Work Text:
Caranthir is chalk-white. Otherwise, he doesn’t look dead. There’s a thin trickle of dried blood at his mouth, but if you don’t look at the puncture in his breastplate, the damage can be ignored. He could be asleep. He looks more like their father than he ever did in life with all the colour gone out of his face.
Curufin is hacked and battered, blood in his hair and his teeth. He looks unsatisfied, discontented, the grief that he had hidden in life suddenly there to be read in death.
Celegorm is the worst. You can hardly see that his hair was silver at all, that his grin was insouciant, that his incisors were a trifle too long and sharp. You might doubt that he ever had teeth at all, or a mouth, a nose, two strong sweeps of cheekbone; that he once had ten fingers, that when he was born his ears were like perfect tiny leaves.
Maglor watched him die, and he knows that Dior killed him cleanly, but you wouldn’t know it from the state of the body. Did every fleeing Sindar take a moment to vent their rage and horror on the fallen thing that had been Maglor’s little brother, who had killed their child-king?
There is little point in washing the bodies, and less in laying them to rest with their arms. They’ve lost their master-armourer with Curufin. Celebrimbor will never speak again to any of them, not after this. Swords and spears and daggers must be hoarded from now on, any armour that can be repaired taken. Stripping the bodies of half-destroyed things they nevertheless cannot afford to bury is a terrible task.
How far they have fallen.
They’ve brought death and destruction into the Hidden Kingdom as even Morgoth never managed in his fondest dreams. Dior Aranel is dead at their hand, and so is his snow-white Queen. No nightingales are singing in the forest. Elves of many kindreds lie dead throughout the charnel halls of Menegroth’s Thousand Caves.
All this they have done, and they have nothing to show for it. The Jewel is gone. That is, somehow, the worst part.
Maedhros is gone too. He’s been gone all night. Maglor keeps thinking that he should be here. Maedhros who was there when each of their brothers was newly born, he should be there with them to close their eyes and help heap the stones over their corpses.
Maedhros believes Celegorm had given his men orders to avenge themselves on the children.
Maglor doesn’t.
They haven’t fallen that far.
Not yet.
-
Maedhros comes back at daylight the day after the massacre. There’s a child in his arms, head tucked into his neck, and another with its hand fisted in the hem of his tunic, stumbling along, trying to keep up with his long legs.
Maglor has allowed himself to feel very little since the raid began, but now he feels relief. None of the blood on their hands has diminished, but it must mean something that these lives at least are not at their account.
It must.
“You found them,” Amras says. He’s looked half-dead for a very long time. Now he’s looking at the children, and there’s light in his eyes.
Maedhros says nothing. His face is grey, his mouth tight. The child at his side grabs his leg, hiding its face in his thigh.
“Put your weapons away,” Maglor orders belatedly, and behind him swords are sheathed, bows lowered.
Maedhros sets the child in his arms down and gives it a little push forward, lest it, too, cling to him. “Go to the fire,” he tells it and its twin, voice rusty. “Warm your hands. I’ll find you a blanket.”
They must be cold. What little they’re wearing is thin, light stuff, and it’s in rags. Maedhros finds only cloaks, rent and blood-stained, reclaimed from the dead. A few sharp words to some of his standing armsmen, and two of his people rapidly shed their own cloaks in exchange for the gory ones. They’re also blood-stained, but less so, and he swiftly swaddles a child in each of them.
Amras squats by the fire, his hands working at his belt. The children flinch from him, even when what he draws forth is not a weapon but waybread.
“Are you hungry?” he says, breaking a piece in half, and his voice is stronger than Maglor has heard it in years. There’s still Sindar blood under his fingernails. “Here. Eat!”
-
The children are wary, although they are treated kindly. Still they fear their captors. At night they sleep clutching each other, tangled into a tight ball. They understand only Sindarin, and conversations can be held in Quenya above their heads. They talk only to each other, and sometimes to Maedhros, who had found them. They recoil from the brightness of Noldor eyes gleaming in the dark.
Their names are Eluréd and Elurín. They give this information up reluctantly, and only after Amras begins to call them Dimlas and Dimlod, a joke that isn’t really very funny.
They are well-named. They look like children of the stars with their silver-blond hair, their silver-grey eyes. They look like Nimloth, not Dior. Sometimes when one of them looks at Maglor, he remembers their mother’s face as she was dying, white as marble, and has to look away in order to stay moored in the present.
