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“We want to go on the next patrol,” Elros announced at the end of their training session. They had practised longer than usual, all the way through the afternoon, and now the sun was sinking toward the horizon. “We’re ready.”
He would not have raised this demand with Maedhros, who was usually the one to drill them in weapon-work, but Maedhros was away at a strategy council with the Dwarves of Belegost. In his absence Maglor had taken over their lessons in swordplay. Maglor was a much more promising prospect: he always at least listened to arguments that Maedhros would have shut down with one look, and the twins had discovered that there was little he would refuse them outright if they were careful about how they pleaded their case.
But, “No, you’re not,” said Maglor, with unaccustomed finality.
Elros was taken aback for only a moment before he plunged on. “We are! You’ve been drilling us all week, you’ve seen how much progress we’ve made—Elrond disarmed Linuial just yesterday!”
Maglor’s face softened. “You have made much progress, yes, but I will not risk you on a patrol.”
“This isn’t us trying to show off, or be heroes, you know. I’m not saying we’re expert warriors yet. But we’re not children anymore, either. We won’t take unnecessary risks, and we’re good enough to be a help rather than a hindrance. And we’ll never learn to fight real battles if you won’t let us near any.”
“You are no longer children, it is true,” Maglor admitted. The Half-Elven twins had matured much faster than elflings, at least in physical stature; they were already taller than many of the Fëanorion brothers’ other followers. “But you are still young. And we have stolen enough of your childhoods as it is without sending you so soon to war.”
Elrond gave his twin a warning nudge. Guilt often made Maglor more lenient toward his charges, but in this case it was more apt to make him protective, and that would thwart their efforts. Elros changed tack. “You need us, though. Or you will soon, anyway. We know everyone else has been stretched thin, and with Eredwen and Eärion both wounded, every patrol is going out shorthanded. Isn’t that a risk, too? We can make up the difference. We’re part of this household, we ought to be doing what we can to help.”
Elrond could see at once that his twin had made a mistake with those words, for Maglor’s face abruptly went blank and impassive. Like talking at a wall, Elros had grumbled, on one of the rare previous occasions when their demands had provoked this stony, unyielding refusal from their foster-father.
“You are not part of this household,” Maglor said flatly, ignoring both twins’ looks of hurt at his words. “Do not make the mistake of thinking you are. You are hostages, no more.”
Elros said nothing in response, merely clenched his teeth and shoved his practice sword onto the weapons rack with unnecessary force, but Elrond hesitated, looking at Maglor. There was an odd look in his eyes that belied his otherwise closed-off expression and the studied indifference in his voice—something almost like longing. But he did not look at the twins as they left the storeroom, or at the darkening sky where the Evening Star shone above the walls of the keep.
* * *
When they arrived at the practice yard the next day, Maglor was waiting. “We will work on something a little different,” he informed them. “You may be able to hold your own against an Orc or two, but that is not all the Enemy has to send against us. You might find yourself facing more dangerous foes: spirits of the slain bound to new bodies, or Maiar who chose to follow Morgoth, and serve him now in wolf-shape or Orc-shape or worse. You must learn to face an enemy who is stronger than you, with longer reach, yet who may nevertheless be as quick and agile as any Elf, and who may surprise you with attacks you have not seen before.”
It was grueling work. Both twins picked up half a dozen bruises within the first few minutes after they finished warming up and began drilling in earnest. But neither of them complained, sensing that this was Maglor’s answer to their demand to join patrols. Perhaps if they mastered these new lessons, refusal might turn into permission, no into yes...
“If an enemy comes at you like this,” Maglor instructed, demonstrating a brutal overhand cut aimed to cleave the join between pauldron and gorget, “you cannot trust your armour to save you. Even if it stops the blade, you risk a broken collarbone, or a broken neck. Weapons forged in Angband are heavy enough to bludgeon as well as slash.”
Elrond resisted the urge to point out that it would take an enemy both absurdly tall and absurdly quick to pull off that stroke against an Elven warrior without getting stabbed in the armpit in the meantime, not to mention absurdly strong if they could break bone through armour on the off chance the blow actually landed.
