hair today in two knobs over her ears-and sets his plate upon the table with a rude clatter, the food already cut into tidy, bite-sized squares, and Maedhros raises his hand to squeeze hers in gratitude as it passes over his shoulder, the cuff of his tunic momentarily slipping down to expose the puckered scar on the back of his hand that was once a burn. She bows and leaves, and he quickly tucks his hand beneath the table.
III. Girl
From the moment he awakens in the morning until she goes to sleep in the room beside his at night, she is with her master.
Mostly, she stands in his study while he holds council. She does not know what goes on in these hours, only that there is a lot of movement of lips and waving of hands; for years, she has tried to decipher this code that everyone else seems to understand so easily. She knows that Master’s lips sometimes move in a shape and he gives her a very pointed look-and Master has beautiful eyes that make her blush if they linger on her for too long-and taps her with the fingers of his one remaining hand: Her Shape. She moves her lips in these shapes, sometimes-or tries to-in the darkness, in her room at night. She wishes that she possesses the courage to put her fingers upon Master’s lips as he moves them in Her Shape to better know their movement. Master has beautiful lips-but she does not possess such audacity.
She alone of the servants is trusted to help Master dress and bathe. It is difficult sometimes, for he has only one hand, and he cannot tie his boots or braid his hair without her help. She’d once punched an impertinent serving girl who’d tried to break in during Master’s bath; she’d broken the girl’s nose and bruised her own hand quite badly. Later, Master had had ice brought to his chambers and held it on her injured hand for a long time, and she’d blushed and wanted to pull away for his hand was very warm and his fingers were long and nicely shaped, but she was afraid that he would misunderstand her unease as disgust for his body and be hurt.
For Master’s body, despite the beautiful, regal shape it made beneath his clothes, was hideous when naked. It was crossed with scars and puckered in places with old burns; his bones had been broken and set crookedly, then rebroken and set properly, making knobs beneath his skin. Also, there was the stump where a hand had been that had frightened her when she’d first seen it as a child; she’d been careful to hide her disgust and save her terrified tears for when she was alone in her bedroom that adjoined Master’s. She tried not to look to look at him while helping him dress or while he was in the bath, for he was also male and she was female, and she knew from the crude drawings that the stableboys made and waved in front of her face in the washroom what those different parts were used for.
But he liked for her to sit in the room while he bathed. He would lean his head on his left arm-the prettier one-with his damp hair like a wet streak of blood against his pale skin. His face was beautiful, and with most of his body hidden beneath the water, he was a clever illusion. And his lips moved the whole time, sometimes forming Her Shape and making her jump as though stung with a spark.
Master had a brother who lived nearby, and besides her, he was the only one allowed to see Master without his clothes. Indeed, when he stayed with them, she was left with almost nothing to do, for he grabbed her arm and marched her from the room, his lips twisting violently at the same time as Master’s, as though they were both angry about something. A door was closed in her face-and she guessed that Master’s brother did what she usually did, for Master emerged dressed and with his boots snugly tied onto his feet, and he did not smell foully, like he did when he returned from hunts or patrols, having not bathed or changed his clothes for many days.
She had known Master as long as she’d been alive, but she’d only worked for him since her twelfth birthday. Not long after, her body began to thicken in some places and narrow in others, and she’d awakened one day with blood in her bed and a pain in her belly. Master had one of the healers show her how to put the cloths inside her undergarments and later wash the blood from them and hang them to dry. When she was doubled over with cramps, Master gave her an herb to chew that made it go away.
The stableboys liked to bother her with their drawings, and sometimes, they pinned her in the corner in the washroom and kissed her and felt her breasts, but only when they knew that Master was nowhere near. She sensed that they feared Master-most people did.
Sometimes, in her room at night, she thought about the drawings and about Master’s body beneath the clothes. If she closed her eyes very tightly and concentrated very hard, she could imagine what he would look like without the scars. He was the only real man she’d ever seen naked, and she thought he looked better than the drawings. Certainly better proportioned. As to what the drawings told her he would do with those extra parts with which she had to be careful when lacing his breeches: she convinced herself that it would hurt, but there was a strange throbbing heat also at the thought of it, and she made herself go to sleep, sensing that such thoughts were improper and forbidden.