Inheritance is a funny thing. He never met Lúthien, but he knows that Dior, child-king of thirty summers, was made in her image as surely his little sons were made in his queen’s. The very sight of Dior had made Celegorm snarl low in his throat, Curufin wince guiltily. Lúthien’s features had been like flame to oil of vitriol, the scent of blood to a hunting hound.
He does not like to think that Celegorm had been more wolf than hound by then.
-
They keep having a conversation that turns in circles, widening and then tightening, before returning to the beginning.
“Of course we can’t keep them; it would be an obscenity. But why should we not ask for the Jewel in turn?”
“Is it not more obscene to ask a ransom?” Maedhros asks. “We should be glad that their deaths, at least, are not to our account – how could we have gone on living if they had been?”
“I don’t know,” Maglor admits.
But they would have. They lived on after Alqualondë. They lived on after the Thousand Tears. They live on after Doriath, one day after another. Their names are accursed throughout the entirety of Beleriand now, instead of merely within the Girdle, and they’ll live with that, too.
Maglor is fairly certain that Maedhros’s principles will melt like mist once the Oath bites tight again. He will ask for the Jewel in exchange for the boys. For thirty years he turned his face against attacking Doriath, but he yielded at last, and no one is proposing another massacre.
Not now. Not yet.
But one day, he’ll agree to ask.
The survivors of Doriath had streamed away, ragged and wounded, most making for the Sea. There’s no true safety there, but nowhere else in Beleriand for them to go. All the kingdoms of the Noldor have fallen but Gondolin, which lets no one in. All the old kingdoms from before the Sun are gone: white Brithombar and sea-stained Falas, where Finrod helped Círdan to build his shining towers.
Many-caved Menegroth, a wonder from before the first rising of the Sun. Menegroth of song, Menegroth of stories, Menegroth behind its walls of magic and its many grottoes under the earth. Menegroth with its bloody halls, its murdered kings, its flown women –
The wild Green-elves of Ossiriand are almost all gone, too, poisoned along with the earth and water, or else fled over the Blue Mountains. The ones that are left won’t talk to Amras anymore. Their arrows come close to killing him when he tries.
Círdan has some sort of settlement on Balar, their scouts say, and most of the Doriathrim have joined him there, making camp at the mouth of the Sirion. They must have the third child of Dior there, the daughter: the flown bird, the missing girl. They wouldn’t have taken her over the Blue Mountains.
(“Dimloth?” suggests Amras).
They must have the Jewel.
“We should send to him,” Maglor says.
Maedhros snorts. “Do you think any messenger we sent to them would be allowed to live? Círdan won’t treat with us, even for the children.”
“He was glad enough to see us once!”
“That was a long time ago,” Maedhros says.
Yes. Under the stars, when their father was alive and Círdan besieged, and the Sindar of Beleriand greeted the Sons of Fëanor as saviours, not monsters –
But they can’t go back. They can only go on. They can only keep falling, keep to hoping to snatch at a handful of stars as they do.
“I wish Finrod was alive,” Maedhros says, which is unhelpful. They all wish Finrod was alive. “Aegnor, Angrod: even Orodreth. They might have hated us for it, but they knew us. They’d take the children from us, and know it was no trap.”
He seems to believe that.
“Artanis would take them,” Amras says, which isn’t helpful either.
Artanis and her Sindar husband disappeared over the Blue Mountains before the massacre. Even if they came back –
“I don’t fancy telling Artanis we’ve slain yet more of her cousins,” Maglor says. “She nearly killed Curufin at Alqualondë; what she would do after Doriath, I can’t imagine.”
“We would deserve it,” Maedhros says, grim as the Eastern wind.
Of course they would. That’s not the point.
Because someone has to be sensible, and Amras is mired in the past and Maedhros in misery, Maglor says: “Perhaps if we sent one child with the messenger, and promised to redeem the second in exchange for the Jewel –?”
“You will not separate them,” says Amras.
He’s been better since the boys joined them. Less fey, more present. Maglor hadn’t thought him capable of true anger any longer, of even an approximation (he will not think, a ghost) of it. He says, “Not for long–”
Amras’s lips peel back from his teeth. “Not ever.”
-
As they plan, as they plot, the children grow. Too quickly, too fast, but the baby-sweet clean smell of childhood still lingers on their skin. Sometimes their scent makes Maglor feel hollow inside.
