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Dawn is just climbing the eastern mountains when they set out—Celegorm and Maedhros, three of Athair’s men, and one of Rumil’s. Athair grumbled to Maedhros—in Celegorm’s hearing, though for once in no one else’s—that Rumil’s company was afraid of a bogeyman lurking in the shadows, and had only to fight smarter if they wished to fend him off.
When Athair said smarter, Celegorm knew he was thinking of his growing hoard of inventions, ruthless and distinct, which he trained Rumil and the others to use in the secrecy of night.
For his part, Celegorm still feels the shadows. The shadows, and the crust of dried blood on the stranger’s whip.
He escaped their camp alive, that stranger. He killed one of their men, and more of Rumil’s.
Celegorm wishes that Maedhros had shot him.
Still, they will be ready this time. Maedhros’s right hand never misses. Celegorm is nearly as sharp, and Huan accompanies them. Huan will remember the stranger’s scent.
Rumil’s land—their land—looks over the scoop of a valley, close to the edge of the foothills. The mountains from which Athair swears smoke rises are called the Diablos.
“Devils,” Maglor breathed, when he learned the name. “Of course.”
Celegorm is glad that Maglor is not coming.
He watches Maedhros out of the corner of his eye, much in the way that Huan watches Celegorm when Athair is angry or Curufin is snappish or the twins are whining about Mother, which they should not do aloud.
But Celegorm, this time, is satisfied with what he sees. There is color in Maedhros’s cheeks, and he has bathed and dressed. His hair, drying, is almost as dark as Maglor’s. It drips against the collar of his coat.
(“I’m sorry, Fingon,” Maedhros had mumbled, heavy against Celegorm’s shoulder.
Celegorm, who had been trying to gently lever him to the floor, nearly dropped him.)
They ride hard for a day, and yet seem no nearer to those distant peaks.
“I thought we were in the foothills,” one of Athair’s men—whose name Celegorm does not care to know—mutters, when they make camp beneath the cover of scrubby pines.
“We are,” answers Rumil’s hunter. She is darkly tanned, with hair almost as yellow as Celegorm’s own, though she keeps hers cut to the nape of her neck while his tumbles on his shoulders and is beginning to curl.
“You can travel many miles in the foothills,” she explains, after meeting a range of blank stares. “We’ll pick our way up to a plateau tomorrow, and have a better view.”
The men look to Maedhros, and Maedhros nods, accepting her decree. She eyes all of them with sharp distrust and digs in her pack for food.
Celegorm wonders why she agreed to come at all.
The camp is scattered, at least while light still hangs in the sky. Celegorm and Maedhros eat beneath a squat-trunked tree, some fifty paces from the others. The bark scrapes against Celegorm’s spine through his coat.
“I need one like yours,” he says, tearing a hunk of jerky in two—half for him and half for Huan.
Maedhros, as usual, is blinking into the distance like he is seeing something else. He startles slightly at the sound of Celegorm’s voice. “What?”
“A coat. Like yours.” Celegorm isn’t sure where Maedhros found the leather duster that hangs almost to his spurs; perhaps he commissioned it specially from a tailor before they left—a tailor who must have been bemused by such a request.
Those days feel decades away.
“When you’re done growing,” Maedhros says, unwrapping the raisin-loaves he had in his pack, “You should invest in one. Or perhaps I’ll give you mine.”
Celegorm is pleased, and hungry. He takes the bread and they eat together, while Huan drools expectantly.
“Reminds me of soda bread,” Celegorm says at last, around a mouthful. “Fuck. I’d give a leg for some soda bread. You?”
“Hasty pudding,” Maedhros answers, with a sliver of a smirk. “Though I wouldn’t give a leg for it, I think.” It’s the closest Celegorm has seen to his real smile in ages, but unlike Maglor, he’s not fool enough to say so aloud.
“Blueberry buckle,” he suggests, leaning down to offer a scrap of crust to Huan, who sniffs it gravely and then snatches it up with his front teeth. “Oh, God. Do you remember—no, you weren’t there—we were picking blueberries at Tuna hill and—oh, shit.” He snorts with laughter, half humor, half giddiness. Memories sting like bees, but he’s always loved bees despite that.
“You’re a terrible storyteller.” Maedhros is almost grinning now. Huan hauls himself up to a sphinx-sprawl, tongue lolling.
“Turgon was being an ass. Like always. We were—thirteen? Maybe?” He looks quickly to see if it’s safe to go on, but Maedhros looks like himself, even if himself still has a flask wrapped in one hand.
“I found this patch of deer droppings,” Celegorm says, “and when he wasn’t looking, Ris and I tucked a dozen or so into his pail and—” He’s snorting quietly with laughter again, and he can’t even finish because of it, but it doesn’t matter because Maedhros is laughing too.
