Chapter Text
Maedhros, in the doorway, is colored by the same light that falls from any other candle. His hair is burnished bronze; his face burns tallow-gold. The grief of him is in his shadow, but they don’t yet understand that.
Maglor is dreaming, and he dreams, as always, of the past.
You knew more than I, he says.
His brother is beautiful. Tall, perfect, unscarred. Holding his body and spirit away from the sound of the wrath, the memory of fear.
Maedhros says, over and over and over,
I never know what the future holds.
The lines of his face all wrong, the length of his hair all wrong, the bandaged limbs all wrong, the space where a hand and fingers should be—
It is morning. Morning in Mithrim, in the old study with the map-lined walls, sharp-edged by the secrets of a trap door, the tips of dried pen-nibs, and the scrape of Maglor’s fingernails against the desk.
Maglor could scream, here, beyond a door a man once closed and locked against him, intending death.
The man was not his father, but he might have been.
You, he thinks. Pain has lasted long enough to give him clarity. It is a feeling he considered lost in the miasma of despair, along with his poetry. His music. You, Athair. You left us, and your Morgoth came.
Light filters through the narrow window. This window looks hillward; behind Mithrim. Not towards the lake. Maglor flexes his cramped fingers. His mouth is bitter with nightmares.
His eyes are dry.
He cannot unsee the brother who returned.
(The way they cut open his skin over the bridge of his nose, his lips. His very bones have suffered.)
(And that is nothing, to the horror of his handless arm.)
Maglor twists his own hands together, and finds no comfort in the gesture. He is keenly aware of himself, in a manner so long-distant as to be stark and unfamiliar. He failed, in venturing forth the day before, with pride he could not bolster by force of arms.
He failed by—by wishing for force of arms.
“I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;” he whispers. It is a dare, an awakening. He has not—he has not declaimed, nor felt he had the right to, since the fateful days of late spring.
Now, he rallies. It is a punishment he deserves, to reclaim the words of a poet.
Not his own words.
I never know what the future holds.
Not Maedhros’.
He rises, and chants,
“Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”
It would have been easier if Maedhros was dead; if Fingon had found and buried him.
That is, it would have been easier, then, for Maglor to die, too.
He washes his hair and dresses. He has clean shirts and trousers—Caranthir will not turn their laundry over to Mithrim’s women, and insists on tending to it himself. Maglor combs his hair and notes how it reaches, now, to his shoulders. Maedhros’ should be longer than that.
He does not know why his mind returns, again and again, to such a comparatively insignificant matter.
Maybe he cannot bear to long envision the gashed nose, the bruised cheek—
The bandages, and what they hide—
He does not pray. That is one failing he shares with Celegorm and Curufin, though they are unlike in other respects. They none of them turn to the God they forsook. They worshipped their father, while they lived, and they court death, now that he is dead.
They do it in their own ways. Celegorm kills, and Curufin excavates the cavern of his soul’s grave, and Maglor…
Maglor lies awake in darkness, silently.
To be silent, for one such as him—
It is near the end of a considered time.
The light on the lake, and the memory of Athair—it is almost as if he was there within Mithrim when they came to ruin it, how they must have looked as they waited. How proud they were, across the bridge, on weary horses. Death behind them. Hope before them, but only Athair’s hope.
Maglor had been angry, then.
He tells the sentries to let him pass; he goes alone. They do not even attempt to prevent him. This could be looked upon in two, equally bladed ways. It could be respect, or disinterest.
If he dies—
Maglor smiles. Close-lipped, and in the sight of no one.
If he dies, they will make Celegorm and Curufin their leaders together. Or they will kill each other slowly, Mithrim’s men and the Feanorian boys.
(Maglor will not die today.)
He has spent a good deal of time consumed by jealousy, by fear. He feels it still; vice nips at his heels as much as it haunts his dreams. That is a murderer’s fate, and he was (will always be) a murderer.
