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We change the bandage on Maedhros’ bullet wound every night after our brothers are asleep, crouched close by a sheltered, smokeless campfire. It looks like it is healing cleanly so far: There is some redness, but no discharge, and no smell but that of old blood and alcohol, when we wash it. All the muscles of Maedhros’ injured shoulder swelled and stiffened horribly after the first night we cleaned it, making it agony to lift his arm even an inch, and making tugging a shirt off over his head nigh impossible. I had to cut the shirt off him that second night to change the dressing—filthy as it was already from the bridge, it was no great loss—and he has since resorted to wearing nothing but his coat and breeches each day, the heavy duster unbuttoned so the rough material does not press against his injury. It is easy to shuck off in the evenings, so that he does not even really need my help, but I insist.
I do not want my brother to be alone, these days.
He looks thinner than he did before the bridge, sitting with his coat pushed down about his slim waist and the firelight lurching in lurid fingers over his shoulder blades, his ribs, his hair. This is probably merely my own fancy, as I do not think it possible for a man to lose that much weight in only four days, but then again I know he has not been eating, nor sleeping more than an hour a night, either.
“Hurry it up, Maglor,” he says, turning his body stiffly, until his injured shoulder is in the firelight. The hollows of exhaustion under his eyes are so dark they remind me of Celegorm’s disfiguring bruises. I would wish he would sleep more, but the sounds he makes, when he sleeps, have been awful to hear these last three nights.
No—I am not so selfish. I wish he would sleep more, even if it means listening to him moan in his dreams.
“I am hurrying,” I reply, as I peel back the dressing from his wound and toss it on the ground. I squint at the injury, and frown.
“I think there’s some swelling again,” I tell him, hesitantly. Maedhros tilts his head to try to peer at the wound himself, and shrugs his good shoulder.
“Do you feel dizzy?” I ask, probing at the stitches. Yes: they are definitely inflamed a little, though not severely, and there is no redness radiating out that would mean a serious blood sickness. What infection there is probably comes from the thread, which was from mother’s sewing kit that she left behind, and not the sort intended for sewing bullet wounds shut at all. I wish Fingon was here, with his knowledge of medicine—but no.
I cannot wish that.
Maedhros shakes his head: No dizziness.
“Any illness?”
“No.”
“Are you sweating?”
“No.” He pauses, thinking. “A little, perhaps. But there is the fire.”
“Let me wash it again, anyway, and we can check it again tomorrow morning before we break camp, to be sure it is not getting worse.”
“There will not be time—“
“If Athair must wait, then he must wait,” I say, firmly. There is a long silence after my words, and I realize too late how like a challenge that sounded. But Maedhros only sets his mouth in a thin, hard line, and does not argue. When I reach for the flask of whiskey, he seizes it first.
“I will do it,” he says. On the very edge of the firelight, keeping his watch across camp from the seat of his wagon, Celegorm shifts slightly. He will pretend, tomorrow, that he did not see us tonight, and I am grateful for it. It is foolish, that even in these circumstances I miss those times back home, when it was just me and this elder brother whom I love the most, but—I do miss them.
These private, painful minutes spent tending to his wound in the dark when our brothers cannot see is the closest thing I have to them, in this terrible new world.
*
Maedhros bites down on the corner of his lip as he slowly unscrews the flask, awkward with his one hand still so painful to move. He sloshes the whiskey over the wound with his good hand, pulling the torn skin apart a little with his other so the alcohol can get between the stitches and flush them out. He breathes, hard, between his teeth. The swelling around the injury is hideous, making the stitches even more grotesque. His hand begins to shake a little.
“Stop chewing at your lip,” I say, because I am miserable sitting here just watching him hurting, and I don’t want him to hurt himself worse. He unlocks his jaw slightly, but too late: there is a little blood at the corner of his mouth. I wipe it away with the heel of my hand, as gently as I can.
“Now you have to treat that, too,” I say with a lightness that sounds ghastly to my own ears, but Maedhros smiles, catching my poor joke, and winks with a shade of his old roguishness before tipping his head back to drink the last remainder of the whiskey.
His hand is still shaking, but we do not speak of that.
As he swallows, I pick up the pad of clean white cloth—from one of Caranthir’s clean shirts, now cut into strips and set aside as bandages—and press it carefully to the bullet wound, dabbing to soak up whatever alcohol is left before applying a new dressing and rebandaging the whole. I feel Maedhros tense beneath my fingers, but he says nothing. His breathing is rubato against my eyelashes, and I blink, then can’t stop blinking. His breath smells like whiskey.
