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May 11, 1851
They have been fighting for hours. The songs in my mind fall silent, and I am a child again, seeking a child’s comforts. But of course, the sight of this journal and its faded binding has become too associated with grief to be a balm at any other time. If I turn back its leaves, all the entries will begin the same way: ‘they are fighting,’ ‘they hate one another,’ ‘we are huddling in our rooms praying that one of them does not leave us.’
One, or both.
Maglor stares at the words in distaste. He is twenty-one years of age. That makes him a man. A man who knew enough of his father’s recent mutterings to suspect that the East could not bind Feanor forever. Not with Finwe dead. Not with Manwe and the rest smug and sympathizing.
And now, not with Bauglir back from banishment, elevated once again.
He closes the diary. It is more than distaste--it is disgust that overwhelms him now, disgust at the weakness that comes over him at such times. His parents’ anger robs him of expression through music, and so he turns to clashing scribbles that march merciless and tortured over pages no one else shall ever see.
Where is the maturity in that?
He lifts the candle from its holder, intending to destroy a dozen years of muted heartache in the fury of a moment.
“Do you intend to burn down the house?”
Maedhros is in the doorway, a tired smile on his lips. He still smells like the stables, but Maglor will not chide him for it. Both of them are trying not to flinch, Maglor knows, at the sound of breaking dishes downstairs.
“We should have told her,” Maglor says, in a whisper.
“Told her what? That Athair has been reading maps for a decade, and listened keenly to Finrod’s stories a month ago?”
“You knew more than I. Enough to go to Fingon.”
Maedhros hangs his head. He only lets himself look ashamed in front of Maglor; Maglor feels a pinch of jealous pride, that such insight and observation belong to him. “I never know what the future holds,” he says quietly.
Maglor stands on a cliff’s edge, though he sets the dripping candle in its place. How foolish it would be, to light a fire on his desk, making a mess of ash and wax at best—risking real danger, at worst. The cliff’s edge is exactly this: doubt his father, or shut away himself. He is not Maedhros. He cannot have both at once, father and self, an eternal battle concealed behind a charming face.
“Do you think,” he asks very slowly, instead of making a decision at once, “That Athair’s desire to go had anything to do with—”
Maedhros’s face tightens, but he won’t say the name. Maglor has to do it for him, finishing his own sentence.
“With Bauglir?”
Maedhros does not look at him. “I think he was surprised by Uncle’s news.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“You ask what I do not know enough of to answer,” Maedhros says. He sounds wearier than ever. “Now, or ten years since.”
The shouting downstairs, which had lulled, rises again. Maedhros does not hide his flinch this time, and turns towards the door.
“The little ones?” Maglor asks, with a hitch in his throat.
“Not so little anymore, except at times like these.” Maedhros pulls the strip of leather from his hair and lets it fall almost to his shoulders. “I’ll bring the twins to my room. They’ll sleep easier there.”
“And you?” Maglor’s fingers graze the cover of the journal lightly, wondering what, exactly, comfort is.
Maedhros shakes his head. “Don’t worry about me. See to your candle, cano.”
When his brother is gone, Maglor blows out the flame and sits in the dark, attempting to shutter himself.
Ten years earlier…
“You must be brave,” Athair says, and he clasps Maglor’s cheeks in his warm hands, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “I do not know how long I will be away. You must look after your mother.”
I can do it, Maglor thinks. I am eleven, now. But he lets himself sneak a glance at Maitimo, who is two years older, and thinks that his older brother looks pale beneath his starry freckles.
Maitimo’s birthday was a week ago. Is he failing to feel his age?
“We will be brave, Athair,” Maglor says.
Athair nods, shoulders his satchel. He narrows his eyes at Maitimo. “Don’t chew at your lips,” he says, rather gruffly. He does not kiss Maitimo goodbye, but he rests a hand against the back of his neck for a moment.
“Athair,” Maitimo says at last, miserably.
“You must lead.” Athair’s hand falls away. Then he is astride his horse; then he is gone.
He does not return for more than a year.
The first month—April through May—is chilled by frequent rain. Spring thunderstorms crackle at night. Mother cuddles the twins in her lap. They are only three years old, and have grown clingy since Athair’s departure.
Curufin and Caranthir cry when it thunders. Celegorm pretends to be bold and careless. Maglor hums under his breath, and wonders where Athair is—out of the rain, or glorying in it? Athair’s blood runs hot, and so he likes chill spring air. He likes snow. He likes rain on his skin.
You must be brave.
April brings a knock at the door. Mother answers it. The twins are sleeping. Caranthir and Curufin are playing by the hearth.
Maglor is in the kitchen, washing dishes. Mother dismissed the servants the day after Athair rode away.
“Who are you?” That is Mother’s voice, and it shreds through the air like a tear in cloth. Maitimo springs up from his place at the table, tossing his arithmetic book aside. “The children,” he hisses, meaning everyone but Maglor, and Maglor dries his hands on his shirt and dashes out of the room.
He is eleven. Curufin is five. Caranthir is six. Why should they listen to him? But they do.
(There must be something frightening in his face.)