He is no longer a son, no longer worthy to be counted as a godfather, and if he is a brother, there is only one person for whom that was ever enough—
The tents are weather-stained: heavy canvas stretched over uneven poles. They were raised up in haste, which gives Maglor some insight into his uncle’s thinking.
FIngolfin expected to be invited into Mithrim.
Fingolfin shall have his wish, now.
Three sentries stand between Maglor and the camp. He raises his hands, to show that he carries nothing.
He did not even bring his gun; he made himself a sacrifice before they could.
“I come in peace,” he says.
These men don’t know Feanorians, but for the rumors that have, no doubt, been fed to them like poison stirred through wine. One, a rangy towheaded fellow, squints.
“In peace, eh? We’ll see about that.”
“Wister. It’s all right.”
Maglor cannot weep, yet. Certainly, he cannot weep at the sight of Finrod.
Finrod, if he is as weary as the dark shadows beneath his eyes suggest, does not falter in gaze or stance. He waits for the sentries to disperse; he waits for Maglor to speak.
That was always his way. Watching and testing; more cunning than Fingon, but less gentle than Maedhros.
Maglor used to think they were equals, of a sort. Finrod and himself. Maedhros shone above them (though Maglor knew his darker secrets). Fingon was a child.
But Finrod strove for greatness.
And Maglor—
His talent, his promise. They were already considered great.
“I’ve come to speak to Fingolfin,” Maglor says. “Not you.”
Finrod’s lip twist. It is not quite a sneer. It is—sympathy, but Maglor must own it no wonder that he struggled to recognize the expression.
It has been a long while since anyone wore it, before his eyes.
“Maglor,” Finrod says, “What has become of you?”
Maglor scrapes and scrabbles for his pride. He does so standing still. The wind in his damp hair is unpleasantly cold. “What sort of question is that?”
He thinks he sees a little of the sneer, then.
“Our uncle is with Maedhros.” Finrod divulges this. Maybe he thinks they have nothing more to hide, this side of Mithrim. “Come with me.”
Fingon must be there too, in that tent. Else he would be prowling the shore and demanding justification from intruders. Maglor’s heart seizes up. There is pain in his arms, his hands, the lines of his throat and shoulders. All the parts of him that made music sing silently, now. He would call it a curse, but he knows that no one else would call it anything.
He sees Aredhel from afar, talking with Turgon and Artanis.
Maedhros took it upon himself to befriend these lesser cousins. Maedhros—
(The lines of his face all wrong, the length of his hair all wrong, the bandaged limbs all wrong.)
The camp is not recognizable to him. Celegorm had described it, but then Celegorm, even when overwritten by panic and grief, is a hunter rather than a visionary. Pain cannot cloud his eyes.
Maglor, having grieved, remembers nothing but his brother.
The tent to which Finrod leads him is not the largest tent. It is, however, positioned near a large fire. Water is boiling over it.
The woman who tends the fire has a repellant, leather-masked, one-eyed face; stitched and fitted all wrong.
Maglor gazes on her in horror, then tears himself away.
A worse sight awaits him. It hurts all the more for its tender poverty. Maedhros at his worst, in Maglor’s care, was still lovely, stalwart in his birthright of talent and grandeur. I will protect you, Maglor used to snap at him, in the lonely halls at Valinor Park. If that is what you are after. I will not tell Athair, if that is what you are afraid of, or Grandfather—or Mother—
Fingolfin is seated on a low stool beside the long, blanket-covered lines of Maedhros’ body. A steaming bowl is in his hands. A father-look is on his face.
Maglor rejects that last somehow the more, more even than Fingon kneeling at Maedhros’ head. Fingon’s hands are in his hair. His own hair is braided back from his face. He looks clean and neat and almost calm, as he observes his mysterious doctorly duties.
(They must have been feeding him.)
“Maglor has come to speak with you,” Finrod says. Fingon starts, at this, but Fingolfin does not.
Could they—
No. They could not have been expecting him. Not Finrod. Not Fingolfin. Maglor will not allow it, will not grant them the privilege of knowing what is in his heart.