They cling tightly to each other, but they speak more and more. Sometimes they creep close to Maglor when he plays for them, although they won’t let him touch them. They fear dark Noldor men. They cling to Maedhros whenever they see him, twining like vines around a blasted oak. He stays very still while they do, then puts them from him as gently as he can when a little time has passed. They begin to take their meals with Amras. They begin to let some of the armswomen comb their hair.
They stop screaming every time they’re dressed or undressed.
(“What happened?” Maglor had asked his brother while the children huddled by the fire that first morning. “Why were they so ragged? This is poor cloth for princes of the Grey-elves.”
“Celegorm’s men,” Maedhros said curtly. “Searching for the Jewel.”)
They whisper to each other in Sindarin, they whisper to Maedhros, they sing to the horses, they growl softly to the dogs. Wandering fawns and shy-eyed hares come out of hiding to greet them. (Maglor tries to make sure that the children don’t see when his men shoot them for meat.) They chirp at the birds and the birds chirp back.
He finds it very hard not to become mired in the past himself, watching a silver-headed child in earnest conversation with a swallow.
“How Celegorm would have loved them,” he makes the mistake of saying to Maedhros one day. He doesn’t even see the blow coming until it splits the inside of his cheek against his teeth and makes him taste blood.
He whirls on Maedhros, but Maedhros is unrepentant.
“Celegorm would have killed them. You saw the way he went for Dior.”
“Dior refused us the Jewel!”
“Celegorm would have killed him no matter what. He came to Doriath for no other purpose.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Of course I know that. It didn’t have to end the way it did. It wouldn’t have. If Celegorm hadn’t –”
But it never could have gone any differently. The moment they marched on Doriath, everything which happened after was already set, as certain to follow as the moon after the sun.
Maedhros had refused to march without sending a letter of demand first. It had been a very different letter than the one he had sent to Thingol, although it made the same request. Thingol had been older than them all, older than Tirion itself. He had also been fat-headed, arrogant, and fatally short-sighted.
Dior was young, and perhaps misguided, Maedhros had said. As the child of Lúthien and Beren, the Jewel was not his – it could never be his – but their feat in winning it had to be respected. He had a right to disdain them, given what Celegorm and Curufin had done to Lúthien his mother, Beren his father; that, too, was owed respect. So the letter had been deferential; it had been warm. It had demanded, but it had also pleaded. It had been followed by another, and then another.
Finally, they marched on Doriath. There was no Girdle anymore, and the land let them pass as it had not let Aredhel.
(Sometimes Maglor wonders whether any of that mess in Nargothrond would have happened, if Aredhel had lived; if any of it would have happened if she had not died. Would Finrod have had to go almost alone into the dark? Would the forces of Nargothrond and Doriath still have held back from the Thousand Tears? Would Menegroth have ever fallen? If Aredhel had only come safely through Doriath to Himlad before Celegorm left –
If he had caught only her in time, if she had only caught him –
Unhelpful.)
The winding halls under the earth had accepted them, and the Grey warriors in their leaf-mail fell back with faces like stone before the sight of their people hostage in Fëanorian custody, swords at their throats, swords in every hand.
Maedhros had still thought he could negotiate, going armed into the hall where Thingol’s heir sat. Dior would listen to him this time. Dior would understand. Face-to-face, all would be made clear.
Maedhros said that he was only going to Doriath to explain, and convinced no one, least of all himself.
But Dior listened from his throne, his pale queen by his side with a knife in her hand. He listened, and Maedhros asked again for the jewel, and if you listened to Maedhros, the future, then, balanced on the edge of a blade –
But; “No,” Dior said. He must have already known they would kill him because of it. He had all Elu Thingol’s stubbornness, but not his short sight. His queen’s knuckles went white. He looked directly at Celegorm. “The Silmaril was cut by my parents from the brow of Morgoth himself, and they died for it. I will not give it into the hands of one who tormented and persecuted my mother, who dishonourably sought to kill my father, who sent Finrod and his ten knights alone to death.”
He was as beautiful as the day, as hard as steel. His long dark hair was held back from his face by a circlet of silver, on which the Jewel did not gleam – where was it, where was it? Who was he, that he didn’t always wear it? – and his shining eyes were like stars, and the light in his young face more than mortal.
What Celegorm saw in those eyes and could not bear, Maglor would never know. All Lúthien’s disdain? Beren’s triumph?
