Chapter Text
The ground in California is as hard as any other ground.
Caranthir wakes for his watch—the second—only to find that Maglor and Maedhros are both awake and sitting by the firepit.
“Fifty miles more,” Maglor is saying, as if he does not believe it. “And we will have…we will have arrived.”
Maedhros leans his chin on his hand. “Athair thinks we should rest the horses for a few days.”
“Did you know,” Maglor asks dreamily, “That Mariposa means butterfly in both Spanish and Portuguese?”
He does not speak either of these languages, Caranthir knows, and yet it would be like Maglor to learn the word for butterfly in every one he could.
“There are no butterflies here now,” he says bluntly, joining them by the fire. That much should be obvious; it is December.
Since it is past midnight, it is also Christmas Eve.
Maedhros chuckles. “Maglor alone can see them, then.” He looks a little haggard, but they all do—the two months since Beleriand have been full of hardship. Mountains and desert and mountains again. Some of the horses died of exertion, with deep-throated groans and stumbled last steps. Athair ordered that nothing be wasted; they salvaged the meat before it rotted.
Caranthir had known the names of some of their scanty dinners, and had to cover his mouth with his hand to force himself to swallow the leathery chunks.
Of course, Athair said that if they were disgusted by it, they were not yet on the verge of famine, and they should take it as a good sign.
The wagons they sold at Carson City, before they braved the Sierra Nevada. The supplies were parceled between them, carried on the remaining horses, and on their backs.
Strong arms, said Maedhros to the twins, even when he took extra burdens himself.
To Caranthir, the desert was hell. Yet it was the mountains—beautiful and fearsome, meant to kill and crush what could not withstand them—that brought them grief.
Jethro and his horse took a tumble at the edge of a precipice, and were just as swiftly gone.
A good lad, Galway said in a choked voice, when the whole party gathered and Celegorm, who had been riding beside him, shared the dreadful news. Maedhros, who had scouted Jethro as a companion in the first place, looked very sick and pale, his lips pressed in a bloodless line.
There was no funeral because there was no body. Athair said, We must press on. The forty men who rode with them might as well have considered him a king, so faithfully did they heed his every word—and these words, too. Caranthir alone hung back to build a cairn of stones at the side of the trail, almost daring to think, to hell with Athair. Curufin passed him with a sly smile on his thin face.
Now? He asked. Now, you bury the dead?
He was one of ours, Caranthir answered angrily, and then mounted again to ride on, following as the rest did.
There had only been one mutiny. When water ran short in the desert, blame spread like flames to dry grass. The man drew his weapon, but Athair leveled him with a shot to the center of his forehead, before he’d even had time to aim it.
Caranthir doesn’t consider that a grief, though he wishes he had been quicker about covering the twins’ eyes.
The west has changed them all. If he were to say such a thing aloud, some would scoff and others would stare, for it is almost too well known to be said. Yet Caranthir, for his part, does not think of the Bridge—at least, not so much as he used to—when he thinks of endings. In those first days, they were all so afraid, so driven wild, so bloodstained, that they did not even know who they were. They clung to each other and to the simple act of staying alive. It is these last miles, brutal and unforgiving, that have answered the question more definitively.
His brothers seem to have decided who they are.
Caranthir scarcely recognizes them.
He jolts a bit when Maedhros nudges a cup of hot coffee into his hands. Maglor has been carrying the pot in his pack, fiercely protective of it in a way that Caranthir can understand, since he has done the same with his box of treasures.
Maglor has had less luck with treasures; his beloved clairséach cracked in two when they braved the mountain pass. He wept and beat his fists against the rocks, because that is Maglor, even now. His blood is hot like Athair’s, but his heart is much too soft. The men stopped to stare until Maedhros pinned Maglor’s arms, forced him against the shoulder of the stone, and said, with awful, quiet firmness, You cannot do this.
Yes, Caranthir realizes. It is Maedhros he no longer knows.
He drinks the coffee and sorts about for his courage.
“You can let Maedhros take your watch, Caranthir,” Maglor says. “Since he will not sleep, anyway.” He speaks a little acidly; Caranthir imagines that it is because his pleading and coaxing has less and less effect on Maedhros these days, Maedhros who smiles woodenly and does only as Athair commands, eating and sleeping only enough to get by.
No more, no less.