“Where the hell was I?” Maedhros asks, leaning down to scratch Huan behind the ears.
Celegorm swallows the last gulp of a laugh, and since he has to answer, or risk the sharper stab of silence, he says, “Off with Mags and Fingon, probably.”
“As usual,” Maedhros says, after a pause. His hair hides his face as he scratches Huan’s belly. “Of course, you two never got on. You and—Fingon. Why is that?”
Celegorm could do with a flask of whiskey himself at the moment. The answer is, of course, Because I knew you loved him more than me, but he shan’t say that. Wild horses couldn’t drag it from him; having seen and marveled at the strength of wild horses, Celegorm knows enough to swear by them. “Too prim.”
(“I’m not Fingon,” Celegorm had said. And Maedhros’s eyes had opened and shut as he stared, and then he said, very humbly,
“I’m sorry, Celegorm.”)
Maedhros says nothing for a moment. Finally, he asks, a little strained, “So? Did poor Turgon eat shit?”
“No.” Celegorm exaggerates his sigh. “Ris started laughing and he figured it out. Screamed bloody murder. Mother was furious; I had to sit carefully for a week.”
“You’re a terror,” Maedhros says, laughing again, and then the laugh stiffens a little and his eyes close as if he is in pain. Celegorm can’t look at him like that, so he doesn’t, and when he dares to look back Maedhros is wrapping up their remaining provisions in a clean handkerchief, as calm as the best masks can be.
(Once, Celegorm told him to stop lying.
He doesn’t ask for that anymore.)
They camp in a tight, fireless circle, with two keeping watch every hour. Celegorm’s watch is shared with Rumil’s hunter. He would keep his distance, given the choice, but Huan takes an interest in her and goes to sniff at her knees.
“He won’t bite,” Celegorm says. “Not unless I tell him.”
Her eyes flicker at him. She says nothing, but she smooths back Huan’s bushy brows.
Then—“You brought him all this way?”
“Aye. Raised him since I was a pup.” He flushes; he meant to say, since he was a pup, but he misspoke.
She smiles; just a flash of teeth and a dented dimple on one side of her lean face. “You’re still a pup.”
She can’t be much older than Maedhros. She might be as young as Maglor. Celegorm narrows his eyes, but Huan seems to like her, and flops down beside her with a contented groan.
“Can I trust them, dog?” she asks softly, tickling his ribs. “Do they mean any harm?”
“We could ask the same thing,” Celegorm points out. A yard away, Maedhros stirs in his sleep, a ribbon of hair falling across his cheek.
She looks up at him. Her face is very grim. “No, you can’t. You came to us.”
They finish the watch in sharp silence.
Maedhros shakes his shoulder in the blue dark. “We’re leaving,” he says. “Jem thinks we can reach the plateau before noon.”
Jem, it turns out, is the name of Rumil’s hunter. So Maedhros has already charmed a name out of her—and probably has further designs of charm, if the past is any indication. Celegorm is ashamed of the thought as soon as it has floated through his mind; and saddles his brother’s horse as well as his own in unneeded apology.
The ride turns swiftly steeper. Celegorm’s mount—Juniper is her name, and she survived the desert as others did not—skids on the loose stones and Huan keeps out of the way of her hooves. The sky is grey with high clouds, but it does not smell like rain, and it is not cold enough for snow.
“Here,” Jem says at last, tipping her hat back. “We’ll have to leave the horses down below.”
Two of Athair’s men stay with the horses—Celegorm is glad he was not expected to—and the rest of them scramble up the jagged hill, scraping hands and sometimes faces, until they can hoist themselves onto a flat-jutting ledge.
“No smoke,” says Athair’s man.
“The wind is up,” Maedhros answers. “We should wait.”
Jem nods, and they stand with the crumbling earth behind them, layered stone beneath their feet. Maedhros turns this way and that, his hair bright even without direct sunlight.
“Anyone looking,” Jem says, “Will see you from a mile away.”
Maedhros lifts an eyebrow. “Let us hope no one is looking.”
Celegorm keeps thinking of the man with the animal eyes.
They wait, and Huan sniffs the breeze, though he will not be able to tell Celegorm if it is smoke that he smells. They wait, and at last, Maedhros says, “There.”
Celegorm follows his arm. He is pointing up and away, towards the snowy crest of the highest peak.
“I don’t see it.” Athair’s man says, and Celegorm doesn’t want to agree with him, but he doesn’t see it either.
Jem folds her arms over her chest and squints. The sun is breaking through the clouds. “What do you think you saw?” she asks, and Maedhros opens his mouth to answer but it doesn’t matter, for this time, they all see the flash and the swirl of black, and they all hear the thundering boom that preceded it.
The sound is like a gunshot—louder after it has passed.
