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His grandfather is turning seventy, and sixteen-year-old Celegorm is about to be cooped up in a house with far too many people, including his cousin Fingon, who is too much all by himself, squeezing into Maedhros’s affections as though he were a brother before Celegorm. There is all this, and then there is the fact that Celegorm can’t be bothered with any of that—not today.
Celegorm doesn’t brood (sulking in the branches of his favorite pine tree doesn’t count) but he’s been thinking of a few lines in his cousin Aredhel’s letters, and one postscript in particular. It bothers him so much he starts biting his nails even as he rides his horse ahead of his mother’s carriage, followed closely by Huan, and he only stops when Curufin urges Achilles forward and gives him a scornful glance.
When the small caravan arrives at its destination, the grand house of Fingolfin, Celegorm barely musters enough politeness to bow to his aunt and uncle, and to refrain from breaking Turgon’s hand when he grasps it.
(He does not shake Fingon’s hand, but he does shoot a barbed “why are you here? shouldn’t you be getting under Maedhros’s feet?” before stalking past a grasping Argon and vanishing with his favorite cousin in tow.)
“He sent me asters, Celegorm. Asters.” Aredhel sits atop a hay bale in Fingolfin’s stable, pink skirt draped haphazardly over the straw. She holds her back and shoulders straight, as she has been taught, and scrapes dried mud from a horse-blanket with an iron comb, as she has not been taught.
(At least, not by anyone who calls her sister or daughter.)
Celegorm stands stock-still in front of his cousin, sweat seeping through his clothes. The June day is hot, and the road here was long, and his golden hair is wet against the back of his neck.
“I don’t understand,” he says. “What the hell do asters have to do with anything?”
Aredhel gives the horse blanket a particularly vicious stroke, and dust puffs up. She wrinkles her nose. “Dainty. I gave him dainty. Boxed his ears.”
Celegorm doesn’t know exactly what Eol has done, but he’s still ready to punch his fist through the man’s ribs, or maybe his throat. He’s proud of Aredhel, though, for having at the slimy bastard.
Yet again, he is worried. Aredhel is a strong girl, so much more spirited than her stupid, high-and-mighty brothers, but she is two years younger than Celegorm. Eol himself is twenty-three, a gloomy schoolmaster who last year took Turgon under his vulture-like wing. No, not a vulture.
Celegorm had met him only one time, almost a year ago, and thought him most like a rat with a twitchy nose and overlarge whiskers.
He said exactly that to Turgon, who never forgave him.
Celegorm is used to Turgon hating him. It’s as natural as a stag rutting against a sapling, though Turgon could never be compared to such a magnificent animal. And Celegorm is no tree.
Aredhel’s hands keep moving, keep beating the brush against the blanket even though mud and dust is no longer visible. She is unsettled, and Celegorm is determined to know why.
Aredhel wouldn’t go on and on about something that didn’t matter to her, because she isn’t like that.
Eol must have done something dreadful. Maybe it is the flowers, maybe something more.
Celegorm’s cheeks begin to heat, and he pulls the horse blanket out of Aredhel’s hands and throws it over a stall door.
“Celegorm,” Aredhel snaps, “I wasn’t done.”
But Celegorm needs her to focus, to spill everything as quickly as possible. He is trying not to tear off at once, because contrary to popular belief, he does think before he acts. Sometimes.
He grabs Aredhel’s hands and squeezes them, as gently as he is able.
If Eol has laid so much as his little pinky on Aredhel, Celegorm is going to snap every bone in his body and shove his face in a pile of dung.
He grits his teeth and catches his cousin’s eye.
“You asked me to thrash him,” Celegorm says. “Why?”
Aredhel snatches her hands away from him. “I’m not an injured dove for you to take in and heal,” she says. “And I prefer that you not be tried for murder. Anyway, like I said, I already gave him what for.”
Celegorm crosses his arms, to keep himself from swinging them about in frustration, and glances to the side, looking for Huan. He’s about ready to take the dog with him and let him gnaw on Eol’s bones.
“Damn it, Aredhel, I’ll tan his worthless hide just because I feel like it,” Celegorm retorts. “Least you could do is give me a good reason.”
