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Maedhros collapses, a flush of color in his cheeks and his thin chest rising and falling with quick, panting breaths.
He has been too thin for years, now, but at least this is the thinness of growth, and not lack of eating. With Nerdanel’s careful cooking, he has grown three inches this summer, and can look his father in the eye.
His father sits on the grass where they are gathered—Nerdanel, with Amrod in her lap and Amras tumbling nearby, and now Maedhros with his coppery head on Feanor’s knee.
He was never angry at Feanor, at least not that Nerdanel could (or dared) ascertain. Even during the darkest days of that dreadful winter, when she soaked and bandaged his poor bleeding hands—hands she prays will never suffer such indignities again—he did not complain.
When has Maedhros ever complained?
Nerdanel was angry. Fiercely so. But not six months went by before she melted into Feanor’s touch, letting him replace his owed apologies with all possible tenderness.
(Nerdanel is weak.)
“Did you see, Mamaí,” Maedhros is asking. “Celegorm hit the ball past the big oak tree.”
They have been striking a small leather ball of Feanor’s making with short wooden bats, also of Feanor’s making. The rules—which have brought Maglor and Celegorm to tears more than once—are beyond Nerdanel’s understanding. They seem to involve much running.
But she has been watching.
“Yes,” she says, smiling. She frees one hand from Amrod’s iron grip and strokes her Maitimo’s sweaty hair. “And I saw how you ran so swiftly, you were almost a blur.”
He closes his eyes, content as a sun-warmed cat. The day is almost over, and the breeze is singing in leaves turned late-summer green. August has settled in; Nerdanel's garden has been bounteous. She tells herself that all is well, and counts her sons.
Celegorm is rooting about in the brush at the edge of the lawn, looking for the ball. Maglor is staring at the sky.
Feanor looks down at Maedhros. His hand replaces Nerdanel’s, resting lightly atop his eldest’s head, but he says nothing.
He is thinking , Nerdanel decides, and even though it has been a year since they reconciled, and more than a year since his return, she cannot wholly ignore the tremor of worry that seems to course through her at the idea of Feanor's thoughts. All is well—but the workings of his are no less a mystery now than then.
“I want to hit the ball,” Curufin mutters, bucking his head against his father’s elbow. Caranthir is on his belly looking at grasshoppers, with Amras circling him, but Curufin never strays from Feanor’s side. Now he wears too dark a frown for seven; darker than the one he trotted out when he learned that he would have to wait until October to make his First Communion.
But Curufin, Nerdanel said, then—God will not see it as a failure on your part, to wait. And while you wait, you can learn more about what it is you will receive.
Curufin eyed her coldly, and demanded why Father Llewellyn had seen fit to visit Wales.
“When you are a little older,” Feanor answers him now. “Indeed, Maglor and Celegorm shall need a third for their game, when Maedhros goes to the city.”
Maedhros’s lean boy-body, sprawled comfortably loose, goes stiff.
Nerdanel swallows. “The city?”
Feanor’s fingers twitch, carding through Maedhros’s hair. He lifts his chin and gazes on his wife, as calmly as if he spoke of his day’s work. No, calmer—for Feanor’s work gives him fire, and uncalculated words.
“I have spoken to the finest headmaster in New York,” he says, in a moment where no one else even moves. “And Maedhros shall begin his education there in two weeks’ time.”
“Two weeks? What’s in two weeks?” And now Maglor is here, bursting with sound as he always is.
“Maedhros is going away,” Curufin pipes up. “Going away.”
“What?” Maglor practically shrieks—and at a different moment Nerdanel might have to hide her smile, at how high his voice still pitches, but she cannot smile now. “Where is he going?”
Maedhros stirs, as if some outside force draws him upwards, and he frees himself from Feanor’s touch to crouch, sharp-shouldered, like a frightened creature ready to run. His lower lip is between his teeth: nervousness. His eyelids flutter: tears, barely held back.
Nerdanel lifts Amrod in her arms. “Feanor? A word?”
She stalks across the lawn as her sons’ voices rise in her wake—all but one.
Feanor taps his fingers against the opposite elbows. One brow hovers higher than the other. Beyond that, Nerdanel cannot read his expression.
“I thought you’d be proud.”
“Proud?” Nerdanel keeps her voice low, for now. They are in their bedroom, the door fastened shut behind them.
“Of him. Your eldest.”
(I am so sorry, my darling, so sorry—
She said these words over and over again, for a dozen different sins (most not her own), and each time Maitimo looked at her, mute as he had in babyhood, and shook his head.)
“I see not what my pride in him has to do with your decision to wrest him from his home and send him off God knows where!”
“I hardly think my father’s welcoming home to be the peak of barbarism,” Feanor snaps, as if he has forgotten his own ire towards Indis and his half-brothers. But Nerdanel does not raise that point, for now she can read him, and he is—he is hurt? “I have recognized great maturity, great capacity in Maedhros since my return.” He does not stumble over those last words. “I have also observed that his mastery of Latin, his inquisitive habits of reading history and philosophy, have dwindled considerably.”
“Indeed, he was rather occupied with keeping us housed and fed." Nerdanel does not bite her tongue this time. “Forgive him, husband, for not attending to his Chaucer.”
Feanor turns a little paler but he does not take the bait. Not yet. He is always slower than her, to become reckless in their squalls. Against the world, his anger flares readily to white heat. With his wife, he waits, and sharpens.
(That is an ungenerous thought.)
“I can think of no greater way to honor his diligence and fortitude than giving his mind the training it deserves.”
“He is fifteen.”
“He is as tall as I am. And as you said, he kept you housed and fed when most would have shrunk from such a task.” Is that an apology fighting its way out through his teeth? Or is it just more certainty that he is right? “Nerdanel, would you deprive him?”