The child they had had in his despite? Or the child he himself might have had, had wanted, and had been denied?
A mirror, one that showed him a self he could not stand?
All Maglor knew was the sound of Celegorm’s sword coming eagerly from its sheath, the clash as it sought Dior’s heart and was blocked by Nimloth the queen. But sword against knife was no fight at all, and before Dior had freed his own his Queen had already fallen back, blood foaming from where Celegorm’s blade pierced her lung.
In the moment before Dior was on him, Celegorm glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes wide and shocky. It was the last time Maglor saw his living face, still whole and beautiful. The last time Celegorm had ever given him that terribly familiar look, one that refused to sue for pardon but yet mingled horror at his own actions, cried for safety, feared a scolding, begged a way to fix what he had done –
Then they fought, Dior’s bright blade and Celegorm’s bloody one: and in the great chamber built so long ago they fought to the death in a charmed and doomed circle no one dared to break or to enter, and every clash of steel rang over the hideous sounds coming from Nimloth, her white dress turning red as she struggled wetly for breath, as she died.
-
One of the twins is in Maedhros’s lap. Elurín, the quiet one. He likes to hide his face in whatever part of Maedhros is nearest. Right now he’s nose-deep in the front of Maedhros’s tunic, humming something in Sindarin into his shirtfront. Maedhros puts him aside gently, his own face blank, and gets to his feet.
The child’s features pucker in misery, but he doesn’t cry. They cry very little, the twins. Only in their sleep.
“Come,” Maglor says, making his voice as sweet as honey. He holds out his hands as he did to his own little brothers. “Elurín, I’ll take you.”
The child shrinks back.
“You won’t,” Maedhros says, like a warning.
-
Maglor won't believe that Celegorm gave the order to find the boys.
He burned hot, Celegorm, he ran wild: he did things in a blazing heat and later wished he hadn’t. The child Celegorm who ran to their mother with bird’s eggs cupped in his hands to show her, and tripped, and in tripping, smashed them; the child who cried and refused to be comforted as small fragments of blue-grey speckled shell and soft massy yolk clung to his fingers; that child could never have grown into someone who would do such a thing.
The Celegorm that ran with Oromë’s hounds at the hunt and came alive at the sound of his lord’s silver hound; that youth, the wildest and freest creature in all Aman, a tangle of mud and blood and moonlight: never!
The Celegorm who shared his kill with Huan before himself, who knotted his fingers in Huan’s coat and buried his face in his side? All those long years that Huan had run at his heels, those great golden eyes had been honest and loving, fixed on Maglor’s brother with a devotion that was wordless, that passed all description: that Celegorm had surely been worthy of it.
The stranger who had come limping out of Nargothrond, on foot, houndless, his laughter more wild than before and his eyes brighter. Who was he? The man who spent thirty years urging Maedhros to attack Doriath, Curufin hissing black bile at his side; the man who sat spinning a blade between his fingers again and again, and laughed when it slipped; would he have?
-
There are almost no go-betweens left. The Green-elves, the Grey-elves, Finrod’s Nargothrond motley lot, the Noldor of Hithlum and Dorthonion: all dead, fled, or unutterably confirmed in hatred for the ragged remains of the Fëanorian host.
The Men are almost all dead or fled, too. Bór’s faithful people are gone. The Dwarves of Belegost are still their friends, but no friend could ask them to carry word of the survival of the sons of Dior to the remnants of Thingol’s people, who would surely slay them as swiftly as any dark Noldor bearing the eight-pointed star.
Still, one of Amras’s people offers to take their missive to Balar. Perhaps he was one of Amrod’s first. Maglor can’t remember, but he sees the way Amras’s people brighten as a little life comes back into their lord’s eyes, the tenderness they have for the children who have worked this miracle. It is from love for those children, from gratitude, that Amras’s man offers.
They are not monsters.
“I’ll write a letter,” Maedhros says, and he sounds wearier than Maglor has ever heard him.
-
His men came up with it themselves. That’s what Maglor believes. Celegorm’s men saw their laughing lord die with Dior’s sword in his belly, and they went after Dior’s children, hot with grief, and they found the nursery where Dior’s sons were hiding, and they searched them for the Jewel. Then, in their anger, in their grief, and finding nothing, they took the children out into the forest and left them to die among the trees.
