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He’s the giant of the mountains;
they call him Count Carrots.
How he hates that nickname.
Let me tell you now he came by it.
~
The twins are terrified.
This is to be expected — their mother is almost certainly dead, their city sacked, and they are being held by Maglor Fëanorion whose hands are yet bloody. But Maglor has younger brothers, and while he might once have been able to let terrified children sit alone, his younger brothers are now gone and gone and gone, and all that he sees is the shadows of Carnistir’s old nightmares and Ambarto’s visions of fire in the twins’ faces.
Maglor sits down near the two of them, and waits for their eyes to stop darting from his face to his hands before he speaks. “There is a poem that I heard when I was small,” he says, and perhaps it is unwise to speak of captured princesses and the giants they trick, to these children, but he could not have left them be.
They didn’t speak of captured princesses in Valinor; that much is a lie. But it is an old tale, and one Maglor heard from his father who heard it from an uncle who did not want such stories forgotten, and if helps — then it helps.
~
Some say he brought her gifts of precious stones
to tempt her to love him. This is untrue,
he was simpler than that. He brought her, I think,
bilberries from the forest, baskets of raspberries,
mushrooms, many sorts, which Bohemia excels in
and clumsy importunings, day after day.
He brought her wild strawberries, gathered from steep hills.
She was used to sugar and cream; she was used to pretty bowls
from which to eat them. He roasted venison: the smoke
stung her eyes, she said. She feared the spluttering fat.
~
“This is a poem my father told to me, when I was very small,” Elrond says to Elladan, when Elladan is young enough that he still wants to hear stories before he falls asleep but is old enough that the fairy tales Lindir makes up will no longer serve.
Elladan privately doubts that his father was ever small. But he sits wide-eyed and watches Elrond’s face.
His father speaks softly, uncertainly, of a princess going wandering in search of flowers, of a giant plucking her up and keeping her. He gets more confident as he talks about how beautiful the mountain was, of the rivers and the forests in the lands of the giant, of how the giant tried clumsily to treat the princess well; he goes soft when he speaks of the grieving king and queen in their castle, wondering where their daughter had gone.
The giant gave the princess carrots, which turned into her friends and her servants and her dog at a wish, and Elrond speaks of the magic with a wonder that makes Elladan feel it too, and the carrots wilted, and Elrond sounds almost pained, and the princess hatched a clever plan and asked the giant to count his carrots to ensure that he would never run out, and Elrond speaks uncertainly again of the giant going to look for her, and the castle walls that kept him out.
There is a long silence after Elrond finishes.
“Good night,” Elrond says finally, and leaves, and Elladan cannot shake the feeling that he has seen something he should not have.
~
Then the princess picked some carrots, the freshest, the strongest,
and turned two into horses, and one into the prince,
the semblance of him who she loved.
They rode away with the speed of a wish,
through forests of pine,
through thickets, past mountain streams,
into the valley below.
(Do not fear, do not falter,
do not yet fall behind..
Good Hope, stay by my side,)
so the princess prayed.
~
“My lord,” Glorfindel says in a low voice, when the children have gone to bed and Elrond hovers by the railing of the balcony, looking out over the valley. “Are you — is everything well?”
Elrond doesn’t respond for a moment, and then shakes himself as if from a dream. “It is nothing,” he says, too quickly, and then, “It is nothing,” again.
~
When I was small, I called his name into the forest:
‘Count Carrots! Count Carrots!’ then leapt into bed, half in fear.
He didn’t come for me though. Could it be that perhaps he forgave me?
He loves children, they say — may the forest stay green for him ever.