She shook her head at his words again. Wasn’t this difficult for everybody? The words ‘difficult for you’ made her stomach churn, and not only from hunger - she couldn’t properly eat anymore, and she didn’t even want to. She wanted to take a deep breath, to still the shivering of her body, but the air around her was as cold as the ice under her feet.
She looked up into his eyes for a second, then cast her eyes down again before she carefully leaned her head against his shoulder. “‘Had you known’, yes. You couldn’t have known though. No one could.” She bit he lip slightly, tasting the coppery tang of her own blood - her lips had dried out and frozen very early on, and whenever she even scraped them with her teeth, they started bleeding again. She didn’t even notice the pain anymore, but she was self-conscious about the look of it, and she licked the blood away like she had done so many times.
"It’s not your fault…", she muttered, closing her eyes against the fabric of his garments. It had been her decision. She didn’t have to follow them; she was not one of them, her people, her home, her family still were at the place she had chosen to leave. Yet she had decided, and this was what had come from this decision.
At least she managed not to cry, even though her shivering grew stronger again. “Do you….” she gulped down the knot that threatened to make her give in to her tears, “do you think that Elenwë suffered? When the water took her?”
“We– we should have! I should have realised… Nolofinwë should have realised! Realised what a traitorous, hate-filled murderer my uncle was. And because of our blindness people have died. Amarië, it– it’s as though I killed them myself. Of course it’s my fault, I swore fealty to that kinslayer!”
His expression softened as he noticed his voice was raised, and heads from the encampments were beginning to turn in their direction. School your thoughts, Findárato, for they will use them against you, his father had said – parting words before his force was rent in two by bloodstained catastrophe. He hadn’t known what Arafinwë meant until now; here on the grinding ice he did not know who could be trusted and who could not.
And then his love asked about Elenwë and his face twisted with guilt. Perhaps if he had been there, he could have helped Turukáno save her. If only he’d been there for his friend. But he couldn’t afford to think of such things, not now. His beloved was alive, for Varda’s sake, and if there was anything he could do to stop her from fading – which she seemed to be so close to, out in this cold – he would do it with fervour.
“The healers say the she would have felt warm, in the end, as though in bed at home,” home, such an alien word now, “It is a peculiar quirk of the coldsleep, apparently. In any case there would have been very little pain, it was–” and here his voice broke ever so slightly, cracks appearing over the surface of his carefully formulated calm, “it was over so very quickly.”