Aredhel does not flinch at Celegorm’s rough manner. She never has.
“If you must know,” she says, shrugging, “I was running an errand for Mother and he stopped me in an alleyway and tried to kiss me. That was when I smacked his ears. They bled, and he didn’t follow me after that.”
Celegorm whirls, cursing in words he has only heard Maglor use. As he rushes out of the stable, he breathes in sharply, and he can almost taste Eol’s blood hanging in the hot summer air.
Aredhel is fourteen. Damn Eol to hell. Dung is too good for him.
Celegorm doesn’t know the city, doesn’t know Eol, but hunting is the same to him whether the forest is made of trees or board and stone. He can follow a trail, or he can wait at the watering hole.
Celegorm storms the house, a hurricane cloud of gold and spitting anger, and finds Turgon sitting by himself on a window seat, nose buried in the Daily Herald. Celegorm practically rips the newspaper in two when he pulls it out of his cousin’s hands, and then he grabs Turgon by the collar.
“Your friend,” Celegorm says, shaking his cousin so his eyes blink in surprise. “Eol, where does he spend his afternoons?”
Turgon flushes red, and tries to pry Celegorm’s fingers off his clothes, but they have formed a vise he cannot escape from. The cousins may be of the same age, and Turgon is no weakling, but Celegorm takes after Maedhros in height and surpasses his brother in brute strength.
“He’s not my friend,” Turgon says, giving up his struggle at last. “He was—is—a mentor. But he’s been absent of late. I hardly know him anymore.”
So he simpers on for more than a minute, too long for Celegorm, and getting the information he needs is like picking buckshot cleanly out of a rabbit.
Still, he finds his prize in the end, the name of the gentlemen’s club Eol frequents, though he is no gentleman.
Celegorm does not stay even to find Huan, or to gather Fingon and Turgon and to pound into them just how useless they are as brothers.
Fools and idiots.
Maedhros would have known.
Celegorm hates the city, hates the streets and the mud and the noise and the smell and the people oh God the people are rank and rude. Even the heat is worse in the city—sweltering, limpid, suffocating. It says something that Celegorm notices this, because he has been simmering for two hours, the length of time he has spent navigating the maze of streets and oppressive buildings.
This is a forest he could do without. How his older brothers can stand it is beyond him.
Kett Club has a brown stone front, cracked like lightning, or rivers stretching and forking down the length of a map. There is a rich, dark wood door and a sign that says, “Members Only.”
Celegorm slams his broad shoulder against the door, and it gives way, as does the coat attendant on the other side.
“Please, sir, you have to leave, you don’t have a membership, you—”
Celegorm pushes his way down the narrow, poorly lit passage, tilting his head around dusty iron sconces.
It’s as though he is descending into a bear’s winter cave, or a cougar’s hideout, and adrenaline spikes and thrills throughout his veins and he almost shivers.
The common area of the club is scattered with expensive leather chairs in a middling state of repair, shelved with almost as many books as are in the library at Formenos, and centered around an ebony black table with a deep blue velvet covering.
Eol sits here, playing poker with two other men, and a third who appears to be missing, by the look of the poker chips stacked neatly in front of an empty chair. There are several other men seated about the room, reading newspapers or journals.
Celegorm stands at the end of the passageway, just in the shadows, forcing quiet, even breath.
Little more then twelve feet from him, his prey relaxes, leaning back in his chair, one leg resting across his knee. Eol fans himself with playing cards, and smooths his thick, caterpillar-like mustache with two fingers pinched together. His hair is peaked in the center of his forehead and brushed out to the side and upward. Celegorm will not insult any bird he knows by comparing this foppish bastard to it.
Celegorm waits and waits and maybe two minutes have gone by and Eol still has not noticed Celegorm’s eyes gleaming from the dark passageway—and two minutes is a mere second to a patient hunter but Eol is not deserving prey.
Celegorm thinks of Aredhel’s quick feet and sharp tongue and wild, free, surprising mind, and suddenly he knows that this is not a hunt. This isn’t a game and it isn’t a meal. It’s going to be an obliteration.
A lynx’s smile grows on Celegorm’s lips, and he abandons the shadows.