A terrible thing. Something that would have stained them all forever if Maedhros had not found the boys. Something that could never be forgiven them, something that could never be forgotten. They would have staggered on, but who would they have been? What would Maedhros be like now, Amras, Maglor himself, if Dior’s children had died? Who would they be?
A terrible thing, certainly; but a deed of passion. Not something cool and cruel, an attack on the line of Lúthien that was always meant to unfold, a plan within their plan, to remove what mithril traces of her still lingered in the world: to punish two people who had shown Celegorm and Curufin who they had become and how far they had fallen, two people who could no longer be hurt, who had gone forever out of reach.
What a spiteful thing such a plan would be - and a stupid one! To want Dior’s sons dead more than the Jewel they could be traded for!
Celegorm would never have planned that, Maglor tells himself.
Not his little brother, who died like a maddened wolf but had once run with Oromë’s hounds over holy earth and felt Oromë’s palm rest on his head in blessing.
-
Elurín is the dreaming child, the quiet one. He will draw nearest to Maglor when he sings, although never in reach. Music touches him. He sings often, to himself and to his brother, to the birds in the trees, to the fire: even to them, the Sons of Fëanor.
Elured is the bold one. He is the one who has been heard to laugh, once or twice, the one most likely to range almost out of sight when not closely watched. He is intrepid. He reminds Maglor of Celegorm the most, but that is a comparison he will never make again, not even in his head.
-
Amras’s man comes back several months later, thin, unwashed, trembling. His eyes are red. Maglor looks to Maedhros, who shakes his head: no thrall of Morgoth here.
“Gone,” the herald chokes out at last, clearing the road-dust out of his throat. He spits; sobs. “Our last city. Turgon’s city. Gone, in flames–”
It doesn’t mean anything to Maglor at that moment. He’s waiting for news of the Jewel. The Jewel for the children, that’s the bargain that must be made. That’s what matters.
They’ve made worse ones. In Doriath he gave three brothers for nothing but blood and horror. He’ll give Dior’s sons for the chance to keep the Oath, however sweet their skin smells, however bright their eyes, however they bring Amras into focus, keep Maedhros from dissolving into horror.
In the next moment, the words make sense. Then he tells himself that it still means nothing, that it can mean nothing.
Turgon’s city, Turgon’s host: they were no part of their plans. They’ve been off the chessboard of Beleriand for so long. Off the map, out of the reckoning, out of mind, glimpsed once at the Tears and never again since. They can’t be allowed to matter now, when they’re gone.
“And the Jewel?” Maglor says, when Maedhros won’t. Can’t? He swallows, like the words stick in his throat, but he has to ask. “Did you make contact with the Doriathrim? Do they have it?”
Amras’s man heaves again, dry. Then he straightens to a soldier’s bearing, wiping his mouth on the back on his hand. “Yes, my lord,” he says, and his voice is still full of dust.
-
Looking back is more painful than looking forward, however dark the road ahead. Maglor tries not to do it. Maedhros has been – unstable since the Tears. Celegorm and Curufin became the force pushing them all forward as he crumbled, but they’re gone now, too. Amras can’t do it. So Maglor must.
But in his weakness, that night, he finds himself remembering the balcony in their grandfather’s palace, looking out over the city. The cool sweetness of Telperion’s silver light, and glasses of yellow wine, just as cool, just as sweet. Finrod, a riot of bright blossoms of many colours wreathed on his head. Turgon, dressed more soberly, with the white flowers in his dark hair that he wore for Elenwë’s sake.
They had never been truly friends, Maglor and Turgon. What they had had in common was the propinquity of their birth, a half-measure of blood, and Finrod, a shared favourite cousin. Finrod, who of all Maglor’s family had been the one most able to talk music with him, to sit as they had sat that night, a harp in his lap, and to ruin Maglor’s song with tragicomedic accompaniments that undercut him in all the wrong places: mirthful rills of sound, rising notes of expectation, great crashing falls –
“Give me that!” Maglor had said, and snatched for it. His cup had almost gone flying, but Turgon had foreseen the action and taken appropriate measures to remove it a moment before its fall.
“Oh, I don’t need it; take it!” Finrod had cried.
Among Maglor’s brothers, that would have meant a brawl. From Finrod, it was in earnest. Releasing the harp easily, he had flung his head back and repeated exactly the last sequence of sounds that came come from his harp-strings. From his white throat issued merry arpeggios on high, deep humming very low, the parody heightened further yet; all so beautiful, so joyous, so full of delight that you smiled even as you longed to brain him with his own harp. The circlet of flowers had slipped down drunkenly over his ear.