She was surprised to discover that Master had at least two more brothers; they were alike to him in face, with the same high, noble cheekbones and straight noses. One, though, had golden hair and the other very dark. They’d arrived last night. Master was taller than both of his brothers, but the blond one was broader in the shoulders and more muscular-at least, this was how he appeared in his clothes. The dark one looked like the painting in Master’s office that he usually kept covered but sometimes unveiled, pacing before it and moving his mouth in angry shapes. The dark one was very beautiful in the way of the porcelain dolls always given as gifts to the lords’ daughters. She’d never had such dolls.
But the blond one, for all his rugged impertinence-smearing his feet on his furs so that the serving girl had to be awakened to change them, sending back his beef three times for being overcooked-captivated her. He even made her forget to watch for Master’s waterglass to become low, so engrossed was she in watching the way his mouth moved. His mouth was chiseled and a lot like Master’s, but his lips were fuller and never seemed to stop moving, his quick tongue flicking to lick them, his blue eyes blazing. And then she was being nudged by the cook in Master’s direction, for he was sucking on the dregs in his glass after she’d been neglectful of refilling it.
~oOo~
Master holds council with the dark-haired Elf who comes sometimes, he who wears his hair twined with gold, and his two other brothers. Of course, she stands in the corner, watching their mouths move. She wonders how they decode with their backs turned to each other. Fists pound tabletops; hands flutter through the air. She can sense emotions charging the air in the same way that an oven will make the space in front of it shimmer. Master stands and paces, his mouth moving frantically. The other three sit motionless. Master rakes his hand through his hair, messing the neat plaits she’d put in it this morning. He gestures sharply in her direction and makes a sign with his hands. Wine. Good wine.
She hurries from the room for the wine cellar, lights a lamp, and descends the wooden steps into the dank darkness. Halfway down the stairs, she feels them vibrate with extra footsteps. Whirling in fear, expecting one of the stableboys-for they have been known to accost her down here too-she discovers instead the blond brother, paused expectantly at the top and watching her with a strange expression upon his face.
He flicks his fingers at her to tell her to go about her business, and blushing, she does as she’s told, taking the last few steps and going to the racks that hold the Good Wine. She feels him moving behind her; he is standing, watching. She wonders if his lips are moving. The cellar is drafty, but there is no chill upon her back. He stands close.
She selects a bottle and turns, but she keeps her eyes on the packed-dirt floor. She bows to him, hoping that he will move out of her way, but instead, he lifts her chin with his fingers. His eyes move over her body, appraising her. His lips are unmoving, but suddenly, they smile and move to form:
Her Shape.
The wine nearly slips from her hands. He takes the bottle and sets it aside, taking her calloused hands in his larger, smoother ones. His hands are warm like Master’s and at least as beautiful. The backs are not burned and he does not cover them with his sleeves. His tunic is half-unlaced at the throat, and she finds herself staring at this smooth triangle of bare flesh, wondering what lies beneath the soft, embroidered blue cloth. A bit further down, there is a bump at the front of his breeches, and she knows that this is his maleness, just as Master has maleness down there. She wonders if his is nice and proportional like Master’s or hideous like the stableboys’ drawings. She stares for a long time, wondering, until she realizes that he is aware of her gaze, and he is watching her watching him with a smirk upon his face, and she quickly averts her eyes and feels her face fill with the same heat as between her legs.
He catches her face as she turns away, and his mouth is moving again until, perhaps, he realizes the futility of it, and he stops and presses her hand to his chest, over the rich blue cloth. He moves his lips again: Her Shape. She feels herself draw a sharp breath and-horrified-she sees the fingers of the hand he does not clasp rising, stretching towards his mouth, to press his lips and feel them move in Her Shape.
But he does not indulge her. His eyelids flutter closed and she feels him sigh, then his lips part and he moves his tongue over her fingertips, sending a spark of fire down the length of her arm, where it explodes in her gut and fills her groin with a heavy heat. She knows that she should jerk her hand from his mouth but she cannot, and she is rewarded, for he forms Her Shape with his lips, and at last, she fully understands.
