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Even the color of evening is different here. Turgon never paid much heed to maps, to the large atlases that Finrod—and Argon, come to that, loved. Now he wishes he understood the stars pricking the violet heavens, that he might tell Elenwe of them with something like authority. He wishes he could make suggestions, to his father, about what roads they should take.
He wishes he could fill the hollow in Fingon’s chest, but instead, he needs his brother to do him a favor.
They circled the wagons at sunset. They cannot smell the river, or indeed anything but prairie grass. It that has been like this for days. The women gather around the cookfire, and the men talk in low voices. There are some fewer (men) now than there were at Ulmo’s Bridge, because not all of Father’s associates wanted to remain associated with a penniless man, taken for a fool by his own brother.
Gold had been promised. Deeds of land had also been promised.
Turgon had had a thought—half a thought—that one of those deeds might be for him and Elenwe.
There have been no skirmishes, with thieves or natives. There have been, as yet, no towns—but Finrod says they shall reach one soon.
Finrod of the atlases, and more importantly, of a solitary journey west that seems long ago, would know.
Turgon tries not to see the absence of his own use.
“Will you walk with me?” he asks his brother, and Fingon’s brows inch up, even as he rises, tucking his thin-leafed notebook back into his satchel. By dim lantern light, each evening, Fingon has reacquired the habit that the tragedy two weeks back seemed to take from him. He is keeping notes of his studies, supplies, and patients again.
Galadriel was stung by a wasp today. They have had few other ills.
Finrod and Father don’t even look up from their conversation. Fingon follows him away into the settling dusk. Turgon does not dare glance back at his slim wife where she sits beside his mother. Elenwe is wrapped in her ever-present shawl; he knows that much.
(He knows, too, that her belly is swelling a little. He has seen it, of course, but no one else has taken note—yet.)
“There is something I would speak of.” Turgon does not meet him eye-to-eye.
“What is it?”
His stomach roils. “Shall we walk a little farther?”
“If you wish.” Fingon shrugs. Fingon isn’t sullen, exactly, but there is a pall over him. Turgon could name it, and pity it, but that—
He takes a few more steps. They both do.
“We shouldn’t stray too much from the camp,” Fingon says, all older-brother warning. “Turgon, really—what’s amiss?”
“Fingon, do be reasonable.” Turgon could bite his tongue out as soon as he says it; it is the sort of platitude that, were their places exchanged, would set him afire. At any rate, Fingon does not need to be reasonable until Turgon has said what he must. Fingon merely needs to listen, and from the shadowed set of his shoulders, he is listening.
“If this is about the bridge,” Fingon replies, now, in a hollow tone—
“It’s not.” Not everything is about our cursed half-family. That’s the pity Turgon will not name. “It is about Elenwe. Elenwe and...and me.”
“Oh.” Fingon’s face, at the proper angle, catches a little of the firelight. By that light, Turgon can see his relief. No doubt there can be no ailment or fear for Fingon that eclipses his far-flung pains. No doubt his notebook is a rare and steady comfort, and Elenwe’s troubles shall be jotted down there, too.
But no—Turgon is being unfair, and all because he is afraid.
“Elenwe,” he says, his palms clammy and the back of his neck quite damp beneath his rumpled, unwashed collar, “is...approaching her confinement.”
He wanted to say it distantly, carefully. Now, like all that has gone before, he has done it wrong.
“What?” Fingon’s eyes seem liable to spring out of his head. “Approaching her—but we—you—”
Turgon is strangled with panic. Somehow, he manages to choke out, “No—I mean—her confinement is still some time away—”
Fingon lifts his hideous hat from his head and drops it again. Like Turgon, his hair is overlong and fans around his ears when his hat forces it down. “Oh. You mean she is expecting.”
“Yes.”
“Ah. Well...” Fingon is the picture of Father, drawing his brows together like that. “I suppose—”
Two weeks—two weeks out from all their recent heartache. Fingon’s bruises are nearly healed, though by day the skin around his injured eye is still a little yellow and green with old blood.
Turgon has wondered, savagely, if Maedhros would have been man enough to strike those blows himself.
He cannot think of Maedhros now, or of any Feanorian. He has a wife, a child, and a brother he needs. “She has until…until the winter.”
In all his life, he has felt few sensations more agonizing than the pause that follows, than the way in which Fingon-his-brother becomes Fingon-the-doctor. Fingon-the-doctor taps each finger of his right hand lightly against its thumb, counting.
“God,” Turgon hisses. “You needn’t—I admit it. I—I lay with her, before we were married.”
“Oh,” Fingon says. He doesn’t sputter, but his voice grows very quiet. “I didn’t…I was only trying to reckon how far along she was now. She…has looked a little wan, and if I know better her…circumstances, I can prescribe a few herbs…” He stops. Reaches out, and Turgon does not stop him. Does not shy away from the hand on his shoulder.
(They have begun to comfort each other, lately.)
“It is a happy event,” Fingon says finally. Night has almost fallen, but Turgon glimpses the white flash of his smile. “And you are married to her now, are you not?”
Turgon flushes. “I thought you would be more shocked.”
“Nothing can shock me anymore.”
“I doubt that.” He is sorry again. “Thank you. It…”
“Has weighed on you heavily?” Fingon clears his throat. “I—cannot say I understand, wholly, but I do know that…well, what matters, in the end, is that you have done right by her. She is our family now as well as yours, Turgon. She and the little one.”
His voice softens. In that softness, Turgon hopes he hears a forerunner of what his father’s voice will be.
“What do you need from me?” Fingon asks.
And that is Father, to the bone, though neither Fingon nor Father seem to know it, always, about themselves or about each other.
“No one else knows.”
Fingon’s hand has not left his shoulder. Indeed, it tightens a little. “I will stand by your side,” he says, so gravely that Turgon’s eyes swim in the dark. “Now and always.”
(Fingon told no one, least of all Turgon, when he slipped away. Father and brother and sister were left behind, all in ignorance. They had to learn from each other, in hushed or frightened or furious voices, that Fingon had gone to mist and mountain, daring hope to find him in the dawn.)