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Your father sends you to study medicine when you are quite young. It is, according to some, a disaster. Your first autopsy isn’t on a corpse (not an accident). You have a habit of collecting butterflies, and fingers, and the classmate who finds you at it is later found in his bed with his head turned all the way round.
Better to run out of patients than patience. You aren’t meant for doctoring.
You don’t count years, you count lives. Your lives. You’ve had several—wealth and creation, wicked contrition, comfort and weakness alike. You owed nothing to your brother, and then you did. That is a death, not a life. You would forget it, if you could, but you never forget anything.
You were a bright child.
You were a child. (Just another life.).
“Gentleman, I would be the last to suggest war with the North. There are other themes on which I know we may find common purpose. Save bloodshed for a better time than this.”
Your brother was raised in the cold north. You preferred the plantation warmth that descended through your mother’s line. To your dead father’s horror, you flourish there. You don’t have a father, by your own reckoning, though you tell Manwe of his gracious gifts. You had a mother, once. How long ago is that life?
You think about mothers when you meet the rag-tag Irish. One has eyes you’d like to see in glass, a chin you’d like to shatter. Finwe. He has your brother’s ear, his sympathy. He has a dull little wife. He has a son who burns like a furnace.
Feanor. You want every inch of him. You want a study of his bones, his fears, an autopsy on ambition. You have spent every life before, and will spend every life after, attending to such an interest: collecting hot hearts and quick minds. Sometimes, as it happens, the hearts are cooling in your hands. Sometimes you leave them beating, measuring terror with a pulse, because you really are a scientist more than anything else.
At any rate: You’d keep him alive.
You’d keep him.
He sees through you like smoke blown aside. He takes something from you. He wants you to know that he did it.
Anger is no new thing, and it does not surprise you, even when it boils black in your veins. What surprises you is how much Feanor wants, as if being father and husband and skilled smith is not enough to contain him.
You are going to have to take something from him. Maybe a finger. Maybe a father.
You spend a dull month trial over whether or not you will have a trial. Damn Tulkas, the inconvincible soldier—damn Manwe and his disappointment. To save your next life, you have to beg. You imagine yourself Feanor, imagine him begging. Surely there is a life—
After a time, five years of time, Manwe sets you free. You will never hate him more than at that moment.
Reclaiming scattered hearts, discovering new minds—all of this is made difficult, in your new life. But you were a bright something. You are something. Money buys everything except freedom, so you offer freedom anyway, freedom from fear.
Even Manwe glows with hope.
You’re glad that Finwe discovered you. You attended his death near enough to see and hear it done; it was the last dangerous thing you did.
Does Feanor beg, in grief? You keep watching.
You have a thousand eyes and they look at one family. When you were free, you watched the ugly mother with her beautiful sons. When you were captive, you watched the eldest stumble home drunk, arm around the neck of his patient cousin. That eldest—he would beg, and do it prettily. You only have to wait.
“I don’t think he’s ready,” Manwe says earnestly. “He’s always resented you…I am not sure he would be willing to believe you had changed. And now...”
Was it the murder? “I have changed.” You put your hand on your brother’s. His bird-bones repulse you. They are as hollow as his hopes.
“I know that, brother. But Finwe’s son…he’s fragile. I hope you understand.” Manwe wants you to understand.
“Yes,” you say. “Very fragile.”
You have felt his bones under your fingertips, too. They were like anyone else’s bones.
Without Rumil’s maps, you are set back. Your eyes are not endless; you never quite know where Feanor went. You only know what he brought back, and everything else.
(The diamond is as heavy as a hand. Clear as smoke blown aside.)
Finwe’s second son is maddeningly stoic. He does not even weep at his father’s funeral. (You are not there, but your eyes are.)
Feanor hates him, so you watch him. Him and his patient son, the doctor’s apprentice. Olorin is the only physician in the city you haven’t gathered to yourself; of course the boy, with all his sense of honor, would follow him.
Finwe’s second son is maddeningly stoic; his son is less so. You read them both through that lens, and determine that they would follow their hearts anywhere.
Back to hearts again—which are always a study in four chambers, one weakness, and blood.
You go North, your protégé west, your overseer south. You have work to do. You have eyes to open, and a habit of collecting your own enjoyments.
Manwe’s trust is no new thing. It does not surprise you. Nor does money, or the future, or anything but how content you are—
—to wait.