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The cookfires make them sitting targets, though they are necessary evils. Aredhel is less certain of the torches—ordinarily, she trusts her father and Haleth’s combined judgment, and if they believe there is less danger in carrying light than snuffing it, she should agree. Tonight, however, she is at dreadful odds and ends.
Turgon has thrown himself into tasks around the camp, staking tents and securing supplies, accounting for weapons. The men who were thralls were eager to be armed. The redistribution spread like a wildfire.
Turgon is almost certainly more angry than grieved; his grief came long before now, and shall not increase for the sake of any Feanorian. Galadriel, who has lost no one dearest to her, is much the same.
That is perhaps unfair, but Aredhel is hiding from her younger cousin in the shadows. She herself is raw, laid open, and she cannot face judgment.
Not now. Not from someone who never even—loved—
She dares not spare a thought for Fingon. She cannot look her father in the eye. He is talking levelly with Haleth and Finrod, studying a map under lantern light as they have done many times before. Her father is the eldest in their fractured family, now. Has he thought of that? Can he think of anything?
Aredhel sneaks away, out of view of familiar faces. The lake laps the shore, beyond the winking flicker of the guards’ torches. Across the lake, light also shines.
That light can see her, Aredhel feels. It can see the tears running down her face.
Beren is one of the men on watch, and he lets her pass with only a whispered warning. Aredhel is a little in awe of Haleth, and Wachiwi and Wister are rather like warm-hearted…cousins, but Beren, for all he is older than Aredhel, is simply a friend.
If she is struck down over the water, it will not be Beren’s fault.
Aredhel is not Fingon. When they found themselves betrayed, Fingon was violent against men who had never wronged him; white-faced and silent over sins that he himself, in a past life, would have readily condemned.
Aredhel, for her part, raged. Aredhel cursed them, and cursed the ones best-loved especially. Only when Fingon’s shock subsided into bitterness, only when she saw him sneer for the first time, did her own grief break her softly.
She wanted Celegorm, in the endless, savage nights when she prayed for death to come to her, to take her from the cold. Celegorm would have stood in the path of death; would have told her she was being foolish. He would have built a fire, somehow, and scoffed at what it meant to be weak.
These were the plain, aching lies she told herself, missing her friend when her family was dwindling.
Now that she has seen him again—traitor—she restores all her curses, and wants him killed.
Aredhel knows she is rotten-hearted. Knows that she isn’t Father, or Turgon, who suffered blamelessly. She isn’t even like Fingon. He was too naive; too innocent. That, and his one was a very skillful liar.
Celegorm wasn’t—a good liar, that is, because he did lie—and Aredhel was supposed to know better. The Feanorians are all shit-eaters. Always have been.
Aredhel knows he will come tonight.
She leaves Beren, the outermost guard, and heads for the lip of forest that curls away from the bridge. He could cross the river on the far side, and cut into the woodland to creep up on their camp from behind. They are watching the forest, too, but with fewer torches.
Aredhel goes among the trees. She seats herself, cross-legged, and rests her elbows on her knees. She wears a tunic and trousers, now, like Wachiwi does. Father has not said a word about it.
Aredhel waits, and promises herself that no matter what happens, she will not cry.
Celegorm is cunning, but he is also a fool. She smells him before she sees him—or to be more exact, she smells Huan. Wet wolf-hound is distinctive.
Her heart is beating very fast.
It is hard to see him, tall though he is. He is as tall now as Maedhros was—no, perhaps not. Aredhel cannot say for certain, and she will never be able to measure the two beside each other.
Fingon would know.
She waits until the monstrous boy-shadow and the monstrous dog-shadow have woven, almost silently, past her. Then she says, low,
“Shit-eater.”
The silence—stops. Which, of course, means that it wasn’t really silent at all.
He could kill her out here, if he wanted to. Aredhel is a rather magnificent shot—Fingon taught her, and the one who taught him...
...who also taught Celegorm...
(Celegorm isn't going to kill her.)
Huan begins to pant, and Aredhel scrambles to her feet so that his long tongue or pungent hide doesn't strike her in the face.
“Shit-eater,” Aredhel says again, quiet and venomous.
“Stop it,” Celegorm growls. A mumble, in olden days, but his voice is deeper now.
That only stokes her rage. “Stop it? You filthy, belly-crawling bastard. You spineless, half-cocked beast. Fucking Irish—”
“Stop it,” he says, more insistently. “Stop it. I know.”
Aredhel’s eyes sting, and her lips and cheeks seem to spasm, twisting against the onslaught of a sob. She shuts her mouth, cautiously.
“Ris...” Celegorm tries, and then seems to reconsider. “Huan, go to her.”
“I don’t want your—your dog,” Aredhel hisses, aggrieved, but her hands knot in Huan’s wet, wild mane all the same.
“How’d you find me?” Celegorm asks, still keeping his distance.
Typical arrogance. “Knew you’d be spying. Knew exactly how you’d do it.” She wrinkles her nose, not that he can see her very well, in the dark. “Of course you’d pick the most disgusting route.”
“The river’s clean!” he protests.
“Not now that you’ve been in it.”
He makes a soft, pained sound. It takes Aredhel more than a heartbeat to realize that this may be all that is left of his laugh.
“I...”
He says, still pained, “You hate me.”
She doesn’t. “I should.”
Celegorm sighs. “I forgot you’d recognize the scent. Or that you’d be waiting.”
Aredhel scratches Huan between his ears, to his pleasure. Huan hasn’t changed. “What were you planning, you woolly-headed lout? Ambush us in our sleep? Slit every last one of our throats?”
“Something like that.” And now again it is a mumble—a bit embarrassed; reaching across the darkness for a scrap of humor, or across thousands of miles, for affection.