To try to distract myself from the stubborn tears that are still rising despite my blinking, I look down. A glint in the firelight catches my attention: it is a small silver medallion, resting on his chest, strung on a silver chain. Maedhros has worn it as long as I can remember, just like I wear mine, but it is a prayer medallion, and so I am surprised. I have not seen my elder brother pray at all, since the bridge.
“You still wear this?” I ask. Maedhros looks confused for a moment, and then his expression clears.
“Of course. Athair made it.”
After mother’s design, I think but do not say. Already, I am growing accustomed to the ache that burns me hollow, when I think about my mother. It has only been four days.
I touch the medallion reverently with one fingertip, feeling the engraving against the whorls of my skin: the winged soldier, with a lance held in both hands. My patron saint is Cillian, who died a martyr in Ireland, but of course Athair had his first son christened after the prince of all the angels. My father has never been humble, about the things he has created and claimed as his own.
“Saint Michael the Archangel,” I whisper. “Defend us in battle.”
“The greatest of the angels, Athair always said,” Maedhros smiles, slightly bitterly. He looks down at the silver on his chest, and beside it the whiteness of the new bandage. “He was fond of reminding me I must live up to my name, when I was a boy.”
“That’s not true,” Curufin says, from where he lies with his feet to the fire, his hat over his eyes. I startle, because I had thought him asleep. Maedhros also looks perturbed a moment, but he recovers quickly.
“Yes it is,” Maedhros counters, his humor softening a little. “You were not even born yet, Curufin, to call me a liar!”
“Not about that,” Curufin replies, one hand reaching up lazily to push his hat back. It slides into the dust, and his eyes glitter as he looks at us slowly, each in turn.
“Lucifer was the greatest of the angels,” he says.
In the silence that follows, the fire moves. In the shadows beneath Celegorm’s wagon, Huan moves. I, stricken, cannot move, until I turn, and I see Maedhros, and—
And the look on Maedhros’ face is one I have seen only once before: when he stood on the bridge, and said I gave Fingon my word, and Athair tried to put the torch in his hand.
“Yes, maybe so, but then Lucifer fell, and forfeited that title,” I tell Curufin, sharply. “Isn’t that right, Maitimo?”
But Maitimo—Maedhros still says nothing, just sits there a look on his face like he is dying. Then he pulls his coat up over his shoulders, stumbles to his feet, and leaves us, walking alone out into the dark. I hear Huan snuffle, as Maedhros passes Celegorm’s watchpost, and Celegorm whispers Ho, Maitimo—but my elder brother does not even waver. He is invisible to me as soon as he is outside the firelight. Huan gets to his feet, whines, and looks at Celegorm, who nods. Go on, then, I hear him tell his dog, and the massive wolfhound obediently follows Maedhros into the night.
“Why must you always be trying to hurt him?” I hiss at Curufin, furious with both him and myself. My younger brother has gone very pale, but he looks back at me with eyes wide open, challenging me.
“Whatever are you talking about, Macalaure?”
My mother’s name for me hits me like a blow, like a bullet. I jerk. I nearly lunge at him, the words there on the very tip of my tongue before I can bite them back: I am talking about how I know you killed a man, Curufin, and how you think no one knows, and how ever since the bridge you have been trying to make us hate you.
For the space of a wild, broken heartbeat, I do want to hate him.
But he is my brother, and he is fifteen.
I bite the words back.
“Go back to sleep,” I say, roughly, and I gather up the soiled bandages and the empty flask, clumsy with anger and the grief after anger, and I carry the whole mess back to the third supply wagon with me.
The flask smells like Maedhros.
*
I lie awake all night, waiting for Maedhros to come back, but he does not. He does not return until the pearl-like pre-dawn, when he walks back into camp like nothing was ever wrong with him or with the rest of the world, and he climbs up into Athair’s wagon to rouse the twins. He raises his bad arm, to lift the canvas, and he does not flinch at all. Huan, nosing at his ankles, sneezes a hoarse dog-sneeze and trots calmly back to Celegorm.
It is bitterly cold, now that the fire has burned down to embers, but I see Maedhros is still bare-chested beneath his long coat, and he does not so much as shiver.
This also I see:
The prayer medal is gone.
I never mention it again.