Finrod! Maglor had thought, and met Turgon’s eyes over his sprawled form.
Finrod! Turgon had silently agreed.
A strange thing to remember now, that moment of perfect accord, in Beleriand among the rubble.
-
“Idril,” Maglor says with renewed purpose. “She knows us. She’ll take them.”
Maedhros laughs horribly. “She knows us. She won’t.”
“She has a half-elf child herself.” They’ve had a letter in reply, brought with Amras’s man along with the news of Turgon’s fate, Turgon’s city. “She’ll trade.”
“You terrify me,” Maedhros says, and Maglor wants to hit him.
Instead, he says, “The child’s there at Sirion too. Not Idril’s; the baby. Elurín and Eluréd’s sister.”
“Dimloth?”
He knows that Maedhros knows her name. “With the Jewel.”
“Let her keep it as a toy, then,” Maedhros says, in the same tone he used to say Leave Lúthien alone. She won it fairly; let her hold it. (Later, when the Oath bit, he would add reluctantly, and her years will not be long.)
Now, like it’s hooked out of him, he mutters, “Children tire quickly of playthings.”
“So dark and yet so bright a cradle-gift,” Maglor says. “I suppose they imagined, if we caught her and her nurse that night, we would spare the child, and miss the Silmaril?”
“Then they thought too well of us!”
Maglor can’t talk to him while he’s being like this.
Near the fire, Amras is warming porridge for the little Sindar princes, as though he’s not a prince himself. His face is rapt, intent; his hands, stirring, have the same keenness they once did in the firelight. He’s humming a snatch of song under his breath, one of Elurín’s little tunes.
-
Idril was a slender girl-child when Maglor saw her last. That had been at her grandfather’s great peace-feast, bathing her bare feet in the clear waters of Ivrin.
She is a tall, proud woman now, her golden hair pinned in a wreath like a crown. There is no smile on her face for them, no softness.
She looks very like Indis. She’s looking at them the way Indis once looked at their father, but with far less pity. Like Indis looking at their father, her eyes say, What have you done? What will you do?
“We were sorry to hear about Turgon,” Maedhros says.
“I was sorry to hear about Doriath,” Idril says.
That concludes the pleasantries.
“We have the children,” Maglor says, since they’re all being blunt. “Have you the Jewel?”
Idril looks at him, and he doesn’t care for his image in her eyes.
He had sung for her, the last time they met. He had sung for everyone, drunk on Fingolfin’s best wine, drunk on hope stronger than wine. They were all together again and the past was to be forgotten! They were turning the page. They would not mention the ones who were not there, all the ones that were already dead. His other brothers had not been there because Maedhros feared what the first three would do, and had mercy for the last.
He had still had mercy then, Maedhros. Of course he had. The Tears had not yet happened.
“The Jewel,” Maglor says.
“Please,” Maedhros whispers.
Amras says nothing.
“It’s not mine to give you,” says Idril. She looks at Maedhros. Her eyes ask, What will you do? “It is no thing of the Noldor any longer. We may live together, but the Sindar have it, and the Sindar hold it, and I am not their queen.”
“You would have us treat with the child?”
“I would have you behave as princes of the Noldor, when that still meant something. Before you tarnished it forever. Surrender the twins to kind hands, turn your face to the Enemy, and die on your feet. I will wish you joy and pray for your success.”
“Hard words,” Maglor says. “They have been in kind hands.”
“Hands stained with their parents’ blood?”
“Those hands have been still since the deed was done.”
“Yes, I notice there are only three of you left,” Idril says. “For my dead uncle’s sake, Maedhros Fëanorion, I would beg you to die better than any of your brothers did.”
It’s an arrow that finds two targets.
Amras makes a horrible sound. Maglor doesn’t look at Maedhros. They never speak of Idril’s dead uncle. He doesn’t want to see his face.
“Idril Turgoniel,” Maedhros says, like he’s choking on ashes; on dust. “Have you no pity?”
“I have a young son,” says Idril. “You will pardon me if negotiating with you for the lives of Elwing’s small brothers turns my stomach.”
“Not their lives,” Maglor says.
Maedhros says nothing.
Maglor says, “Never their lives.”
“Where are they?” says Idril.
Maedhros doesn’t move. Maglor doesn’t know what will happen when he does. Will they ride away, rejoin their people, and move the twins far, far away from the mouth of the Sirion?