“Mining?” Celegorm asks, when they have gone down to rejoin the horses.
Maedhros is shaking his head. “I don’t think so.” He seems to have a thought, but he won’t share it, which means he doesn’t like it at all.
Celegorm doesn’t like that at all.
“Building the railroad?” asks one of the men. “Through the mountains? Even this Bauglir fellow can’t be such a fool as that—”
“There are more things to build than railroads, if it’s an empire you want,” Jem snaps. “And it is an empire he wants.”
“So you know him?” Athair’s man bristles at her tone.
“You certainly don’t.” Her eyes are hard and her arms aren’t folded now. They’re straying to her sides, where she keeps not one gun but two, and Celegorm feels the same sick twist that rises in his gut when the prey spots him waiting in a thicket.
“Now then,” Maedhros says smoothly, moving between them with the kind of unpracticed ease that Celegorm knows is, in fact, a study of years. “We’ve seen what we set out to find. We shouldn’t go farther with so small a party.”
The tension recedes, just a touch. Celegorm lets out the breath trapped in his chest, and sees that Huan is watching him, the same as he always does.
The path back down requires them to travel by foot, leading the horses by the reins. Celegorm stays close by Maedhros, when he can, though Maedhros’s eyes are often fixed on the back of Jem’s head.
“What is it?” Celegorm asks, low.
Maedhros shrugs under his coat. “She knows something.”
Celegorm sucks his teeth. “She doesn’t seem like to let on.”
Maedhros shrugs again.
His brother takes the watch opposite Jem’s that night. They will reach Mithrim in tomorrow's afternoon. A light rain is falling; Celegorm huddles under his cloak and lifts the edge for Huan to crawl beneath it.
Maedhros keeps a respectful distance from Jem, but Celegorm watches him through his slitted eyes and can see all the ways that his brother makes himself friendly in posture alone.
He nearly falls asleep, waiting—Celegorm is impatient by nature, except when he is hunting, and he is not hunting now.
“You can look at me all night,” comes Jem’s murmur at last. “Nothing’ll come of it.”
“I’d only ask you one question,” Maedhros says, crossing his booted ankles.
“The answer is no.”
“It’s not that sort of question.”
“Well then.”
Celegorm doesn’t move, except for his hand, which scrabbles gently under Huan’s chin.
What question? he wonders, and yet he is still surprised when Maedhros asks quietly,
“Whom did you lose?”
There is a silence in which Celegorm doubts that even Huan breathes. The only sounds are the snores of Athair’s nameless men, and Celegorm curses their disruption.
“Rumil doesn't keep secrets from us,” Jem says at last, which isn't true, but Celegorm can understand what that's like, to believe there are no secrets. He believed that for a while. For a thousand miles, even. “I know you met Mairon in the forest. Fuck him, he’s probably listening now.”
“My brother’s dog would know.”
“Good dog. Better than the lot of you.”
Maedhros laughs quietly. It is his charming laugh; Celegorm cannot trust it. “I agree.”
“I never liked him. Rumil didn’t either. But he charmed the lot, 'til he strung them up.”
“I know. Rumil told us.”
“Tried to warn you in a letter. Guessing you didn’t receive it.”
Another pause. “No.”
Celegorm cannot look, but he hears Jem sigh. “I’ve nothing to hide. Mairon thought he’d scare us out, when the orcs came. Thought he’d take the place. He needs somewhere, or his master does. We didn’t leave, though. Rumil’s no intention of leaving Mithrim, till he’s carried out in pieces.”
“You, also?”
“All of us, also. Don’t quite care for the pack of you marching in red-handed, picking fights when we’re already surviving one.”
Huan nudges his wet nose against Celegorm’s hand again, and Celegorm remembers to keep stroking him, though cautiously, that the movement might not be seen.
Maedhros doesn’t argue.
“Three men went out after him. Did Rumil tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“Bodies came back with the faces carved off the skulls. You knew that, too?”
“Yes.” His voice doesn’t even change—how does he do it, now, and not when Celegorm so much as mentions the past?
“One of them was my husband.” She clears her throat. “Wake your brother, tell him to finish my watch. He’s listening anyway.”
They return. The sun is setting over the lake and river, turning it to fire or blood or any number of things that will keep them alive and kill them, someday, if life continues on as Celegorm supposes it must.
“A blast?” Athair asks, with his teeth bared as Huan’s are when he catches the scent of blood. “From the mountainside?”
Maedhros is staring at the floor of Rumil's study. “It would be a good location,” he says. “For a fortress.”
“That would be like Bauglir,” Athair spits. “Curse him. Curse the blackguard.”
(Celegorm has never even seen Bauglir. He has only seen Mairon and his animal eyes, Gothmog and his bull-squared chin.
Celegorm does not like to think of men without faces.)