Work Text:
When I see the city in the distance, shielded by grey-hung clouds, I know I will never be able to come home again.
All my way west, I unmade myself—as a son, and a brother, and a cousin, until I was but an empty orphan under the stars. It was the only way I knew how to make a man of myself. If I lost a page of my careful writing, to wind or rain or fire, I found a new one as weeks passed. There were songs written in the wind-swaths of the prairies. There was poetry bleeding sharp among the cragged rocks that steepled high as heaven.
I could write, or speak, to keep myself human. That was all I needed, for a time.
Finrod did not have a meaning, among the mountains or the plains. I had to be grateful for food and water, for sleep; I learned to be blissful over friendship.
Beren, he said.
What tribe? I asked, for I had learned it was the proper question.
Erchamion, he answered, and he shook hands readily, knowledgeable of settlers’ ways as well as their speech. But they are no more.
I cross the Hudson by boat. After months—no, years—of plotting simply whatever course was most expedient, I find I am no longer as quick to consider the social consequences of who waits at the end of my journey.
Lord, but that would fall harshly on my mother’s ears! Of course, my heart’s first wish is for my father and mother, for my lanky towheaded brothers and my spritely sister. Of course I have thought of them daily—when I shivered with cold, when I was delirious with heat-fever.
When letters reached me, bearing tidings of comfort or sorrow, I kissed them and wept over them unashamedly. By being remade into a man, you see, I do not mean that I suffered any loss of devotion to those left at home.
Perhaps this is exactly why I pause on the docks. My satchels of curios and necessities, not to mention my long gun, mark me a strange interloper as much as my fringed leather trousers and the beads in my hair.
Beren threaded half of those beads. He was particular about the order and meaning. He told me what each symbolized, practicing his mastery of English as he went.
He himself wore no braids, fine or thick.
When I asked him why, he said that until his family’s spirits were free, he could not cease mourning them.
Ah, I said, grieved. I am sorry to have burdened you, so often, with stories of mine.
His brow creased. It made him look a little like Fingon—though I couldn’t imagine Fingon here. He is a stiff and proper boy, even though he was trying to be brave and almost rustic, in service of Doctor Olorin, when last I saw him.
Beren said, I speak of Luthien to you.
And I am glad to hear of her, I answered. I took his meaning, too. We were friends, and we shared what joys and memories—what families we had—with each other.
(Perhaps I should have gone to my own home first, instead of Fingon’s. But it was nearer…and I relied too much on what the west taught me, forgetting what it did not.
It seemed like freedom, at first, being unable to fully return.)
I found a letter waiting for me, in January, at one of the outposts I told my father I would visit, both on my outbound and homebound treks. This letter, dated in July, informed me that Grandfather Finwe had died.
No; that is too kind a word. He had been murdered, by an unknown killer, on his own steps.
I felt stiff and somber and very old, when I read that news. I know that this means I am young. Beren was young, too. Young with grief, then, I rode out of that town blinded by the tears streaking my face. I imagined slipping my hand into a friend’s hand, that I might not be left all alone.
I had never felt lonely before.
I had never understood how it was that anger could feast on grief.
Uncle Fingolfin greets me, soberly and kindly. He shakes my hand. My aunt and cousins’ round eyes are comment enough upon my attire; I have not even a hat to tuck under my arm, merely the tailed coonskin at my belt. I came here first, because…because this house has always been both distant and safe.
At the moment, I feel only distance.
Fingon, though. Fingon does not flinch at the sight of me, because he has grown up. It is Fingon who presses me to his breast, smelling of chloroform and the streets despite his fresh collar. It is Fingon who bids me sit down and take tea. My uncle joins us. I have blustered through half an hour of tales and news before I realize how much unhappiness is cloaked around the house, smothered like an expiring thing.
My voice dries up in my throat.
Dead, Beren said. The first word I knew, in your tongue. All dead.
“Grandfather,” I say. “I am—I am so sorry that I—”
Fingon almost yelps in his loyal eagerness to disavow my words, but Uncle Fingolfin answers first.
“How could you blame yourself for that, nephew? He would not have wished it so.”
My eyes blur. I rise, I stagger. I somehow, drawing on the dandy dregs of my former selves, manage a bow.
“I should say good night,” I say. “My father awaits me.”
Every gentleman in the street seems to wear Finwe’s beneficent face.
It is almost a fortnight before I visit the Feanorians. It would have taken me less time than that, had Galadriel not told me, in painstaking detail, what transpired in the summer of ’49.
(Here I am, leaving the docks. Here are my steps, one in front of the other, very light and easy on the simple cobblestones. Home, home, and not at home for long.
Here is Uncle Feanor’s door. I hold no card to leave, if they are gone.
I have only myself.