“Who—” Eol does not finish his question.
Celegorm hurls himself out of darkness, a golden hurricane set loose in one snap of judgment, and he strains his muscles and upends the heavy poker table, flipping it back towards Eol, who leaps out of his chair, barely evading being crushed into human flour.
Eol’s companions stand in shock, pull themselves together just enough to advance toward Celegorm, but he grabs their hair and knocks their heads together, a crueler, more merited version of his occasional horseplay with the twins. They crash to the ground and stay there, blinking.
“Sir, what means this most abased behavior?” Eol is standing on the other side of his chair, trying to catch his breath. “Hold, do I know you?”
“You’re the only one who’s rotten,” Celegorm says. “A week-old carcass even a coyote wouldn’t nibble.” And then, before Eol can open his thin, radish-red lips, Celegorm lunges forward, swinging his fist.
Eol ducks, barely escaping a nasty blow to his lips.
He is seven years older than Celegorm, but he’s a good two inches shorter, and his skin is soft as butter. Yellowish white like butter too, and it only gets paler as he looks Celegorm up and down.
“I can’t fight a child,” Eol says, loftily as he is able.
“You won’t,” Celegorm retorts, and before Eol can respond, Celegorm grabs him under the shoulders, lifts him off his feet, and throws him into the wood-paneled wall.
One of the other men in the room, a serious looking fellow with dark eyes and a thick encyclopedia in his hand, jumps up from his chair as though he would go to Eol’s aid, but Celegorm whirls on him, snarling like a wolf.
“He tried to kiss my fourteen-year-old cousin. Side him and I’ll split your skull with your own book.”
The man freezes, and Celegorm turns his attention back to Eol. He has staggered to his feet.
“How dare you treat me thus,” he begins, but Celegorm undercuts his jaw with a vicious strike, and then he grabs Eol’s rumpled jacket and holds him upright and hits him again and again and again, until—
“What the hell? Celegorm?”
Celegorm shakes with fury and the powerful urge to knock out a few more of Eol’s teeth, but he recognizes the voice, the tone, the shiver that runs down his spine every time his eldest brother has ever caught him in the middle of mischief too great for understanding words.
Celegorm drops Eol like a bag of rotting potatoes, and Eol falls and thumps against the floor like a bag of rotting potatoes, and Celegorm turns to find Maedhros standing in shock.
His brother holds a dark green bottle in one hand and balances a stack of four short glasses in another. His wine-colored coat is probably expensive and flawless, which Celegorm neither knows nor cares about, but his expression is nigh blank, and his lion-glorious copper hair is dull in the poor light of the club. It lies flat and limp, too, and normally Celegorm wouldn’t care about this, seeing as fashion is a fool’s obsession, except the days Maedhros does not take good care of his hair are the days he has always seemed sadder to Celegorm.
Days when he snaps at Maglor, seeks out the twins and finds excuses to hug them, and bites his lip at Curufin’s mere existence.
Celegorm isn’t dumb. He knows Curufin is a special sort of brat.
“Celegorm.”
Maedhros has set his burdens down on a side table next to a few inches of candle and flame, and he steps forward.
“What are you doing?”
Celegorm looks from Maedhros to Eol, sitting slumped against the wall in a bleeding mess, sniffling like a baby. Most of the blood is from his nose, and he’ll probably have a black eye, but on the whole he looks far better off then Celegorm intended to leave him.
“He deserves worse,” Celegorm says, shrugging. He explains, and Maedhros listens, and the other men in the room hear, and Eol wipes blood from his face with his jacket sleeve, staining it with rust.
The expression on Maedhros’s face transforms. It is no longer blank, but a controlled mask that does not conceal the fire in his eyes. Everything about him sharpens, from his cheekbones to his jaw to his gaze to his shoulders as he breathes in and forgets to breathe out.
“Celegorm,” Maedhros says, “help Eol stand, would you?”
He has no idea of his brother’s intentions, but Celegorm grips Eol under the armpit and hauls him to his feet. Eol stands, and stutters profuse and disgusting thanks to Maedhros for understanding and mercy and other such nonsense.