IV. Celegorm
Celegorm paces his room, thinking of her, the servant girl. He cannot stop thinking of her, despite the fact that he knows that such fancies are silly and clichéd; he’d mocked Caranthir for the dalliance he’d had with one of the maidservants after the death of his wife, and that girl had been blond and thin and far prettier than Maedhros’ girl, and Caranthir had the excuse of grief.
“How quickly you’ve forgotten, Tyelkormo.” He jumps, whirling to face Curufin, who stands just inside the door, smirking. Curufin enjoys a talent for walking and entering rooms nearly soundlessly. “Forgotten her. Luthien. And after I’d nearly died to protect your honor.”
“Yes, from being choked by a mortal.” Celegorm sniffs, and Curufin’s face blanches, then flushes a dangerous red color. Now it is Celegorm’s turn to smirk.
He finds himself in council with Maedhros and Fingon, staring at the two of them across the table and seeing their mouths move but hearing their words no more than does the girl standing behind him, the girl of whose presence he is uncomfortably aware, forming an image in his head and Fingon drones on about some tactical nuance in the way typical of Fingon. In his imagination, he lets his eyes rove over her body; he strips from her the clothes that hold her bosom in check; he takes her breasts in hand, then between his lips that still burn with the memory of her fingers upon them.
He is aroused by her naked flesh but it is her eyes that captivate him, for they look at him in a way that he has not known for too long now-and the look is so fervent that he almost believes them, almost believes that he is a good man.
But of course, to her, he is: She cannot hear the tales that tell otherwise.
~oOo~
There is a place, Curufin had said: It is whispered about, between the servants. He’d overheard-or so he claimed. It is hard to tell when Curufin is lying, but Celegorm hadn’t seen the point in wasting his efforts on that at the moment. All it takes is two gold pieces, Curufin had said, and she will rid you of your “curse.” He’d grinned and said: “She is supposed to be the best in town.”
Under the disguise of evening, Celegorm goes to the lower streets of Himring, where most of the Edain live in their ugly stone houses. Filthy creatures, they are, yet they stare at him; they scowl at him. Tales have spread quickly: of kinslaying, of exile, and-most recently-of betrayal. The people do not stop to question him, but he feels their stares upon his back-yet when he turns, there is no one in the street to watch him.
Their voices rustle like rats in the gutters, speaking of his treachery and his shame.
The woman lives in a dark hovel; she stands on the crumbling threshold with her hand clutching the doorframe and her bony chest thrust forward. It is a cold night, yet her skirt is torn at the sides, baring her leg almost to the hip; her body is bound in some contraption that pushes her meager breasts upward. She is thin and has a flat bottom; her cheeks are rouged and her lips smeared with something red, like she has been eating berries; her hair is too oily to be of any discernable color.
She is less interested in Celegorm than his two gold pieces, holding them to the candlelight inside her one-room house, scratching their surface and squinting at their size. Her lips peel back and he sees that she is missing some teeth in the side of her mouth. He forces himself to look elsewhere, feeling a wiggle of nausea in his gut.
The room is empty but for a bed; indeed, it is not large enough for much else. Beside the bed is a table holding vials whose contents Celegorm doesn’t know and whose purpose he pretends to be unable to guess. “Well enough,” she says, her scrutiny of the gold pieces complete. She lifts the mattress and puts them in a box beneath it, watching Celegorm mistrustfully as she does so. The mattress-nothing more than a flimsy straw tick-flops back into place, and with an expert shimmy, she slides out of her skirt. She wears nothing underneath, and she lies on the bed on her back with her legs spread and her knees raised, while Celegorm flushes and quickly looks away. Her legs are covered with wiry hairs that thicken on the insides of her thighs, becoming a black mat at her groin. “Well?” she calls from the bed. “Are you a virgin or what? You will need to take off your clothes too, you know.”
“I am not a virgin,” he mutters. His trembling hands undo his belt and fumble the laces of his breeches. She laughs. “You Elves never are. You pretend to be so chaste and so much better than us, but trust that yours is not the first Elven cock inside of me. Nor will it be the last.”
Naked, he goes to the bed and climbs atop her. His body is quite splendid, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She grins and ducks away from his attempt at a kiss. “Does your wife know you are here?” She grins. Her breath is sour and her missing teeth seem a black smile within an already rotted grin.
