T | 1373 words | First Age
Some men are more beasts than others.
Bëor is very young, in the white-flame eyes of the Eldar, when he first meets Felagund’s cousins of the black steel and truesilver stars; not yet as old as an oak need be to offer a generous canopy, not yet as old as a river need be to carve out a gorge in its passing, but only a sapling, only a brook (though his hair is already turning iron-grey at the temples, slowly but surely preparing for the inevitable decline that all Men must live). Not yet as old as a journeyman -- nor even a squire, like those boys who arrive at the heels of his hawkish knights fleet and willowy and barely a span in the waist, who, carrying tack and plate and jessed raptors upon their arms, laugh in sibilant voices ‘one-twenty’ and ‘one-thirty’ almost as a mockery before scurrying after their lords. Bëor Felagund’s guest is not yet old enough, in the old-world eyes of the Eldar, to understand the difference between kindness and its perversion performed as kindness.
The prince of the white falcons is a strange man. Bëor, who is very young, does not at first hear the sound of his footsteps -- which is odd, come think, because he wears spurs that glint silvern with each long pace and his black boots are hobnailed like a soldier’s instead of a prince’s -- but sees only a sinuous shadow stretching long from the doorway before Felagund rises from his seat, and then a flurry of black silk meeting gold-cloth and green corundum in a continuous whirlwind of courtly gesture. The attendants shuffle away through the gap in the door, quiet and hurried. In the wake of their absence, the princes of Eldalië-over-the-sea exchange salutes, the golden wreath and the pale, they clasp fists clad in precious stone; they converse in the songful other tongue that Finrod has not taught him. They do not embrace, not the way soldiers embrace in the stables after a long patrol or the way brothers wreathe together kindred bodies like a pair of living lungs. There is a perpetual cavernous fissure between their chests, unmediated by boldness. The grasp of their hands is strong and unhindered by gloves, though, cordial enough in spite of whatever rift begotten in the mythical past lies between the pleats of black voided velvet and the viridian crane-brocade -- when Felagund invites his cousin to sit, the sliver of cheek visible from the rear rises as though in a smile. He reaches out. A white hand accepts the backrest.
He turns around and looks at Bëor without blinking, mouth askew in a grin with some curious delight.
“How rude of you, Finrod, that you would not introduce me!” he says. His eyes, too, are pale and blazing.