“Neither will you, cano,” Maedhros points out gently.
Caranthir says, “It is Christmas tomorrow.”
He feels, almost more than he sees, how his older brothers look at him. For a fraction of a second Maedhros’s stoic resolve breaks. A hairline fracture—through it, Caranthir could likely see the past. He does not have long enough to make certain.
“I suppose it may be.” Maedhros’s eyebrows twitch in assent, and he kicks a stray ember towards the bed of coals. “Celegorm gave up his mapping efforts long ago, but you seem more diligent with the calendar.”
Maglor’s face is troubled.
“I should like us to do something for the twins,” Caranthir says. He knows that the hierarchy does not favor him; he is not Athair’s right hand, as Maedhros is, nor Maedhros’s trusted confidant, as Maglor is, nor even Celegorm, who is more and more often drawn into private councils…
…since he killed a man.
No, Caranthir is still an almost-child in their eyes, and no doubt they—even Maedhros, who used to smile with light and laughter in his gaze—believe his motive to be selfish.
The very thought makes him flush with anger. Would they say so if they knew he had made room in his pack for a knotted kerchief of hard candy, bought with his own precious coins in Beleriand? The twins will have that tomorrow, if they have nothing else.
“Caranthir,” Maedhros says slowly, “We can do nothing for them. We have…” He bites his lip. Caranthir narrows his eyes, for the tic, at least, is familiar. “Athair is right. They must grow up, too.”
Something happened to him. Caranthir knows it could be counted in seven bullets, knows it could be counted in ashes falling from the sky. But he counts it, too, in the strange mismatched nights during which Maedhros left camp to run Athair’s errands. He counts it in that night spent at Beleriand, when Caranthir feared Maedhros might not come back at all.
Grow up? he wants to ask, bitter and as cruel as Curufin. I have heard you sobbing in your sleep. He does not.
“They are turning fourteen in five days, in case you have forgotten that too,” he chooses to say instead, and he sets the undrunk cup aside to stalk back to his bed. Let them have his watch after all.
He waits for Maglor to come and see what is wrong, or for Maedhros to confide in him as he used to, but they do not follow him.
Athair is the only one who has the privilege of followers, now.
Last Christmas, considered in its own right, was not one of their best. It was the first Christmas without a box of gifts from Grandfather—but none of them minded the absence of the gifts. They minded the fact that Grandfather was dead. Athair, who had been his usual tireless self for months—albeit with less warmth behind his eyes—took himself to his study and stayed there all day, speaking to no one. He did not even attend Mass.
“Sometimes I’d rather he drink,” Mother said angrily, slamming pans in the kitchen. “Disgusting habit though it is.”
Maedhros blushed and mumbled some placation.
Caranthir had no reason to know then, as he does now, that Maedhros drinks everything he can get his hands on.
The thought is an unkind one, another unkind one, against the brother whom he loves best.
When his brothers changed, did he change too?
Forests are a welcome reprieve from rock and sand and merciless elements, though the trees here are entirely different from those in the east. These stand like solemn giants, reaching for the winter sky. In the afternoon, Caranthir rests his hand against unknown bark and breathes in the sharp tang of their sticky lifeblood. He almost asks Celegorm what sort they are, but no, Celegorm is planning his next hunt and would have no patience for such a question.
Celegorm has a bow, now, from the Paiute people they met at the ridge of the mountains. He traded the silver Saint Francis medal he wore around his neck for a curve of horn strung with deer sinew, and the chain for a quiver of arrows.
Caranthir, when he saw the exchange, clutched his own medal close. He was named at baptism for Saint Dominic, patron of the Rosary, and the medal Athair made from Mother’s pen-and-ink design is something he would never, ever give up.
(Maedhros’s medal disappeared, not long after the bridge. Celegorm handed his over as if it was just another coin.)
Cousin Turgon used to say that Celegorm was wild. Caranthir wonders what Turgon would say if he could see Celegorm now, his hair a golden mane flowing beneath his tipped-back hat, his skin darkened by sun so that his eyes stand out bluer than ever. Celegorm passed his nineteenth birthday in August—a day noted only by Caranthir—and he no longer looks like a boy.