“You must dodge or parry, like this,” Maglor continued, shifting his stance to dart out from under the imagined blow, then stepping back into range and lifting his sword to demonstrate the block. His armour was battered and dented, but the afternoon light gleamed off his sword. “Elros, you first.”
He drilled them in the move until they were both sweating and trembling that day, then added it to their sparring repertoire the next, and the next. “Morgoth’s creatures will not pull their blows! Do not pull yours,” he admonished, when either of them hesitated. As they grew faster and stronger he kept pace, pushing them hard without ever seeming to lose his own composure.
Only once did he grow angry: when Elrond, during a particularly grueling bout, dodged the heavy overhand stroke Maglor had first shown them with a swiftness that surprised even himself, tried a riposte, and—realizing at the last moment that he was about to actually land the blow—turned his blade aside. Maglor’s eyes flared. Elrond stepped back, appalled, though whether at the fire in Maglor’s glare or at the realization that he had very nearly just stabbed his foster-father in the side, he could not say. Maglor was breathing hard, jaw clenched, and he visibly forced himself to relax before gritting out, voice dangerously tight, “I have told you not to pull your blows when we spar.”
“But I might have hurt you!” Elrond protested.
“If your instinct is to turn aside when you might hurt someone, do you think your foe will halt the battle to chastise you? He will kill you, if he can, or maim you if he cannot.” He swung again at Elrond’s collarbone with deadly speed, and Elrond only barely got his own sword up in time. “Again.”
Neither of them came anywhere close to striking him after that, but he made them both practise until they could block or sidestep the killing blow without thought and respond a split-second later, snakelike, with any number of counterstrokes.
“He was holding back before,” Elros said, afterward, still breathing slightly hard as they cleaned their practice armour.
“He’s probably still holding back,” Elrond pointed out ruefully. “He and Maedhros have been doing this for four hundred years. I would wager they haven’t shown us half of what they’re capable of.”
“I wonder if we would have seen—” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Elrond didn’t need him to. The thought was clear on the surface of his brother’s mind, and even if it hadn’t been, he had wondered the same, lately. If we would have seen the full extent of what they’re capable of at Sirion, if we hadn’t hidden, if the fighting hadn’t been all but over by the time Maglor found us. Maglor and Maedhros had both been brutally honest about their attack on the twins’ childhood home, but hearing them speak of it was different from imagining Maglor’s swords coming down with the same deadly speed he displayed in the practice yard upon the necks of people they had known.
But that wasn’t a thought that would help any of them, now.
“Come on,” Elrond said, nudging Elros’s shoulder. “The sooner we get these cleaned and put away, the sooner we can visit the kitchens. I heard Eärion say he’d stumbled upon a patch of currants and brought back enough for tarts.”
* * *
Maedhros returned, but he seemed grim and preoccupied, and though he took no more weeks-long journeys, he was often away from Amon Ereb, leading what seemed to Elrond a frankly ridiculous number of patrols.
“Honestly, does he ever sleep?” he asked Elros, watching from a battlement as Maedhros returned with a small group of soldiers. Technically they were supposed to be in bed rather than watching from the walls, for it was late at night and they were not on guard duty, but no one had caught them as they crept from their rooms. In the twins' view, that was as good as permission to wander. The company had left late in the evening, pursuing creatures that shunned sunlight and attacked under cover of darkness, and were returning now by moonlight, though what little moonlight managed to struggle through the near-constant haze was weak and watery. Elrond was glad to count all who had departed among the returning party. Two, though, were being half-carried by their comrades, and more than one slumped with exhaustion. Maedhros alone seemed as unwearied as when the party had left.
“Or eat,” Elros responded, and then gave his brother a wry grin. “Though if he doesn’t, that probably saves him time at the other end, too. Oh, look, there’s Maglor.”
The younger of the Fëanorions was striding swiftly across the courtyard to meet the elder, and as he drew near, Maedhros dismissed the others and turned to speak rapidly to his brother.
“That looks important,” Elrond observed. Maedhros’s face was tight, and as he spoke Maglor’s brows drew into a sharp frown. They were headed back toward the keep, now.