“You should sit down, friend,” Maedhros says. His voice is soft, and he guides Eol to his armchair and brushes dust off Eol’s sleeves and straightens his rather poofy cravat, or tie, or whatever they call it, and Celegorm watches his brother’s movements in fascination.
This is not a hunt, and it is not an obliteration anymore, but neither would Celegorm call it a game. He inhales through his nose and swears he can smell smoke mixed now with the blood.
Maedhros turns the poker table upright, as easily as if it weighed nothing, and leans back against the blue velvet. He lounges there, seemingly relaxed, except for his hands. He wears a signet ring with a swiveling bezel, a gift from Grandfather Finwe, and he twists the ring round and round with his deceptively slender fingers.
Celegorm has hung from those fingers in years past, swinging from them and cackling in delight.
Maedhros is strong, skillful, and can manipulate a pistol or rifle’s trigger more steadily than anyone in the world.
Eol is in the middle of blubbering his thanks to Maedhros when Maedhros stops him with a word.
“Enough.”
Eol shuts right up.
Celegorm itches to help him along, but his brother has other plans.
“I have held back my brother from thrashing you, not for your sake but for his. I would rather he not be charged with assault.” Maedhros tilts his head to the side.
“Yes,” Eol says eagerly, “I understand. We can leave it at this, an eye for an eye. I made a mistake, and I have paid.” His sallow face leans eagerly forward.
Maedhros smiles lazily.
“Was this really an eye for an eye? Your words, your actions, may have left a mark upon my young cousin that will not vanish as easily as your bruises and blackened eye. Fear is a tricky thing, not readily set aside. Do you not think so?”
Eol swallows. “Yes, yes. I see what you mean.” He grips his own hands, and his chin under his lips and whiskers drips with sweat.
Celegorm, standing to the side, where Maedhros directed him with the smallest twitch of his brow, rolls his eyes. Eol is bad enough, but to be a coward as well as a villain is too much.
The room is quiet all around, excepting for Maedhros and Eol, and Celegorm glances about to see what the audience thinks. Eol’s poker partners have wisely deemed it best to remain lying where he dropped them, and the rest of the young gentlemen peer around their reading material, fascinated and shy, like a herd of deer glancing over their shoulders to see what has become of their kin, fallen to wolf or hunter.
Except Maedhros is not here to kill, or even to maim. He has never hummed with Celegorm’s blood-thirst.
Maedhros looks at his ring once more and adjusts it so that the elegant F faces outward. His hand drifts to the side, palm up, and it floats just above the burning candle. Slowly, Maedhros begins to let it drift downward. The hand nears the flame, nearer and nearer, until the ring hovers directly over it.
“I wonder,” Maedhros murmurs, as if to himself, “what it would be like to carry a scar for all of one’s days. One unhidden—a visible sign of sin, that the world might know who one is at the very core.”
Maedhros’s lips twitch, pull to the side in a slight grimace. The candle flame practically envelops Finwe’s ring, and Celegorm has no idea what is happening. It is with the greatest effort he does not leap forward and drag his brother away from the fire that must surely burn him.
Maedhros knows what he is doing, and Celegorm trusts he doesn’t have something stupid planned. Maedhros and stupid are not words that ever go together. It stretches Celegorm’s imagination to associate his brother with anything not carefully considered.
“What punishment would branding call for?” Maedhros muses. His brow is knit now, and he turns to Eol with an odd smile on his face. “I think the law would be lenient with me, considering the provocation.”
“Maedhros,” Celegorm stammers, shocked. To mark a man at all, but especially with the ring and insignia of his family is—a reckless act, possibly deserved, but too cruel. Celegorm cannot see his brother, the one who used to pick slivers out of his hands and bee stingers out of the soles of his feet, purposely inflicting burning, lasting pain.
But Maedhros has left the table and the candle, and holding his heated hand aloft he descends upon Eol like an angel of judgment, his hair and eyes steadily afire with righteousness.
It is the strangest image Celegorm has ever seen, and he can’t even think it real, but Eol is shrinking in his chair and blubbering like a fool, and the entire room has no more air to breathe.
“Please, please, you can’t, you wouldn’t! Someone help me!”
