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“You’ve grown terribly thin,” Bauglir murmurs. “Give your wrist here, Maeglin.”
He speaks without a trace of his usual savoring gaiety.
Maeglin remembers what had been done to a thin wrist, not his. He stretches out his hand despite this. That is how much fear is in him.
Bauglir’s white finger and thumb, both long and firm and clammy, encircle his bones.
“I was a surgeon this morning,” he says softly, thickly, almost to himself.
Maeglin is, from head to foot, a scream. He wants his hand back.
(He can hear—in his mind, he still hears the howls. He has heard them in his sleep.)
“A surgeon,” Bauglir repeats. “I cut Mairon’s eye out of his head. Do you know how many times he has done such things for me? Not to me, of course not to me…but it felt like justice and injustice at once.”
(Taken from the gabled house, where he had lived and tinkered, loved by women who treated him like the sons they did not have—
This is your home now.
Maeglin stares up at the Mountain, with its many gaping maws. He cannot cry.
She has never liked it when he cries.)
“With Mairon lost for now, to whom shall I turn?”
“I do not know, sir.”
“You bear such resemblance, you know. It’s why I’ve always been fond of you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Did you know before I did,” Bauglir asks, still in the deep, dark voice that carves its way into Maeglin’s chest, “That he was gone?”
“No—no, sir. I didn’t know anything. If I had I would have—”
“Told me, yes. You would have told me. But would you have known what love looked like? Someone came for him, someone who loved him enough to cut off his hand.”
And still! The thumb and finger are around his wrist!
(The first night he spends alone, in a canvas tent instead of the quarters he will later he make his own—he knows that that there will be no escape, because he is here not as a guest, but as something else.)
Two weeks pass. He is twice called to meet Bauglir. Bauglir does not look as sickly, as owl-eyed as he did when he held Maeglin by his unsevered hand, but he is just as vast; just as cunning.
Maeglin counts the days with more clarity than he found belonged to him, before. Knowing that Russandol…lives? is a strange and terrifying ache, but it gives time dimension.
Knowing that Mairon is less an eye—
But they worked in separate forges. Mairon’s forge was not for anyone or anything other than himself and Bauglir. Maeglin never even saw it, but he smelled it on an errand, once, and it smelled like meat as well as metal. Maeglin was promised (to Bauglir) as one who was quick and clever with his mind and touch.
Maeglin was something of value, and he worked in a forge to make things rather than destroy them.
To make, to betray, to love, to destroy, to hope, to hold, to cut off a hand because…
Two eyes, looking down at two hands, which hold a fork and a knife and have meat laid out before them.
“We must fatten you up,” Bauglir says, smiling broadly, at the end of the second week.
When Maeglin learns that he is leaving the Mountain, he knows more than ever that he shall never be free.
“You are a smith, and I am short-handed,” Bauglir explains, creasing a letter in his hand. “It seems meet that I should keep you here with me, does it not, my lad? But no—I am generous. A man of deep coffers, even when the gold itself runs grey. You and I shall be parted, soon, and more than one body shall turn in the grave over it, I daresay. You will be my legacy, mayhap, more than Mairon. More than our old friend Russandol.”
He hands another letter to Maeglin. This one is freshly sealed.
“Thank you, sir.” (He hates to say it. To say anything. He wants to die, or be risen, in clean sunshine, without a thought or a memory or—
You are your home now.)
“Goodley will travel with you,” Bauglir says. “To make certain that you, a precious gift, are not…lost along the way. It will do him good; it will do Gothmog’s man some good. He could use the fresh air, what with the ash in his lungs! Ha! He would have cut Russandol to bits. We all would have, and we all did, didn’t we? Even after Gothmog—even after I—oh, but what is the past, except our religion? That boy was an emblem of our dashed hopes. Dashed, Maeglin, as I nearly dashed your skull against the rock-road when you told me what he’d done!” Bauglir leans forward. Maeglin does not move; does not breathe.
“I had some satisfaction,” Bauglir says, “I assure you, in carving Mairon’s crushed eye out of him. How he struggled! I do hate the bearer of bad news.”
Maeglin looks down. The floor is the color of black shale, black maws. He cannot see where the bloodstains are, but he knows they must be all around him. People have died in every yawning inch of this place.
And he is…dead, before all others. He’s always known he was squirming, under-earth creature, rejected from the womb, half-living on borrowed time.
“I will do anything,” he says, swiftly, and though he does not understand why, Bauglir laughs.
“Wise words. Well, then. Ancalagon shall have you, and shall doubtless make a man of you. If you survive her, you’ll be a better man than the rest, I think, for you have biting, gnawing hopes in you!”
Does he?
“This letter is my regard to the old She-Dragon,” Morgoth concludes venomously. “See that it reaches her. See that she is well-pleased with you.”
Maeglin, despairing, sets out to become someone else.