“Well, we’re not going to hear anything from here.”
“Where do you think they’ll go, the study or the library?”
Elros considered. “Wine cellar.” Elrond shot him a sceptical look. There had never been wine—or much of anything—in the wine cellar at Amon Ereb in all the years they’d spent here. “It’s where Maglor keeps their private stash of pînnen now,” Elros explained, naming the harsh, clear grain-liquor a couple of the soldiers had taken to brewing in a makeshift still.
“How do you know?”
Elros grinned. “Remember when he caught us raiding the stuff in the study cabinet and confiscated it all? I followed him to watch where he hid it.”
“And he didn’t catch you?” said Elrond, incredulous, then shook his head. “Never mind, let’s go.”
It took them some time to make their way from the battlements to the cellars, and twice they had to duck into a hiding spot to evade notice from someone heading to or from a night watch shift. But Elros had guessed well; as they crept down the steps toward the wine cellars, they could hear faint voices drifting up toward them.
“…cannot stay here much longer,” Maedhros was saying. “We are too few to hold this hill, and once we are surrounded it is only a matter of time.”
Elrond exchanged glances with his twin, whose wide-eyed gaze he knew must mirror his own. They had known for some time that things were bad, and getting worse—but this bad?
“Perhaps if we returned to the forest, kept moving…”
“You know as well as I do that it was hard enough to protect them in those early years; that was why we came here to begin with. It would be even more difficult now.”
They mean us, Elrond realized with a start.
I know, dimwit, came Elros’s voice in his mind. Stop thinking at me so I can listen. Beneath his sharpness, though, Elrond could sense an edge of fear.
“The mountains, then? We have allies yet in Belegost.”
“Perhaps, for a time at least. But they are as hard-pressed as we are, and I would not see them caught between the Valar’s host and Morgoth’s.”
“You think it would come to that?”
“I could not ask them to harbour us without at least telling them of the risk.”
“No,” Maglor agreed, and was silent for awhile. Then, abruptly, he said, “I think Elrond and Elros should start joining the patrols.”
There was a spluttering sound that might have been Maedhros choking on a swallow of pînnen. In the stairwell, Elrond and Elros exchanged another silent glance, this one charged with surprise and more than a little excitement.
“I have just recounted how much worse things have grown in the lands around Amon Ereb, and you want to send them out now?” Maedhros’s voice sounded strained, perhaps from liquor in his windpipe or perhaps from horror at Maglor’s suggestion, or both.
A rustle of cloth: Maglor shrugging, Elrond thought. “Elros asked me, some time ago. I told him no at the time. But he said we needed the extra swords, or would soon, and he's not wrong. We were short two fighters before your expedition today; now we are short four, for as long as it takes them to heal.”
“And if it is Elrond or Elros who is wounded next? Or killed?” Maedhros sounded more agitated than they had ever heard him. He drew in a sharp breath before he said, in a slightly calmer voice, “They are hostages, not soldiers of the House of Fëanor. You’d do well to remember that, brother. They are no use to us dead.”
A wave of resentment from Elros; or perhaps it was Elrond’s own resentment washing over them both.
“You are right; we will not be able to protect them forever.” Maglor’s voice was terribly sad.
You don’t think they’ll try to send us away, do you? asked Elros, silently. The suggestion had come up more than once, rather to the twins’ horror, but always the journey to Círdan or Gil-galad was too long and too dangerous, or immediate needs too pressing, for the suggestion to become a plan, or a plan to be put into action.
They can’t, not now, Elrond replied, unsure whether he was reassuring Elros or himself. They need us. If only as bargaining chips, he thought miserably, and not foster-sons or even fighters; still, one way or another, Maedhros and Maglor needed them.
“Morgoth grows stronger; the Valar draw closer; their father holds a Silmaril,” Maglor said bleakly. “Whatever Doom finds us, we will not be able to protect them forever. But we can make sure they know how to protect themselves.”
“We already train them in every type of weapon we have, not to mention the arts of mind and word and song. For whose sake would you send them on patrols? Theirs? Or your own?”
There was another silence from below.