Perhaps they can send Sirion another letter in a year’s time. Perhaps more time will make the Sindar more anxious to give up the Jewel. The Sindar know them better than Idril does, after all. They would never have thought to try appealing to their better natures.
Perhaps when they come back, it’ll be with knives at the throats of Eluréd and Elurín, the way they came into Doriath with captives. That might work.
A show, of course. They could never hurt them.
They would never.
Maedhros is still for a very long time, and then he holds up one mailed fist. Idril’s throat moves, although the rest of her doesn’t. Her chest moves up and down, a little too swiftly for normal breath.
She’s afraid, Maglor realises. Turgon’s daughter does not know what that signal means, and she is afraid that they will kill her for denying them the Jewel. She is here alone with them, empty-handed, and somewhere not too far away she has a mortal husband, a half-mortal son. Eluréd and Elurín’s little sister.
Could they hold out against Fëanorian might together, the last ragged survivors of Doriath, of Turgon’s secret city? How many are they now? How many are left?
He thinks their own people might be enough to take those pitiful walls, to take the Jewel. It must be so near.
It is so near.
What will you do?
It takes a long time for the party they had in reserve to reach them. They all wait in silence as the horses’ hooves draw closer, as their people approach. They have Eluréd and Elurín with them. This is not quite clear until they are closer still, and the wind lifts their cloaks enough to show the silver heads.
Idril says, “Elwing is dark.”
Maedhros says, “Nimloth was fair.”
“Do you think there are so many half-Elven twins of their age that we might deceive you with a false pair?” is what Maglor says, but what he wants to say is, Maedhros, Maedhros. Please. The Jewel.
There’s still time to send them away. Idril’s archers won’t shoot down those of their riders who are bearing the children. They can still hold them back.
They can still insist.
The horses reach them. Maedhros’s jaw is clenched so hard that his teeth barely separate when he speaks, and his words come out in a mutter. “This is Idril,” he tells the twins. “She’ll be kind to you.”
Idril says, “Eluréd? Elurín?” and her voice is far softer than it was speaking to them. She sounds like a mother now, Turgon’s little daughter. Maglor can hear the motherhood in her voice, and it makes him feel hollow as a blown egg. “I know friends of yours that will be so pleased to see you! Elwing, your sister, and Lindis, your nurse. Do you remember Lindis?”
Elurín says, like he’s rediscovering a lost world, “Lindis?”
Eluréd is crying.
Amras is crying.
Maedhros is not, because he hasn’t cried since the Tears. Maedhros merely dismounts and walks over to their reinforcements. He lifts Eluréd from his perch in front of one of their men and sets him down, and then Elurín, who clings to him and weeps into his front, despite the unloving metal of his breastplate. The arm around him is Maedhros’s handless one; his fingers are busy smoothing pale hair out of Elurín’s eyes, wiping tears away, holding his hand a moment cupped over the soft curve of his baby cheek.
Eluréd grabs his leg and hides his face in his tall boot the way he had that first morning.
Maedhros sets Elurín down, and then cups the back of Eluréd’s head tenderly before pushing him, too, away, towards Idril.
Maglor sits with his hands twined too tight in his horse’s mane. He’s already said his goodbyes. He wants to say them again. He wants to take the children back to their own camp, and he wants to deliver them into Idril’s open hands like the most precious of new-laid eggs and beg her not to break them.
He doesn’t dare open his mouth for fear of what will come out, what orders he might give.
It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, in the end, asking his horse to turn to the East, away from Sirion. Perhaps the best thing he’s ever done? The Jewel is behind him.
So near.
Maedhros looks like he’s in pain, a pain that gets worse the further they get. Amras’s eyes are glassy.
“Where are we going?” Maglor asks, when they’re too far from Sirion to have any hope of returning in time to overtake or slay Idril before she reaches the safety of the walls.
Turgon’s little daughter.
What will we do?
“East,” says Maedhros.
Amras’s gaze comes slowly into focus. “Yes,” he says.
East.
-
There are two ways this story might end, and when they ride away both are equally likely.
The first sees them they do what they mean to, the day they ride away from Sirion.
They keep riding East. They join the rest of their people, who look for Elurín and Eluréd’s small bright heads as they approach, and are heartsick not to see them, and are still so terribly thankful when Maedhros gives one tight nod.
They are safe now. They are saved now.