He bundles them upstairs and bids them stay in Celegorm’s room. Celegorm’s blue eyes, bluer than Mother’s, flicker uneasily at him. “Stay here,” Maglor pleads, praying that Celegorm does not take it as a challenge. “Stay here.”
The man at the door is a monster.
Maglor, the poet, would know.
Black hair smoothed back from a high forehead, high cheekbones. He has a nose like the point of a knife, and lips that look like a knife carved them.
There is rain on his hair and his long dark coat. He is as tall as Athair would be, if Athair was here. His shoulders fill the space around him.
“Your husband,” says the man, the one at the door, the one who Maglor knows is not a man at all, in the way that Athair or Grandfather or even Uncle Fingolfin are men. “I would speak to him.”
“He is not here,” Mother says. Maitimo is with her. Maitimo steps in front of her, and Maglor sees the man’s eyes, really sees them, for the first time.
They glitter.
“You must be his eldest son,” the man says. His hand—the largest, palest hand that Maglor has ever seen, reaches out, swift as a snake striking, and grasps Maitimo by the chin. He turns Maitimo’s face from side to side, fingers sinking greedily into his cheeks. “What a handsome child.”
Maglor claps his hands over his mouth to himself from crying out. Maitimo doesn’t make a sound, but he struggles.
“Let him go,” Mother says, and from under her apron she lifts the smallest of Athair’s pistols, pistols that he keeps locked up in the cupboard beside his bed.
The man does let Maitimo go. He rubs his fingers together and smiles, as though Mother’s gun does not concern him in the least. “Feanor and I had business together,” he says. “But he has, it seems, disappeared.”
“He is gone on business,” Mother answers, not lowering the gun an inch. “I am certain it is not with you.” With her left hand, she pushes Maitimo behind her.
Shame, Maglor sees, blazing across his brother’s face. Maitimo wanted to be the protector, but he was not strong enough.
(Is it about being strong, after all? Is Athair wrong? Does brave have nothing to do with it?)
“I will find him,” the man says, and his voice swells with anger even though his carven smile remains exactly the same. “I will find him, Nerdanel.”
Then he sets his tall hat upon his head, and steps out into the darkness. He closes the door, quite gently, behind him.
Summer is bearable. It is hot, and the garden keeps them busy with weeds.
“This is all we will have to eat!” Mother shouts, if she hears even a grumble of complaint. “Celegorm, do you think I cannot pluck tomatoes and mind your tricks at once? Stop poking at grubs, and help your brothers.”
The sky is bluer than hyacinths. The wind is laughing in the trees. Maitimo’s freckles multiply beneath the streak of sunburn on his cheeks. When berries grow and are picked, Mother pours fat little jars of jam in jewel-like reds and purples. Maglor commits these images to memory, filling the spaces left by absence, by fear and time.
Uncle Fingolfin visits in the fall. “Our father has not heard from Feanor,” he says. Maglor and Maitimo listen at the door of the parlor, where Mother chose to meet with Uncle Fingolfin alone. Maglor notices that Uncle Fingolfin does not say my brother. When was the last time Athair said that, either? “Where is he, Nerdanel?”
“So many ask me that question,” Mother says. Her voice sounds dull, like faded cloth. “And it seems not to matter when I tell them that I do not know.” Her chair creaks. “You may tell your father, and you may tell the gossips, that Feanor rode away in April and told me only that he would return.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I have never hated you,” Mother says, terribly calm, “But I would ask you, now, to leave.”
Maglor and Maitimo tiptoe away from the door so as not to be caught.
Winter is brutal. Maglor would rather not remember it. Maitimo chops wood until he can scarcely lift his arms. Mother rubs his chapped hands with salve at night. She counts their jars of jam, their sacks of flour, their barrels of salted pork. Maglor is sure she has counted them a thousand times, only to find her counting them again.
Snow falls heavily. Mother and Maitimo scrape it from the kitchen roof, which otherwise would sag beneath its weight. Maglor minds the children.
“When will I be big enough to help?” Celegorm demands, and Maglor tells him not to tease and whine.
Orome, the gentleman farmer whose friendship Athair has always been too wary to accept, brings them potatoes and beef. Sometimes he takes Celegorm hunting. Maglor wonders what Athair would say, sneeringly, of charity—if he were here.
He is not here.
There is one night in February when Maglor wakes with a song running through his mind, the most beautiful he has yet dreamed. Yet when he goes looking for paper and pen, feet cold against the floorboards, he finds Mother hunched beside the embers of the fire in the parlor. She is weeping into her shawl.
He does not know what to do; he puts his arms around her and strokes her hair as if she were Curufin, or one of the twins.
“Oh, Macalaure,” she says, and before he knows it, he is crying too.
April passes. April turns to May. And in May, when they are planting the late crops—this year, even Curufin can help—Athair rides up from the road on a grey stallion.
They have been fighting for hours. That is what Maglor wrote in his journal that evening. This is what he did not write—that it was Maitimo who ran to Athair first, as though he never doubted him, or hated him, as sometimes Maglor feared he might. That even the twins shrieked, Athair, Athair, in their clear little voices. That Curufin cried and would not be consoled until Athair held him close, letting him tighten his small fists in Athair’s collar.
They have been fighting for hours. That is what Maglor wrote, because it was what he remembered.