Myself, and the thing I dare not call anger.)
“He—”
“Threatened to kill him,” my baby sister said, with not a trace of childhood remaining about her. “Pressed the gun to his chest, Finrod.” She fashioned the shape of pistol with her slim hand, and dug it against my sternum, hard enough to hurt. “All our precious cousins—aye, even our aunt! They stood by and did nothing.”
If I look at them…if I…I’ll know—
“No doubt you know,” my father said. He had complained over my hair, gently and kindly, on my first evening home. He also held me firmly against him, his hands cradling the back of my head, his lips caressing my brow. That is Father. There is no telling what he is thinking, except that it is always the result of the purest, best, and longest-held reflection.
“No doubt I do,” I agreed, and sighed. The dinner invitation, with Maglor’s signature, was creased in my hand.
“They are still our family,” he said, gravely. “And we treat them as such. Especially since we are one beloved less.”
Ah, Father—as if I would not have gone! As if I could have shrugged my shoulders over two cousins who could claim pieces of my heart.
My eldest cousin is like one of the magnets that his father, my uncle, gave to us as toys. I have never had cause to wonder why every woman between fifteen and forty turns her head at the sight of him, but we also, boy-cousins who have known him since babyhood, are ever-desirous of his smiles and praise.
Do I come to Uncle Feanor’s home as a challenger? No doubt Grandfather’s death was felt with special keenness, here. I want to see Maedhros, for I know that he will tell me all—how dear Esther fares, and how his brothers have grown, and how the family knits itself together again, after the cruelty of a created absence.
After the cruelty of his father’s hand.
Anger can give you nothing, I tell myself, standing on their doorstep. I come here not to challenge, but to prove. To be welcomed, by the self-appointed leaders of our tribe. I had no hand, no visible stake, in whatever ugliness transpired.
I have learned the lessons of the west.
It will be months before I understand that this was a mistake, and years before I know that it was only a very little one.
Another course would not have changed our futures, in the end.
Two brothers, one sister, I told Beren. All yellow-haired, as I am. The rest are cousins.
I had drawn a rough family tree, and smiled over it, as if my crude sketches revealed their faces. What would they think of the west? Maglor would write poetry, and bemoan the rough terrain, so much wilder than any that Formenos offered. Celegorm would thrive here. Fingon—but I still could not imagine how Fingon would fare.
That left Maedhros.
He is the only one, I explained, who is older than me.
The maid at my uncle’s door stifles a scream. I smile politely, and I remember my bow more easily, this time. I know that my skin is tanned, that my dress must be a shock to the starched aprons of Manhattan’s households.
“I am Finrod Felagund,” I explain. “Are my cousins at home? It is them whom I came to see.”
“Sir, I…”
“Sallie,” I say. “It is Sallie, isn’t it?”
“I beg your pardon, Master Finrod. I did not—” She drops a curtsey, and scurries off, and I feel a lump rising in my throat. I will never stand among my family when my Grandfather is put in the ground. I will never know what my brothers and sister looked like in the two years they grew without me. I will never stand between Feanor and Fingolfin, or be sure that I would even have had the courage to do so. I am a man now, yet—
“Finrod! Damn me, it’s you!”
My first thought, at the sight of him is:
Maedhros is dying.
It is not so. Of course it is not so! He does not move like a dying man—he descends briskly to join me, and grips me by the elbows to exclaim,
“Look at you! Look at...you are a regular frontiersman, my dear!”
All my words of reproach or warning, or pride…these are lost in the light of him.
His skin is too pale; all his color has fled to his cheeks, which have the lovely roses of consumption. I did not think he could be thinner than he always was, but I see that I was wrong. Before, he was lean and strong, in general. Now he is languid and pinched in a sleekly fashionable coat, through which I feel too much bone when he drags me into a swift embrace.
“What has Maglor been feeding you?” I demand. These are my first words, unfortunately.
“Lectures, mostly,” he says, drawing back with a wink. “Come along. Athair is here, and he is eager to see you. Very eager indeed. He came especially.”
To meet me? It cannot be so. “My father must have written of my return.”
He laughs, smoothing back his hair—which is as radiant as I recall, and rather longer than it was. “No, no. I did. As soon as Uncle Finarfin had word of you. We knew with no particularity when we should first see you—you took your time about the invitation.”
“I—” I do not know how I wish to explain this. To cover my confusion, I try to shake as much dust as I can on the mat.
“I jibe you needlessly. It was uncommon kind of you to accept an evening away from home, when you are only just returned.” He links his elbow through mine and practically drags me down the hall. Still strong, then. I wonder if he keeps at fencing. I learned a trick or two by which I might disarm him, but—
“Athair, Maglor! Finrod has graced us with his presence!”
