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i .
The first time he kissed Nerdanel, she slapped him.
Feanor was familiar with anger. This was something else. He rubbed his cheek and stared at her. She had folded her arms over that stiff gray bodice, cut for a slimmer figure than hers, and her cheeks were almost as red as her hair.
“What was that for?” he demanded, deciding that the only remedy he wanted for the insult was to press her dewy mouth under his again. (They were very young.)
“I’m not that sort of girl!”
“What sort of girl?” he parried back, and just as she said, a hussy, he said, the one I’m in love with? And now they stared at each other.
“You’re in love with me?” Nerdanal asked. The blush had spread over her whole face now, and he wanted to taste its certain warmth.
“Of course.”
(He had known her just three weeks.)
She will come back to him. Feanor decided that the night he burned the bridge, and has given little thought to it since.
Little thought, through much will. He has not even spoken her name, save once—and then only on the night that drove him near to wildness, when he saw their son, the one who has her hair and his eyes and both their first love mingled, laid open by and like a wound.
She will come back to him. She has never been able to keep up the pretense of another choice. Feanor is not patient, but he knows that there is time enough for that, though there is little time otherwise. He has work to do, and his hands dance as quickly as his mind can direct them, crafting guns that are not slow in reloading, free-thrown bombs that scatter smaller explosives of their own. Many a day, he binds his face in protective masks, and Curufin’s too—his fifth son is the most willing, as ever, to lend him aid—and together they mix compounds based on Tengwar-coded recipes that no one else may see.
He will burn Bauglir to the ground, no matter what burns with him. If he lays his filthy slatted tracks on this free land, Feanor will crush the ties to ash. At the first sighting of one of his cursed engines, he will leap within the belly of the beast and send its wheels spinning to the far compass points of one of Rumil’s maps.
Already, too, he makes designs on Mount Diablo, where Maedhros sighted a blast that can only be of Bauglir’s secret craft.
There is little time for sleeping, or for waiting, or for mealy-mouthed conceits. There is little time for anything but the genius of his vengeance, and the pride of his fearless spirit, of his sons’ fearless spirits.
(They have been here three weeks, then four, and then it is a matter of months and Feanor is still counting.)
Two can play at the sorcery of ambition, of metal. Two will.
(He has forgotten that he came here to be free.)
ii.
“Carry this with you,” his friend says, handing him a gun so small and sleek that Rumil fails to understand how it can hold bullets for firing, “And you will have no need to be afraid when you step outside these walls.”
Feanor is his friend. Feanor says that twelve bullets, smaller than any Rumil has ever seen, fit within the chambers—and that they may be fired one after the other.
“You suffered a good deal to come here,” Rumil says one day, when their heads are bent over a half-drawn sketch of the Diablo range, and he can speak without having to look Feanor in the eyes. “Your sons have suffered.”
“My sons are strong and hardy,” Feanor says. “They will not wither in a frost. We had hardships, yes, but one expects such on the trail.”
They killed people . Rumil is not foolish enough to launch an argument on the shaft of such a barbed fact, but it is some thing Feanor will have to hear from someone, soon enough. When children kill, it changes their hearts as well as their lives.
He was not allowed to be a child. He picked cotton and drew his worlds in the dust, until he was brought into the dark-paneled study, where the master—younger then, but just the same as he is now—stared at him with black-glass eyes, and said,
“You have talent, Rumil.”
He was given ink and fine parchments, he was taught his letters and his figures, and for a time he was no longer beaten. Only after he began to stray was the collar locked around his throat, with no warning given as to its make.
“Oh, Rumil,” the master said, when he crawled back that fateful second time, gasping and bleeding, voice no more than a gurgle in his throat, “You must have forgotten. You belong to me.”
Feanor makes death into an art and calls it safety.
Rumil’s master mingled safety with death, and called it art.
But Feanor is his friend.
(Sometimes he wishes he could forget that.)