They called Finrod a mountain man when he first came back. They look little better now. Caranthir submits to Maglor’s attempts to keep his hair reasonably short and neat, along with that of the twins, but it seems a feeble attempt at civilization when they have all become wiry and strong and ragged with traveling. Maedhros’s hair is like a bright banner on his shoulders, though he—like Athair—has never grown a beard. Celegorm tried to grow one, and it was a miserable attempt, quickly vanquished by Curufin and a straight razor in the dead of night.
An act of mercy, Curufin called it. Curufin is sharp as a razorblade himself, but he can be amusing. Caranthir will admit that in the privacy of his own mind.
He lays on his back now, amid the cool red needles. Mariposa, he thinks, turning the word and over. Christmas needs no butterflies, but it does need something. Caranthir’s eyes sting.
“Caranthir!”
That is Athair’s voice. He scrambles to his feet, trousers pricked through with little quills, and swipes his sleeve over his eyes just in case.
The horses are tethered to stakes in the ground, since most of the trees are too thick to tie a rope around. Athair has removed their packs, with the twins helping, and now Caranthir sees that it is his own pack in Athair’s hands. He sees, too, that the pack has fallen open.
“What,” Athair asks in a strange voice, “Is this?”
It is one of Mother’s paint-jars.
Their family camp is a little apart from the others, as it often is. There are no strangers here to listen as Caranthir tries to find the words to explain that yes, he combed through the pack that Mother left—the one with little comforts of home—and took what seemed best to him.
That he has carried those paint-jars a thousand miles, useless as they are, for the same reason that Maglor still carries the pieces of his ruined harp.
Hope.
“It is mine,” he says, and across the fire-circle, Curufin’s gaze shifts shrewdly between his father and his next-eldest brother, as if he is memorizing them both.
“It’s—” Amrod begins, but Amras elbows him.
“C’mon, dummy. There’s sap-gum to chew.”
Athair is momentarily distracted. “Do not eat anything you have not first shown to Celegorm,” he chides, and Caranthir is sorely tempted to reach forward and pluck the little jar—emerald green—from his hand and return it to the safety of his pack or pocket.
He knows better than to do this, though.
Slowly, Athair turns back, collecting the threads of the conversation. “Yours, you say.”
Athair bought those jars for Mother, long ago. He recognizes them. Caranthir is sure of it.
Caranthir swallows. He wonders if this is how Maedhros began his endless lies; for everyone else’s good. “Yes,” he says. “Mine.”
Maglor seeks him out before supper, when Caranthir has been tasked with the unpleasant business of plucking the partridge Huan brought back in his jaws.
“I have been thinking,” Maglor says, folding his arms over his chest. Of course. Maglor is not Maedhros, and he never offers to help with tasks he dislikes.
Not since home, at least. Not since Mother.
“Huh.” It’s not meant to be an encouragement, exactly.
“About Christmas.” Maglor’s hair is longer, too, and it falls over his brow and behind his ears in what he doubtless thinks is a romantic fashion. If Maglor could grow a beard—which he probably can’t, since not even Grandfather Finwe could, and he was much manlier than Maglor—it would be a little pointed goatee. Caranthir smirks at the thought, and then takes in the full weight of Maglor’s words.
“Christmas.”
“What you said. The twins. I think…” Maglor presses his lips together. “We have nearly nothing, Caranthir, but it grieves me to not—”
“Live as human beings, with feasts and holy days? I should think so.”
Maglor all but gapes in surprise. “Is that what you think of us now?” He looks nervous, as though Caranthir has seen too much—and he has. He has seen men die at his father’s hands, his brothers’ hands, and he has seen what came afterwards.
What I think does not matter. “What did you have in mind?” He tries to make it sound like a peace offering.
“I…can sort through my things for some little gifts,” Maglor muses, tucking his hands in his pockets. There is a scar across the back of his left hand that is still pink; he burned himself while cooking, a week ago now. Caranthir finds it strange that Maglor still manages to injure himself in such…ordinary ways, when they have faced far greater perils than a campfire.
“I have gifts for them.”
“Really? From—”
“From Beleriand,” Caranthir says gruffly. He does not want to slip into the child’s role before Maglor’s eyes again, and so he scowls, too, to keep the conversation at arms’ length. “A few sweets. Nothing more.”
Maglor’s dewy eyes widen. “So you have planned this,” he says softly. “For two months?”