“Elrond nearly scored a touch on me in the practice yard, while you were away,” Maglor said eventually.
“I had noticed how much they have improved. That doesn’t mean we can send them into the wilds.”
“He would have hit, if he hadn’t pulled the blow at the last.”
Silence again, this time lasting so long that Elrond wondered whether Maedhros and Maglor might be conferring mind-to-mind despite Maedhros’s well-known aversion to ósanwe, or whether they had simply drifted into reverie.
Then, at last, Maedhros sighed and said, “Very well.”
Had he just—? Shock kept the twins frozen on the stairwell until they heard footsteps approach the cellar door. Then Elros yanked Elrond upright, and together they retreated as quickly as they could without making any noise. There was no time to return to their bedchambers, so they ducked into a pantry as Maedhros ascended, looking wearier than they had ever seen him. Maglor followed a few steps behind. Maedhros passed their hiding place without pause, and they sagged in relief—but then Maglor, who had just crossed the pantry doorway, stopped and looked back, right toward where the twins crouched hidden. They held their breath. But he said nothing, merely turned again and continued along the corridor.
* * *
They were barely two leagues from Amon Ereb, seeking the nest of the spiders that had been fouling the streams nearby, when the band of Orcs attacked.
Elros and Elrond were only a split-second behind Maglor in drawing their swords, as Linuial dispatched two of their foes with swift arrows. Maedhros beheaded a third, but there were two dozen more swarming after them, and all at once the full force was upon them and Elrond could spare no thought for anything but his next sword-stroke.
It was different from the practice yards, he would think later, vaguely. Wetter and muckier and with a terrible stink of Orc-blood and bile. Later he would be glad of Elros at his back; of Linuial felling an Orc with a throwing knife moments before it would have reached them; of Maglor’s sword and parry-dagger flashing as he fought, graceful enough to look almost relaxed even as he battled four foes at once; of Maedhros whirling with tightly controlled rage, eyes burning, bringing his sword down with a sickening crunch on an Orc’s armour.
In the moment, though, there was only survival from one moment to the next, and killing.
The fight seemed interminable, and yet when he slit an Orc’s throat and turned to face his next attacker only to find that none remained standing, it seemed to have passed all too quickly.
“You did well,” Maglor said quietly as they were piling the corpses to burn, and Elrond felt a bit ill.
Elros, though, was still riding the adrenaline rush of battle. “I don’t know why Maglor waited so long to bring us on patrol!” he exclaimed, catching up to Elrond a little away from the others as they gathered kindling to start the fire. “Clearly that was nothing we couldn’t handle, even if he hadn’t spent all those weeks drilling us.”
It was true. The Orcs they had slain, for all that they far outnumbered the small patrol from Amon Ereb, had seemed cumbersome and clumsy in their heavy armour, slow compared to the Elven warriors. None of their foes had attempted the quicker, less predictable attacks Maglor had been teaching them to guard against, or used the heavy bone-breaking strokes that he had insisted they learn to dodge.
All at once Elrond felt rather more ill. “The Orcs weren’t fighting the way he’s been making us practise,” he acknowledged, softly.
Maedhros and Maglor had been, though.
Elros, still charged with the thrill of victory, took a moment to notice his twin’s quiet misery. But when he did, catching its cause from the edges of Elrond’s thoughts, his eyes widened in horror.
They wouldn’t—
They wouldn’t want to, Elrond responded. And I think it would destroy them, afterward; we’ve seen how they are about Sirion, and Doriath, and Alqualondë. But...
That damned Oath. Why didn’t he just tell us?
To protect us, perhaps. Or to protect them. I’m not even sure he could tell us, Elrond guessed. It might not let him.
That damned Oath, thought Elros again, the tenor of the thought almost a growl. And damned Elves and their damned Dooms. Well, now we know, anyway. And we won’t let it happen. Elros gripped his brother’s arm for a moment in wordless reassurance, then charged back through the trees toward the others. “We’ve got the kindling, Maglor!”
Elrond stared for a moment at the bundle of dry brush in his own arms, fighting down the sharp ache in his throat, and then turned to follow his twin.