They ride East together. They ride through the blasted land, the poisoned earth, the sickened water. Some of their people fall fighting Orcs. They keep riding East. More die, and they keep riding. They ride East until there’s no one left. Maybe they fall to another Orc skirmish on the way, but perhaps they get as far as the Gates of Thangorodrim once more. Perhaps by that time it’s only the three of them left, Maglor and Maedhros and Amras.
(Maglor likes to believe that Amras will make it somehow to the end of their long road into darkness. He has to believe it.).
They call for Morgoth at the Gates, and perhaps he too hears the ring of fate and he comes out to meet them, hobbling, his last time above the dirt and under the red and sickened sun, with the two last Silmarils still shining from his iron crown; or perhaps he only sends his fell lieutenants in his stead.
However far they get, riding East, they die facing the Enemy. They die like princes of the Noldor should, and have, and know that nothing will be waiting for them but nothingness itself.
They die well.
The Valar are unexpectedly kind.
-
The second ending sees them walking in the same endless circle they have been treading since the day they watched their father weep flame and spit flame and vomit flame and die. It widens and then tightens, relenting for a moment and then returning them to the beginning. Their path never goes forward. It never can.
They ride back to Sirion.
Perhaps it takes them only a year to break. Perhaps it’s many years, because they did mean it when they rode away. Many Orcs fall to their swords in the East. They fight the eternal return. They weep, they spit, they vomit blood.
They ride back to Sirion.
In the years Elwing holds the Jewel, the people of Sirion use it purify the poisoned water that flows down to them from its wellspring in what was once Hithlum and is now ash. The Jewel frightens away marauding Orcs more powerfully than the sun. The Jewel’s light helps crops grow again in the tainted soil near the mouth of the sea. Always the Jewel is a beacon, luring danger to them.
After Alqualondë, they told themselves, what they did there was a hot deed, committed in blazing passion and confusion. They would never have done it if they had had any time to think! After Doriath, only Maedhros still believed that. He would never have done it if Celegorm only hadn’t--!
There are no illusions left when they ride back to Sirion. They are looking straight into the mirror, and it shows them something monstrous.
What will you do?
For the Jewel: anything.
Amras falls before they reach the tower on the cliff. He looks relieved to die.
No Idril, no mortal husband, no half-mortal son. Where Idril’s family have gone, Maglor doesn’t know, but in the tower room overlooking the sea they find the three children of Dior and Nimloth.
They all have the same silver-grey eyes that were their father’s. The same fair face of their mother. Eluréd and Elurín wear dark sea-pearls in their fair hair. Their sister’s dark hair is knotted with white gull feathers.
Around her throat is the Jewel.
In her brothers’ hands are long spears with sharp fishing-hooks on the end. They are standing between her and the door, between her and the invaders, between Maedhros and Maglor and the Jewel. In the corner of the room behind her is another pair of twins, very small, their eyes wide and bright as mithril. Lúthien's line, still moving inexorably forward.
The sister’s throat moves, but no sound comes out. She is very afraid.
“The Jewel,” Maglor says, his voice like dust.
“The Jewel,” says Maedhros, dustier still. “Please.”
The children of Dior and Nimloth have been expecting them for a very long time.
Elwing takes the Jewel from her throat and gives it to the brother closest to her when he holds out his hand. Then that brother – Eluréd? Elurín? – holds it out to Maglor and Maedhros, an offering, and Maedhros makes a sound like the fishhook has caught his guts instead.
Maglor drops his bloody sword. He stares for a moment. He looks at Eluréd-or-Elurín, and then at Elurín-or-Eluréd, and then at their sister. Three pairs of grey eyes meet his in turn, respectively solemn, sad, and sullen.
Then Maglor reaches out for the Jewel, and for one glorious moment, as his hand curls around it at last, all the pain stops. The circle closes.
Then it blooms again like a hideous flower. He’s holding the sun in his fingers. He’s holding the Eternal Flame. He’s burning and burning, the skin of his hand reddening and then charring and then whitening. The pain doesn’t stop even when the nerves go.
There is water shining through the tower window. Water for the fire.
He is at the window before he knows what he’s doing. Maedhros is shouting something, his voice hoarse.
He is falling.
There is nothing to catch him on his way down, nothing for him to catch hold of, only water and water and water and the star in his hand, caught at last, and there is nothing -
But the Valar are thrifty, so perhaps then there are feathers.