Aredhel takes it to the chest, a thrusting twist. She has been lonely for so long—all her life, with not a reason for it. She had a mother, and three brothers, and as much future as a girl could hope for.
“I—I didn’t mean it,” Celegorm says. He must be able to sense her distress, but he has forgotten how to know her. “I wasn’t going to kill you all.”
“I know,” Aredhel answers, distracted. But she doesn’t hate him, and now she has told him this. She has given him something he does not deserve.
Celegorm shifts from one foot to the other. “The Irish dig was low.”
She releases Huan, clenches her fists, draws herself back into herself. “I can say it. We have the same grandfather.”
(It seems like sacrilege, to think of Finwe here.)
“You…”
“Mama is gone.” Aredhel is afraid of his gentleness. He hid it so well, even when they were young. It will crush her to see it now. “Or didn’t you care? Mama is gone. She wasn’t a fighter. She wasn’t—”
“Christ.” Celegorm sits heavily, his bow jutting higher than his head, a black-edged shadow, then lowering to lie across his knees. Huan pads back towards him.
Aredhel does not want to sit down, but it is awkward to talk from above. Awkward, when she is so near weeping.
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
(In Aredhel’s heart, a locket fastened around a memory: two children, hiding in dusty stables, trudging through the mud of any season, running away from everything that, defined by law and family, could break them—)
She stays standing.
“Did you ever think of me? When you were—you were—at—when you—” She did not come through a dozen hells to lose her voice now. “When you killed innocent men at the bridge. When you left us. When you left Mama and Argon to—to die.”
Celegorm’s breathing changes, or something does. The air around them? She does not know.
He says, “Argon—Argon is—”
“They shot him. They shot him because of you.”
“What?”
What—what does it matter? Aredhel sinks down. Huan does not bowl her over. He stretches out between them, his dog limbs stiff.
“He was shot.” She says the words like a year has made them calm and unfamiliar. “We couldn’t save him. The rest of us, who lived, couldn’t save him.” She won’t betray—she won’t say any more.
“I didn’t,” Celegorm whispers. “I didn’t kill anyone at the bridge.”
She believes him. He isn’t, after all, a good liar. Still: Aredhel, less a brother and mother, can be cruel. “But you have killed.”
“Yes.”
“When?” (Cruel.)
He is across from her now, and she can make out his shoulders and his wild hair, silhouetted as darkness against a different shade of darkness. She can’t quite see his face. “The first—I had to save Huan.”
Huan, at the sound of his name, whines. Even the way he lies between them seems significant. Aredhel does not want to compare anything—any creature—to a bridge, but so it is.
“Of course you did.”
They breathe, side by side and in silence, for a while.
“Argon died first.” Aredhel says it through her teeth. “Mama was…we all nearly froze to death, when the winter trapped us. She wasn’t the only one.” Her tears are hot; the memory is cold. “That was many months ago.”
She swore she wasn’t going to cry.
Celegorm clears his throat. His silence isn’t sullen. She knows that much. Maybe she still knows him. At last he says,
“So you won’t trick me?”
All her fury returns, lightning quick. “You dare—”
“Amrod,” her cousin says, across the miles and very, very close, “Is dead.”
Aredhel sobs. She catches it in her hand, like the kisses Mama used to blow to them both, to her and Argon. Celegorm’s profile is lost, hidden in his shoulder. If he sobbed too, she did not hear it.
Night, having already fallen, seems to fall again.
Aredhel keeps her hand over her mouth and crawls, as awkward as a creature half-maimed. Huan moves obligingly for her, and the cold ground is not hard enough, not cruel enough, to tear at her knees. She lifts herself up when she touches the hem of Celegorm’s coat with her other hand.
Then she puts both of her arms around his neck.
Here is the weight of him; the crushing force of his arms at her back. He smells like Huan, and like river-mud. His clothes are still drenched, but he does not shiver.
It wasn’t night that darkened further, Aredhel realizes, somewhere in her lonely thoughts. It was blind grief.
Celegorm does not let her go for a long time.
“Your hair,” she mutters, spitting it out of her mouth, “Is stupid.”
He tugs at her braid. “I like yours.”
Huan sits sentry next to his master. Aredhel is seated on Celegorm’s opposite side. Their knees are almost brushing. It is…companionable, which is a feeling she thought they would never share again.
“You won’t let us in, still?”
He goes all hard and grim again. “Ris. I can’t.”
“Is it Curufin? Maglor looks…” If she pushes him too far, she might lose what she’s found. “Never mind. It looked like a dank, uninviting place, anyway.”
“We might let you in. No promises for the rest.”
He hates Fingon. He always has. She thinks of the reason for that; of the tall, flaming, red-haired cousin, who had an angel’s face, but something not of the angels in his smile.
Aredhel loved him. They all did. It was a curse of their Irish ancestors, perhaps. All the charm and danger and woe of their people was captured in the vessel of a single man.
Dead. Maedhros is dead.
She watched her mother freeze. She watched her brother bleed. Why is death ever a surprise to her, anymore? Why can she not see it, in her mind’s eye?
“I missed you,” Celegorm says, mumbling once more.
She missed him, too. Aredhel is not yet decided whether it is safe to tell him that—but maybe she already has.
He waits, and she prepares her answer. Huan waits, and she strokes his head.
She opens her mouth—
And hears the sound of someone else shouting. Torchlight flares. She and Celegorm spring up, and run for the light, through the woods that kept them hidden. A pack of men is charging towards the bridge—
No. Not a pack. It is Fingon, torch in hand, who runs. The others are following as if they are trying to catch him, and bring him back.
There must be something that Fingon knows.