"I love you." It was simple enough yet complicated to say, and so when it came from Isulril's mouth, she found herself shocked. "I love you," she had insisted.
She remembered the day as though it were yesterday, when her lord had come to the apartments he had kept for her, when he was sitting in his study there, looking through some documents. He had looked up at her, apparently somewhat stunned by the admission.
"I told you from the first, darling, that you could never do such a thing. That it was not an option. It is not an option." The man turned his attentions back to the papers before him, effectively ignoring the woman who had been sitting on a low stool near him.
"I am tired of this life. I am tired of the men you have me entertain, I am tired of the treaties, the debates, the agreements, the handshakes. I am tired of making myself available to every man in Dol Amroth but you. How could you think it otherwise? I have obeyed you in everything. I have been everything to you but your servant. I have loved none but you. How do you think I could not?" Isulril's voice was like a soft keen, pliant and plying at the same time.
"Because such things are matters of business, and you know that I've a family. I've a wife, Isulril. A wife. I cannot go playacting at love with you, even if I wanted to. Which I do not." His words were brutal but true, and they stung.
She watched him take up the quill in his left hand, the elegant manner in which he wrote. It all only served to enrage her.
"Then I am quite finished with this masquerade. I am quite finished being your plaything, your puppet. When I came here, I grew to admire that men would look at me and find me beautiful. But now I know that it was I who was being used, even if you were using those men for your own political schemes. I cannot help that I fell in love with you in spite of things or even because of them!"
"Then you may go," he had said calmly. He did not even look up from his writing, ending a sentence with a flourish of the quill. "I release you."
Isulril could not help herself. The closest thing she had to throw was a lamp, and she hurled it at him. It smashed into pieces on the floor between them, the glass shards spread around them both. She rose and fled from the room, her bare feet cut and bleeding.
She took no time in packing her things. It was immediate. She would leave Dol Amroth as soon as possible.
The woman pondered this instance, this hurt, the hole that had been in her heart since. She looked at herself in the mirror. There were two bruises at her throat. Sighing, she wrapped a scarf about it, covering it, and headed for the door.