“I am not wed,” he says. He is unable to become aroused, even cupping her small pancake-breasts through the contraption that she has not removed. With a sigh, she takes him in hand, and with a few expert tugs, brings him to tenuous arousal, although he must clench his eyes shut and pretend that her hand belongs to another.
Luthien….
But no, that is not the face he sees.
Before he can reconsider, he thrusts inside of her. Her hands lie limply at her sides; when he caresses her and tries to kiss her, she sighs and turns her face from his. “Finish,” she says, “or I shall charge you two more gold pieces.”
“But you have not-” he begins, before realizing that it is not the pleasure but the gold that has brought her beneath him. But his cock-though hard-is unfeeling, and he quickens the pace with no better result, and she growls in frustration, glancing toward the door, where shadows of other customers have begun to move. He grits his teeth and closes his eyes, picturing Luthien beneath him…but no, it is someone else; her hands are rising to caress the long, toned muscles of his back, cupping the swells of his buttocks; her voice is rising in an animal cry of pleasure that she cannot hear; her knees are tight on his slender hips-
And he cries out with climax and feels a foot suddenly kicking his chest, pushing him onto his back on the thin mattress, reflexively taking himself in hand and spending himself into his own palm, a forced, rubbery orgasm without pleasure, almost painful. Already, the woman has risen from the bed and is pulling on her skirt again, even as Celegorm groans in his frustration, unfulfilled. “Do not come inside of me,” she spits. “I do not want to be left feeding your half-Elven bastard with my hard-earned gold.”
Celegorm curls on the bed, the straw mattress poking and itching his skin, gasping with his unsatisfying exertion, tearing at the flimsy, stained bedclothes, his palm full of his own fluids. “Here,” she says, tossing a cloth at him, “clean yourself,” but the cloth is stiff with the fluids of the customers before him, and he casts it aside in disgust, grimacing and forced to use his tunic instead. “You are a proud one,” she says through her gap-toothed grin, “especially for a-”
He does not hear her last word as she goes to the door to welcome her next customer, but he knows it nonetheless:
Kinslayer.
V. Girl
She dreams of him, of being draped across his saddle and held in his arms, of watching Himring grow to fill the horizon, a dark, slumped city glittering with the lights of candle flames.
He wraps her in his cloak to keep her warm; his body blazes. Master’s blazes too, she has learned, from inadvertent touches, but this is different. Even as she shivers, he fills her with his unbearable heat, like the time the lower streets were overrun with plague and she thrashed in the delirium of a fever, but Master gave her something that made it go away. But Master is not here now; it is only the golden brother and she is fevered with him. He pounds in her blood and settles in the deepest recesses of her body. She aches with him; each breath drawn into her lungs hastens it, until she is filled with him and fears she might burst.
She awakens in a damp tangle of bedclothes, tossing and gasping, her fingers pressing into her throbbing flesh until she achieves the ecstasy of release-an ecstasy that remains unsatisfying.
For her bed remains empty and cold. He is but a dream.
~oOo~
He is in a foul temper that day-fouler than usual-tossing his golden hair and moving his mouth in angry shapes at the kitchen girl, making her crush her apron in her hands and run from the room in tears. He swipes one of Master’s exquisite goblets to the floor, shattering it in a scream of light on crystal, and Master-usually so dignified and collected-leaps to his feet, and they both move their mouths at each other and pound trembling fists into the tabletop, until the blond brother sloshes a goblet full of wine down the front of Master’s pale blue tunic and flounces from the room.
The porcelain-faced, black-haired brother sits, unmoving in body or lips except to smirk-and he stares directly at her, his eyes bright as though with secret knowledge, as she hurries to soak the wine from Master’s tunic, pressing her rag to his chest despite the urge to recoil from feeling the intimacy of his racing heart and heaving chest beneath her hand.
In his chambers, later, she helps Master to untie the tunic and slip it over his head, revealing his badly scarred chest and deformed, improperly mended ribs. He makes a sign at her: Bath. Lavender. There are circles as dark as bruises beneath his eyes. She hurries to prepare his bath while he slowly undoes the laces on his breeches with his one good hand. While he soaks in the bath, she ponders the stain upon his tunic. It is a beautiful tunic, made of silk so fine that it feels like oil running through her fingers, the high neckline and low cuffs embroidered with exquisite patterns in gold thread. And the wine has ruined it. She will try later, in the washroom, to save it, but she knows even now that her efforts will amount to naught.
