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“What did you do, Feanor?” Nerdanel demands, and he roars,
“We shall—not—speak of this again!”
He has fought for everything he has. The forge is proof of that. He shovels the long drive of Formenos, late in the night when the boys are asleep, and does he ask for thanks?
Does he like to see the hoofprints, dug deep and absolute, smoothed fresh away?
Athair, said his eldest son, you are being unreasonable.
Two days gone, and Feanor does not come down to dinner.
The letter is—flippant? Impersonal? Unjust? All and none of these things—
And yet so warm. Nerdanel would say, maddeningly, you do not speak his language, as if Feanor had not felt that small heart beating and fluttering, under his hands and against his chest, from almost the moment of his eldest’s birth.
You are very tall, Athair, little Maedhros said, tucking his head under Feanor’s chin, when Feanor lifted him up. You are taller than Grandfather Finwe.
Not so, dear one. He kissed his boy on the forehead, the smooth round cheeks.
Maedhros whispered, You have a taller soul.
Blarney, said Nerdanel, laughing. There’s the blarney.
He sees nothing in this letter that he understands. He sees—a man, too busy even to annotate the work of a scholar he might once have coveted.
We lose our children, Athair thundered once, and Feanor thundered back,
You push them away.
He does not come down to dinner, so Nerdanel sends it up to him.
She doesn’t understand, either.
The second letter is bright. Feanor reads it, crumples it, smooths it out. Maedhros is taller than he is. More beautiful than any in their family; a figure of perfect form.
Miriel’s bones.
Can you miss someone you never knew?
Finarfin asked him that, once. Feanor slapped him. Finarfin apologized to him.
What does Maedhros want? To be welcomed within a family he will not serve?
What has Feanor ever done but serve? And now, if the example he has set is not enough—
“Celegorm rides to the post in the morning,” Nerdanel says calmly, braiding her fiery hair for sleep. “Have you anything to send?”
Feanor tugs the quilt up around his ears.
Maedhros, for all his strength and beauty, for all his forthright eloquence—
Damn you, Fingon has nothing to do with this!—
Maedhros, in short, has always wept too easily.
The third letter is an embarrassment.
Feanor does not allow himself to mourn over it. He takes the twins duck-shooting.
It is too early for ducks.
“There is a letter for you,” Nerdanel says calmly. There is paint on her fingertips. Green and gold. “From Maitimo.”
Does she call him that to be vexing?
“He wrote two days ago.”
“Perhaps he forgot something important.”
Feanor sits at his desk. He chews the edge of the paper. He is disgusted with himself for doing so. He burns the whole of it to ashes over a candle:
Both Maedhros and he need a fresh start.