(She holds her first baby close, when the door is locked and monster gone. He shakes against her, but makes no sound.)
(She catches him giving his dinner to the twins.)
(She watches him run, after that endless year, into his father’s arms.)
“Get out of my sight,” she snarls. “I’ll sleep alone tonight.”
Nerdanel doesn’t sleep. The sound of Feanor’s hammer ringing in his workshop stays in her ears even after she is half-certain that the sound is a memory, the hammer put away. But there are others to listen for, too, in this witching hour—she wanders the hall, to see that Curufin and Celegorm are snuffling in pleasant dreams, to see that Maedhros and Maglor's door is closed tightly.
She pauses outside of it. Two voices, rising and falling. Voices, and sobs.
Nerdanel covers her mouth with her hands and creeps back to bed.
At breakfast, Maedhros barely eats. He picks at his porridge until it grows cold. His eyes are red. Feanor drinks his tea and frowns.
Nerdanel is still not speaking to him.
(Is this right? Does it accomplish anything?
(Sometimes she wishes someone else had the answers.)
“Maedhros,” Feanor says, when breakfast is nearly over, and even the twins fall silent in their fanciful games at the note of command in his tone.
“Yes, Athair?” Maedhros answers. His voice cracks a bit; he is still so very young.
“You may give an honest answer.” Feanor pauses, then asks, “Do you want an education?”
“Yes,” Maedhros whispers, knuckles white around his spoon.
“Speak up, son,” Feanor chides, then smiles. “They would teach you to speak up, in the city. It is known as the art of elocution. You would like that, would you not?”
“Yes, Athair.” More clearly, this time.
Nerdanel tastes blood in her mouth.
“Now,” Feanor finishes, setting down his cup, “Do you want to go to the city, or not? Your mother seems very uncertain of your wishes.”
Maedhros winces ever-so-slightly, when he turns his head to look at Nerdanel. He does not meet her eyes. “I want to go,” he says, and Feanor lifts both eyebrows now—a look quite readable as triumphant.
“Damn you all!” cries Maglor, and dashes his bowl on the floor.
After Maglor has been scolded and set to scrubbing the kitchen top to bottom, Feanor vanishes into his forge. Maedhros is nowhere to be seen.
"Take Caranthir and Curufin to the garden," Nerdanel orders Celegorm. She would send the twins with him if she could, but Celegorm, even at ten, can be a trifle absentminded. "I want lettuces for supper salads."
It is eleven in the morning, but Celegorm does not want to be sentenced to a punishment of his own. He seizes each little brother by an unsuspecting wrist and trundles them outside.
Nerdanel gives the twins their dolls, and a biscuit each, and kisses their curly heads. They are almost enough to be out of dresses, but they are her babies and Nerdanel cannot bear to think of them growing up so soon. Not when her firstborn...
Maedhros is not in his room, nor in any of his brothers'. He is not in the attic. He is not, despite Nerdanel's clever guess, in her workroom.
At last she finds him in the pantry, behind the shelves of molasses and sorghum and fruit preserves.
When he sits shuddering like that, knees drawn up and his head drooping almost between them, he seems much smaller than he is.
Nerdanel sinks down so low that her light skirts puff up around her. She might be a fallen cloud.
"My darling," she says, voice not above a murmur. "My darling boy, tell me what is wrong."
He shakes his head.
So long, so tall, and strong, too, because of the good food she feeds him, because of the hard work that makes his new muscles wiry and firm. If he grows into his shoulders and feet, he'll be the tallest man she knows.
"Maedhros, you must talk to me. I cannot help you if you do not talk to me."
"Help me?"
"Of course that is what I want. But I would know what you want." Everything in her heart and bones screams, say the word and I will break heaven and earth for you, say the word and I will stand against even Feanor, but the choice must be her son's.
"Mamaí," he mumbles pitifully, looking her in the eyes. "I..."
"Do you want to do as your father says?" she asks. Do you really want that?
Sometimes she thinks his eyes are brighter than Feanor's, even when he has been weeping. He looks at her for a long moment, and then he nods. Just twice. Just enough to break her heart.
"Yes," Maedhros answers. "Yes. I want that."
Her condition, demanded through gritted teeth, is that Maglor go as well. At first Feanor protests that he is too young; then he proposes, rather cheerfully, that the two together keep house at the Valinor Park, and it is Nerdanel's turn to make the same argument. At last it is agreed (with a message sent and a message received, to and from Finwe) that they shall both begin their schooling in a month's time.
Maglor is overjoyed. He needs only Maedhros, to be happy.
Maedhros is carefully quiet.
Nerdanel cuts more of her heart away in this bargain, and calls it compromise.
"I shall write to you every day," Maglor assures her, as if he isn't already itching to set foot in the carriage Finwe sent for them. Maedhros makes no such promise. He lets himself be kissed by each brother in turn, and holds on longest to the twins. Of course. Amrod is his godson, and he has always been so gentle with them.
Nerdanel commands herself not to cry, but it does no good when his arms are around her at last and she feels his heart beating against his ribs.
Or maybe that it is her heart.
"I will spend no day without you in my thoughts," she says, in his ear, and he gasps a choked little breath into her shoulder, but when he draws away he is smiling and calm, if somewhat pale.
"Goodbye, Mother," he says. "Goodbye, Athair. We shall send word that we are safely arrived."
"I shall be there myself in a month's time," Feanor proclaims, and he kisses them both on the forehead. Nerdanel watches Maedhros's hand circle his father's wrist and hold, like he used to do when he was small, when his hand could only reach around a finger.
Then they are off, and Nerdanel covers her face in her apron and keeps to her workroom for the rest of the long, September afternoon.
Help me?
It is a long time after that Nerdanel realizes—
It wasn't a question at all.