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“You’ve been quiet,” Maitimo says.
“Well, we are hunting.”
His brother laughs softly. “Before that.”
Celegorm plucks at the pliant band of his slingshot. “You have been away,” he offers, and then hastily softens this barb, lest it strike heart: “I have not wanted to talk so much in front of the children.”
Or Athair, flares in his mind, plain as day, but that, he will not say.
Maedhros has a hunting knife strapped to his belt and a long, recurved bow that Athair made a few years ago. He lays the bow aside, now, abandoning the pretense that they watch their quarry more than each other. “Is something troubling you?”
Celegorm has waited for this moment in lonely months during which Caranthir was sullen and stupid, or Curufin needled and whined, or the twins destroyed his careful snares and traps with their baby curiosity. He is—nearly fifteen, and not a child.
He snaps the band again. A departing rustle in the bushes below their hidden, flat-board perch signals that there will be hunting or conversation today, but not both.
He drops the slingshot in his lap.
“I want to live in the woods,” he says. It is a childish beginning, but he has no skill with words.
Maedhros lifts one brow, very slightly. It is a softened trick of Athair’s. “These woods?”
“Any woods, but I know these the best.”
Maedhros shifts so that one knee is peaked upwards. He is out of his finely tailored city breeches and back in the worn trousers Mother has washed and mended a hundred times if once. “Has it been very hard, at home?”
“Didn’t say that.”
Maedhros tips his head so that his hair falls in front of his face, making Celegorm smile a little. “Tell me I lie.”
“You do not lie.”
“The twins? They are mischievous.”
“They are little blockheads, and Caranthir is a lump.” He feels he has been overly harsh, just a hair. “Curufin is a prickleburr, at times, but I don’t mind him at others.”
Maedhros smiles with his lips and not his eyes. Around them, the branches link their fingers in a woven mesh of gold-green shelter. It is afternoon.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Maedhros says, so quietly that Celegorm almost thinks the hunt has resumed, almost thinks that the forest has swallowed them, pitting their thoughts against the silence, “Who was meant to be the eldest in our family.”
“What?”
The smile is quicksilver, this time. That means it dazzles more than anything else. Maedhros runs a finger along the length of the bow. “You may think your lot a sorry one, Celegorm, and I don’t deny you’ve had much to bear—but I look at you and think, perhaps God sent us down the wrong way round.”
“You want me to be older than you?”
“Something is needed—someone. Perhaps it would seem kind to say that I am needed, but all that means is that I can’t set things right among you all in my absence.”
“That’s not yours to—”
“What would you do, if you were the eldest?” Maedhros asks.
“I don’t want to be.”
“But if you were, and I were younger than Maglor.”
“I suppose I…” Celegorm scratches the back of his neck, where his hair is damp with sweat. “I suppose I’d fight with Athair all the time, and Maglor, too, because he would be just the same as he is anyway, and I…”
“Ah. Is it—Athair, then?”
Maedhros is very clever. He can trick Celegorm into saying what he swore he wouldn’t, and do it so that Celegorm doesn’t even mind the tricking.
I cannot love him, as I love you. There it is, altogether.
“We are at odds. I do not…I do not want to be a smith.”
“I am not a blacksmith. Nor is Maglor. He does not expect that of you.” A shaft a sunlight finds its way between them, and Maedhros squints. “Athair asks a great deal, but I promise you—it isn’t more than you can give.”
“What right has he to ask at all?”
The moment stretches them thin, though the sunlight holds steady.
“He loves you,” Maedhros says. “He loves us.”
Celegorm is beginning to think that his brother does not understand after all.
“Don’t go all soft,” he says, scowling darkly, and Maedhros lets slip his thin-lipped, wide-eyed warning, and laughs.
“Soft? I’ll throw you down from this tree. Let you frighten the rest of the rabbits.”
“We came out here for squirrels!”
“You did. I came for a deer.” Maedhros makes a sweeping gesture to the bow. “Now we’ll have neither.”
Celegorm scales down the tree-trunk. Maedhros follows. They have wasted their time, maybe; Celegorm expects their steps to lead them towards the house at once.
But Maedhros collapses in a heap of limbs, lying among the crushed, faint-fragrant ferns with dreams crowding towards the single crease in his brow. Celegorm sits down beside him, cross-legged.
“If you go to live in the woods,” Maedhros tells him, with his eyes and lips upturned now, seeking sun, “I shall come and visit you.”
It is as much an answer as any.
The forest is always waiting.