“Yes.” Caranthir jerks a tuft of feathers ruthlessly from the partridge’s breast. “But it would be a better Christmas with carols.” He does not look at Maglor when he says this, to give Maglor a moment for any flash of regret or grief.
“My harp,” Maglor murmurs, just as Caranthir expected. “I have not had time to mend…”
“You have your whistle. And your tongue.”
“Yes.”
“Then that is enough.” Caranthir pulls too hard this time, and the thin bird-skin tears a little. He sees the bloody muscle beneath and shivers despite himself. “But we will have to be quiet about it.”
Maglor lifts his gaze, as if the whole scene is too common for the poignancy of what he feels, and he must consider the changing colors of the sky, the fronded branches of trees, before he can know quite what he will say next.
“I wish it were not so,” Maglor says at last. “But it is. We will not disturb—Athair.”
(They are both thinking of Maedhros.)
Celegorm and a few of the other men brought back more than the partridge; two deer are dressed and roasted at the center of the campsites. They eat late, however, because Athair insisted that the firepit be dug deeply and the ground around it wetted.
No one complained, but he showed them his reasoning anyway, scattering a handful of sap-sticky needles into the fire, where they blazed up at once.
“Intriguing,” Curufin murmurs, tying a few into a rag that might once have been a handkerchief.
After the meal—in which Caranthir watches Maglor, and Maglor watches Maedhros, and Maedhros stares at his plate, dully calm—Maglor tells Athair that the twins wish to see the starlight.
“May we walk to the edge of the trees?” he asks. It is not far away, and they might have camped on open ground, but Athair insisted that they stay better concealed. Better defensible, he said, and everyone—from the miner-men to Maedhros to Amrod—could imagine well enough what he meant.
Athair frowns, and Caranthir knows that all of his brothers are listening, whether they guess the occasion for such a request or not. “Do you expect different stars here than in the mountains, Kanafinwe?”
Caranthir wonders at Athair’s mood; it is rare that he calls them by their middle names, though he was the one who chose them.
Athair chose almost all their names.
“We shall be quiet,” Maglor says, “And stay no longer than half an hour. We shall not step beyond the shadows of the trees.”
Caranthir has seen the other men writing letters, staring at photographs. Has heard them speaking of their families. He is right; it is Christmas tomorrow. It is only his own family who pretends not to know.
A muscle in Athair’s jaw twitches. “Not beyond the shadows,” he warns, and Maglor nods to the twins, who leap up and trail after him.
Caranthir puts down his plate for Huan to lick clean. His boots leave no tracks in the needles; at least not one he can perceive. Likely Celegorm would be able to hunt him down and shoot him in the throat if he very much wanted to.
At the border of the grove, Maglor stands with one hand in each of the twins’. There is not much light, but what light there is, they stand dark against.
Caranthir joins them. The hard candy is a lump in his pocket.
“It is Christmas tomorrow,” Maglor tells Amrod and Amras. And then, very softly, in his voice that Mother used to say was like the angels’ voices—
—though three other sons of hers were named for angels, and he was not among them—
—he sings—
It is very still. Winds could rage and tear here. They did in the deserts. They did in the mountains. But Caranthir feels nothing tonight, not even a breeze, to cool the tears on his cheeks. He waits to sing until the twins’ warbling efforts have mingled with Maglor’s steady tenor—
Hark, the herald angels sing…
And they sing, and they stand, and there are stars here, the same as they were and yet not so, for they are always viewed in the light of different sorrows.
When they have run through the carols that were in Mother’s little red book at home, and the half-hour is nearly passed—by Caranthir’s unwilling count—he unwraps his treasure.
“Bully,” the twins say, their voices a little hoarse and wispy from exertion, and they jam the sweets into their cheeks as Maglor pats their hair and scolds,
“You will make yourselves sick.”
“Here is a piece for you, then,” Amras says, shoving one into Maglor’s palm. “And for you, Caranthir.”
“Yes, for you,” Amrod chimes in, adding one of his own.
The candies are lemony, once Caranthir sucks past the salt of dust that films them. The twins do not mention it.
He does not know what else to say so he leaves Christmas at the border of trees, and walks back to camp before they do.
He sees a flash of movement. It is Maedhros, turning away from where he stood just out of sight of their little gathering, his arms wrapped around his chest and his face set with longing. His swift strides outpace Caranthir’s, forestalling questions.
Caranthir lets him go.