He barely knew himself, until now.
He has been afraid, he understands, that he does not love Maedhros better than they do—these cold-hearted, virtuous kin, with their plain faces and capable hands. Maglor knows that his family is a wound. The body bleeds when it is cut to pieces; brilliant and bright though that blood may flow.
And he survives, even as he rots, and he loves Maedhros more.
For that love, then, he does this:
Enters the tent. Beholds the unbeautiful. Begs a favor in offering one.
His father would not understand, perhaps, but his father is dead.
“You want to take him away?” Fingon demands incredulously, though it was not to Fingon that Maglor spoke. “Out of the question!’
It takes—it takes the scarred lips, the sunken hollows of the bruised and blemished throat, the awful stillness; all these keep Maglor civil.
That, and Fingolfin shaking his head in reproof.
“Fingon, let him finish.”
Maglor knows that he resembles his father a little. He has the same genius, the knife of his spirit held at the core of his body.
Perhaps the two are the same. If that is so, then he is not the same.
(An image: Maedhros, night after night after night, walking the floor with his face in his hands, Jesus, Maglor, leave off—
Do you hate him?
Then silence, guilty for both of them. Because that question was betrayal, even when their father had asked Maedhros time and again to betray, as Maglor knew in his bones that he had.)
“I offer you safety,” he says. It is not a grand or gentlemanly gesture; it is begging. Sometimes it is begging, when you offer a father your home. “You may enter Mithrim.”
Fingolfin watches him carefully. This should not come as an insult, but it does. If Maglor says, I am not my father, whom will it serve?
He keeps civil.
“Will your brothers agree?” his uncle asks.
Maglor told them not of his going; they will not know when or how to expect his return.
“I am the leader of the fort,” he says. “When my father died, and Maedhros—”
But he stumbles, there. He cannot—he does not want to say, what Maedhros was doing.
But Fingolfin presses no further. He does not ask Maglor to return to the night when Maedhros forced one last embrace, when Maglor let grief be anger, when the hooves clattered into darkness, never to be heard with proper weight again.
Finrod has been silent all this while. Both he and Fingon are closer to Maedhros than Maglor is. Maglor does not like to see them ranged there beside him, like two watchful hawks.
“Will we find safety in your fort?” Finrod asks. “With those strangers?”
“There are no traitors in Mithrim,” Maglor answers. He does not say, no more. Ulfang is dead and gone. His name shall not ring out again—
Not in Maglor’s fort.
Fingolfin links his hands together and stares down at them. He used to do that long ago, and Maglor thought it was fury suppressed.
He’ll hit Athair if he has the chance, Maglor said to himself, and waited with a child’s sick, unholy thrill, for the blow to fall.
It never did.
Fingolfin says, “We are a camp with several leaders, here. I will consult with them as to the exact numbers that will enter. But it would serve your brother better to be within real walls. Resting on a better bed.”
“We can give that to him.” Maglor does not know how to answer the rest of the words; is it a show of strength? A strategic ploy?
They came so far. They suffered and died. These faces rival his own, for pain endured. But it isn’t the same. Fingon, so much older than he was when Maglor resented his clumsy adolescent overtures, is not ruled by the cruelty of his circumstances.
Finrod, with the grim set of his jaw, is likewise implacable.
Grandfather took us all aside—the four of us—and said that we would all be the men of our houses, someday.
Maglor is looking at his cousins because he cannot look at Maedhros for more than an instant. He came to bargain for Maedhros, to offer what remaining strength he has for Maedhros, and yet…
Why would we both be men of our house? He asked, putting a hand, as it were, to the fault-seam in the logic.
Maedhros answered:
No one would ever wish to exclude you, cano.
He is going to leave Maedhros here again. Under the stained canvas, amid the sacks and barrels of (no doubt) hard-won supplies. He is all wounds, but they have cleaned him—with clear liquor, boiled water, wrung cotton. Fingon would know what to do. If Maedhros worsens, hungers, wakes—
Someone cut off his hand, and Fingon saved his life.