Eol’s cries go unanswered, and Maedhros stretches his hand out, nearing Eol’s cheek and Celegorm almost shudders in sympathy for Eol, except he has earned all upcoming pain.
Will Maedhros merit the upcoming punishment? Despite what he says, Celegorm doubts the law will overlook a branding, least of all give him a blessing.
“Maedhros,” Celegorm says, blurting out his brother’s name. But it is at this moment that Eol slumps in his chair, head lolling to the side, and Maedhros stops with his hand and burning ring a six good inches away from his intended victim.
Celegorm swoops in, pushes Eol’s chin up with his hand, notes the lack of any burn marks. Maedhros did not so much as graze the bastard’s pasty skin.
“What happened?” Celegorm asks dumbly.
Maedhros stares down at Eol, eyes sparkling with sudden mirth. His voice runs light, and this time the lightness is not forced.
“I believe he has fainted.”
They leave Eol like that, a cowardly ruin, and know that he shall not dare associate again with anyone related to the house of Feanor.
Outside, Maedhros leads Celegorm to an evening pub, where he begs water and cloth, and he cleans Celegorm’s knuckles. Celegorm did not even realize they bled. Eol’s rat-face must have had sharper bones than he thought.
Celegorm appreciates his brother’s gentle hands, so much that he does not comment on the breath that smells a little too much like wine.
“So, you were going to play poker with Eol?” he asks.
Maedhros shrugs. “The twins wrote that you would be delayed for another three days, and Maglor and Fingon have both been deep in their studies. There were certainly worse ways I could spend my time.”
Celegorm almost thinks his brother’s voice shakes, just a little, but why on earth would it?
“Sorry,” he says, “Caranthir told Ambarussa not to joke about that. He caught them giggling over how we would all surprise you, and he even read their letters to you so that they might not slip in the lie, but they are tricky little fiends.”
Maedhros’s face softens in fondness, whether for Caranthir or for the twins or for all of them.
“It is no matter,” he says, anointing Celegorm’s hands with scented oil from a bottle he magics up from his wine-colored coat.
It is indeed a very beautiful coat, even Celegorm can admit that, grudgingly, to himself.
The oil is too much though.
“I don’t intend to smell like a wild-flower the rest of the day,” he says roughly. “Aredhel alone would give me grief, and Turgon will be insufferable.”
Maedhros rubs his head affectionately, mussing Celegorm’s golden hair so it is not so much a mane as it is like yellowing corn blustered about by wind.
“Celegorm,” he says, “you stink.” And he empties the entire bottle upon his brother’s head.
Celegorm punches him in the shoulder as many times as he punched Eol, but there is no fury driving the blows.
When he is done, Maedhros kicks Celegorm in the shins, and all is settled.
“Come,” Celegorm says. “Mother and Athair and our brothers await, and Fingon also.”
Maedhros’s face lightens even more than it already is, before his hand strays to his mouth.
Celegorm knows he has been drinking, but who gives a damn about that? Maedhros is old enough to consume sherry, wine, or ale whenever he feels like it. Athair has no objection, and even Mother doesn't mind so long as it is done in moderation.
Maedhros is far from a drunken sot.
“Come on,” Celegorm says again, tugging Maedhros’s hand. “It will take us at least an hour to return to Uncle’s house, and that will give you enough time to sort out whatever is bothering you.”
Maedhros allows himself to be led.
It is late evening when Celegorm and Maedhros near Fingolfin’s home. They walk close together, arms slung around each other’s necks, under flickering street-lamps, and over cobblestone streets.
Maedhros still looks impeccable, and his hair seems to have lifted of its own accord, and Celegorm still smells like a wilderness of flowers.
There is but one thing Celegorm wishes to know, before they are mobbed by brothers and obnoxious cousins, and it is a hard question to ask, so Celegorm pulls a Curufin mixed with a dash of Caranthir.
“Would you really have burned Grandfather’s ring into Eol’s cheek?”
The bluntness does not surprise Maedhros at all.
He laughs, full and light, and Celegorm cannot help but smile too.
“No,” Maedhros says, grinning ear to ear, with all the innocent mischievousness of Ambarussa. “But Eol didn’t know that.”