I once faced down a grizzly in Oregon Territory. I do not mean I threatened it; that would have left me dead, and in pieces. Beren and I stood side-by-side, and raised our arms over our heads to appear as tall and powerful as we could.
Powerful, and silent. The bear’s eyes and muzzle surveyed us together; glittering and snuffling in turn.
I was afraid, then—or I thought I was, until we encountered a mountain lion.
My uncle watches me like a cat, plying me with tea and biscuits. He makes no fuss over my strange hair and clothes. Instead, he asks me questions that evince respect I never imagined earning from him. He asks after my cartography. He asks if I have studied languages. Where did I weather winter?
Did I stay in California long?
“And that is the signal for supper,” Maedhros urges, laughing warmly at my explanation of curing bison meat. He has laughed and smiled at his father’s jests and my stories. He has also, I realize, said almost nothing himself.
I hear myself saying yes, I am hungry, and am flattered when his smile falls on me again. Flattered—until I see the quick, cunning look he directs at his father.
“Finrod,” Maglor says, very glumly, “You’ve been gone too long.”
“Am I boring you?” You who invited me?
He lifts one shoulder. There is jealousy in his eyes, which I recognize, and something guarded, which I do not. “No.”
Why do you not hate them? The ones who did you ill.
Beren stared at me a long while, unblinking. You are them, also.
I nodded, stung, but I waited for him to finish his quiet thought.
I do not hate you, he said. We will all be—swallowed—by the earth, hate or no hate.
I speak the word gold, around mouthfuls of my uncle’s fine food. I speak it more times than I thought it, even when I spent days with men who sought it as if it was air to breathe.
Something sick twists in me. I did not come here to—or maybe I did. Didn’t I want to prove myself? The beads rattle against my temples. I swallow, deeply. I breathe, deeply.
“I ought to be going,” I say. “Thank you ever so much for your…”
“A little more wine,” Maedhros coaxes. He has had a bottle at his elbow all evening, and has been drinking with steady calm. His wits seem not at all affected, but that does not comfort me. “Come, Finrod. Our eyes grew sore from weeping, with you away.”
“Don’t be maudlin,” Uncle Feanor chides, but his sharp grin gleams with nearly as much welcome as his son’s. “Finrod, I would be so much obliged if you would step into my study. Take the wine with you! I have drawn this nation a hundred times—but all, I fear, are flawed attempts.”
Does he no longer disdain his half-blood, having come so close to drawing it?
I stay.
I stay, trapped as I swore to never be again.
Is this home? It cannot be, any more than happiness should harbor this strange-beating core of uncertainty. In the hall, finally departing, it is I who seize my cousin by the arm.
“Maedhros,” I say. “I’ve scarcely had a word with you all evening.”
His breath fans my cheek. He smells of drink. His eyes look hollow, in the candlelight.
“The words all belonged to you,” he murmurs. “And Athair. As well they should, Finrod. Your tales were unspeakably grand and I—”
“How is Esther?” I ask, groping for safe ground.
The candles remain alight, but something in Maedhros’s eyes blows out.
“You find me a bachelor once more,” he says, and then, with a crushed-glass laugh, he adds, “Oh, Finrod. You must take us with you, next time.” He does not wait for me to interject, to apologize, to inquire. “Celegorm would be absolutely wild for a glimpse of half those species you described. The twins would be clambering up those god-high trees—you must come to Formenos, and talk to the family until your tongue turns blue. Do you promise? Of course, you do. You’ve always been so obliging. A lesson for us all, really, swear on God I’ll never be as good as you. Sallie, you have his coat? Thank you, dear.”
Under the grey-hung dusk, I have to remember that I love them. I trace the scar on my palm with my thumb.
I was a fool, to think myself alone in unmaking.
“Had you a pleasant evening?” Father asks me, putting aside the spectacles that perch, incongruous, on the end of his narrow nose.
“I talked too much,” I say, hearing again the sound of my child-voice. “I always do.”
“Never.”
“Father, you needn’t patronize me.”
“Then let me speak plain: you ought to see a barber.”
“Father!”
“Finrod. Come here and sit beside me, my heart.”
I do. I sit with one leg crossed over the other, and my hands laced around my knee. I can think only of my friends—Maglor with his frown like curdled milk, and Maedhros, bleeding laughter.
What has happened to our family? I want to ask, but only if I can have an answer other than the steady-burning flame behind Uncle Feanor’s lion eyes.
“I missed you dreadfully,” my father says, his eyes falling shut. He speaks like a man in a dream. “I shall miss you just as much, next time.”
“I am home, now,” I say. “I am home, Papa.”
He opens his eyes. He shakes his head, smiling. “No doubt,” he says. “No doubt you know.”