She puts the tunic to her face. It bears Master’s familiar scent, but the stain overwhelms it: It smells pungent and heady, of fermentation and the loss of inhibition, of the blond brother’s breath in her dream, mingling with hers as lips claim each other, as Himring remains naught but a cold apparition on the horizon.
~oOo~
The dark-haired Elf with the gold in his hair comes to Master’s chambers when Master is only half-dressed and dismisses her. Her face snaps in Master’s direction, waiting for his indication that she should stay, but his head droops-his scarlet hair falling like a curtain to cover it, his tunic only half-laced over the ruin of his chest-and he nods that she should obey, and so she reluctantly allows the door to shut behind her.
Their lips begin to writhe at the same time, before she has even left.
With the door closed behind her, she realizes that she still clutches Master’s ruined tunic in her hands. She turns to head for the washroom but the chamber door at the end of the hall swings open, and she finds herself facing the blond brother across a length of floor.
He moves his lips as he approaches her. He is tall and smells of fresh winds; he wears a short tunic partially unlaced and riding breeches that show the long musculature of his legs to perfection. He comes to her and gentle are the hands that take the tunic from her to inspect the damage, regret twisting his beautiful face, making her fingers fly unbidden to his cheek, foolish in the belief that she can offer him comfort, that she should even try.
His eyes, though, drop shut with her touch, and with their fire removed from his face, she sees that he is surely kind, surely a good man. The wine, the tunic-perhaps it was an accident? Perhaps he is not the cause for the exhaustion on Master’s face? This she will believe, if it allows her to touch his face without feeling guilt, to feel the whisper of a breath on her palm that becomes a shivering kiss.
The tunic drops unnoticed to the floor between them.
His hands are warm and strong upon her waist, and she offers no resistance as he draws her into his embrace. This is not like with the stableboys in the washroom; she begrudges suddenly the space between them-however small-and the air that fills it, the air that knows what it’s like to touch his body where she does not. She wants it destroyed, made insignificant. She wants them to become one. She burns with the need, and he fills it, bringing her against his body in a single crushing instant, making her draw a sudden breath that is caught by his lips on hers, moving across her cheeks, her face, her eyelids, to her ear, where she feels his lips moving in shapes.
She understands. She nods.
With a tender hand cupped beneath her bottom, he lifts her into his arms and carries her to his chambers.
She opens her eyes when his gentle hands leave her, and she finds herself on his bed. Even in Master’s bedroom, when he is in the bath and is unwise to her actions in the next room, she has never allowed herself such a luxury. The bed is wide and covered in furs so luxuriant that her body craves the feeling of them on her naked skin. He has been here but a few weeks, but already, the bed smells of him, of the earth in the forest, of organic need. Her hearts pounds as it fills her nose and seemingly her head, until she is drunk with it, with him. He kneels before her, his blue eyes agonized and his lips writhing on his face, against her hands clutched in both of his. His tremble where hers are steady, as they lift to smooth his golden hair that is of finer silk than Master’s best raiment. His face relaxes into thankfulness with her touch; he kisses her callused fingertips, moving his lips against them.
How I wish I could know what he says!
But that quickly, he is gone from her, gone to lean against the vanity table with his hands clutching its edges so tightly that his knuckles have gone white. She can see his reflection, can see the agonized movement of his lips. His eyes shine with guilt as he watches her in the mirror, clutching even harder to the table as though anchoring himself from doing something terrible.
She rises and goes to him. He is not like Master, who she would never approach in this way. His golden hair is spilling over his shoulder, unfettered; in the candlelight, it is the luscious color of honey. She watches her hands move to circle his waist. In the mirror, his eyes shut as though with pain, and his warm hand clutches hers and pushes it lower, against the laced front of his breeches, against his maleness.
Sometimes, accidentally, she has brushed Master’s maleness while helping him to dress, and always, she finds it difficult to look at him in the days after, although he treats her no differently and seems never to notice. Her hand, though, seems to remember the soft heat of his flesh; she scours the spot until her hands become chapped and bleed-still, the memory persists.