Maglor understands why Celegorm ran.
He puts that thought away.
“Today,” he says, shifting his gaze above the road of his brother’s body. Finrod may scorn him, and Fingon may loathe him. They feel nothing that he has not felt first himself. “Will you come today?”
The hush is not strategy. They are not at war. If only their caution was war, rather than love. Maglor sways on his feet.
His uncle nods. Fingolfin—Maglor has never seen him, like this, because he learned from childhood to see only what made the world fit together.
(He sang the rest, but his song has departed. The future holds nothing but that from which ear and eye cannot afford to hide.)
“We will come today,” Fingolfin agrees. “At least in part. Again, I do not know what the rest of the camp shall decide upon, and I would not speak for them.”
“You do not fear that we shall hold you hostage?” Maglor asks, and tastes his cousins’ anger. He is, after all, a little of his father’s son—and that is what they will see. But it is a child’s question.
Fingolfin shakes his head slowly. “I do not fear that, Maglor.”
All this time, his uncle has remained seated. Raising his eyes to meet Maglor’s. All this time, Maedhros has not lowered himself.
If one stands on the edge of a cliff—if one walks back, back, back from the edge with each footstep a memory—
Fingon clears his throat.
Finrod is silent.
Outside, the camp of strangers moves with the easy, industrious self-absorption of bees. They eat, they sleep, they befriend. Maglor (who has never been much for friendship) can recognize the firm formation of an alliance. But—and here is the mystery—he does not believe that Fingolfin’s confidence stems from the knowledge of fighting power.
“Very well.” (The doom is on him.) “I will go on ahead, and give the alert. How soon can you bring—him?”
Fingon huffs impatiently. “It will be a slow process, Maglor. It is not safe to move—”
“You must have dragged him many miles,” Maglor snaps, his resolve fracturing at last. “And yet he lives.”
(He lives he lives he—)
Fingolfin raises a hand. Finrod rests one on Fingon’s shoulder. Maedhros’, shorn off, is naught but a ghost.
“Will two hours be agreeable?” Fingolfin asks.
Fingon chews his lips, a stolen trait, but he nods. “Good enough.”
“Estrela and I will help you,” Finrod assures him, in a low voice. “Whatever you should need.”
Maglor should depart. “I shall expect you in two hours,” he says, as coldly as he can, and Fingolfin nods gravely, rising. He has business to attend to, after all. And as for Maglor, he expects his feet to move beneath him, to carry him out of doors, into a world he has had no part in saving.
Instead his fingers twitch, grasping at invisible strings.
His voice catches in his throat, as it never did in song.
“Can I touch him?”
They are proud and generous, surrounded by proud and generous people. It is a privilege; a matter of being easily unfeeling, to be so free in love.
Maglor has shown his hand; they will deny him, now.
Maglor crosses the bridge. The sentries stand aside. His pulse thumps in his ears. No one exclaims; no one is waiting for him, here.
(You may, said his uncle, and he did not even warn him to be gentle.)
He kneels, rooted in the cold earth. He can see, now, the rise and fall of his brother’s chest. Fire floods his eyes, his throat. His whole body recalls its old patterns—its oldest patterns, when he was nearly small enough to be carried on Mother’s hip. In those days, Maedhros, though not equal to his weight, would lift him up sometimes, would hush him until Maglor laughed away whatever baby-hurt had vexed him.
Maglor’s hands.
Maglor’s hands, trembling. There is no comfort. No answering voice.
We are all alone, and it would have been better if you were dead—
But the rise and fall of breath!
Maglor does not take the remaining hand. Instead he fits his own against the sunken cheeks, mindful of the bruises there. The skin is dry and warm.
The scream does not leave Maglor. It breaks like a wave. He drags the tips of his fingers, lightly, very lightly, under Maedhros’ blind eyes.
A world, this.