Master’s golden brother, though, links her fingers in his and grinds his pelvis against her hand; his maleness is not warmly innocent but burning hot and as hard as a column of stone; his breeches are distended with it. His face in the mirror is contorted, his teeth clamped upon his lower lip, but his eyes are wide open and fixed upon her face. She wants to pull away, to feel disgust, but her dream is returning to her, her desire to be filled by him, and she opens her fingers to take him in hand, to stroke him through his breeches, watching him in the mirror to see the way his mouth falls open as he gasps with the pleasure of it.
She knows where these sorts of things lead. She is untouched but not naïve. She knows that he will take her to bed and have her chastity. There is hot heaviness between her legs at the thought of it; still, she knows, it will hurt. The size of him-even through his breeches, she can tell it. But she trusts that he will not hurt her.
His blue eyes in the mirror are gentle, perhaps even grateful? Not the kind of eyes that would watch her pain.
He turns to embrace her, to lower his face to hers in a kiss. His mouth is warm and soft; he coaxes her lips open and touches his tongue to hers; she expects to be disgusted by this, but the touch sends a spark of desire sizzling through her body. The kiss deepens, their tongues tangling; he nibbles her lower lip until it almost hurts, then slips his tongue across the place to soothe the pain. She feels the bed bump the backs of thighs; so engrossed in the kiss was she that she hadn’t even noticed that he’d lifted her and carried her back to the bed.
He lies her atop the furs and then begins to undress himself. He tugs his tunic over his head and tosses it to the floor. His chest is broad and muscular; his skin is deeper in color than Master’s and almost entirely unblemished. There is a white thread of a scar along his side but it doesn’t detract from his beauty but seems to enhance it, emphasizing the perfection of the flesh around it. His fingers move busily, unlacing his breeches; she feels her heartbeat quicken as his maleness rising from a patch of dark blond hair springs free. His legs are hard with muscles and glisten with golden hairs. As he comes to her, she reaches out to stroke his thigh, letting her fingers slip upward to the satiny skin of his hip and-growing bolder-crawl to the center, to bury themselves in the wiry hairs of his groin, to cup and knead the heavy sac beneath his rigid maleness, as he falls to his knees on the bed, his head lolling back until the ends of his golden hair brush the backs of his calves.
He falls to the bed beside her and begins to unfasten her dress, pushing it from her full breasts and nuzzling them, sucking first one nipple, then the other, making her body explode in goosebumps of pleasure. He pushes her skirt and her underpants from her hips with a single motion, trailing kisses from her breasts to her navel, then lower, until-with a thrill of pleasure-she realizes where his kisses lead in the instant before he lands a kiss with his tongue darting from between his lips to tease her at the source of her ecstasy, and her hands plunge into the silky warmth of his hair and hold him there, gently teasing and sucking her until she almost cannot bear it and he must pin her hips to the bed to keep her from thrashing too violently beneath him, until spasms of pleasure wrack her, and he does not stop until every last bit has been wrung from her.
He rises with a smile, brandishing his maleness in his hand, positioning himself between her parted legs and slipping a finger inside of her, then adding a second. Her flesh is tight around his fingers, and when he slips them out and thrusts himself inside of her, she is jolted by simultaneous pleasure and pain, clamping her legs around his hips in surprise, clenching his shoulders and raking him with her fingernails. He is so tall that her lips are at his throat, and it buzzes beneath her lips, his pulse throbbing rapidly as he quickens the rhythm. He lowers his lips to her ear; she feels his mouth moving against it and his breath caressing her, as though she can understand his meaning, but in the instant before he gives himself to climax, she realizes that she does understand, that his mouth moves over and over again, reverently, in Her Shape.
VI. Celegorm
His heartbeat against her back, curled around her damp, sleeping body, he tentatively puts his fingers again inside of her with different intent: They come away damp, but not with blood, and he is relieved.
I did not hurt her.
Night is falling on Himring, and one by one, candles blink to light like eyes in the dark. Taverns roar with life and families sit around tables for supper; tongues wag and speak of the gossip that trickles down from the servants who work in the fortress. Like a fistful of dry paper, Himring rustles constantly with rumor, each more astounding than the next, but lying in Celegorm’s arms, flesh pressing flesh, the servant girl hears-and so knows-none of them.