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Maria gathers Estrela in her arms, one palm against the back of her neck, the other clasped at her elbow. “I’d beg you to come,” she says, “But Soldier’s your man, ain’t he? And t’other.”
Estrela is horribly afraid, though the fear should not be a new one. She presses her rough face against Maria’s neck. When she shuts her eye, she can imagine that she still has two.
Her lives are so different, divided in their parts, that she herself cannot recognize them. Who is she? How would she answer the question?
Who would ask it?
“I can help here,” she says. Not I am needed, nor yet I am wanted, which is sweetest of all, and thus, unattainable. She is just confident enough to believe that her service will be of use; that her care of the children will be an aid, of sorts.
Russandol will want to see the children, when he wakes. Even if it hurts him, he will want that.
She should call him Maedhros now.
Whenever she reminds herself of that, she thinks of what she wants him to call her.
(She wept in the tent with Finrod, Finrod who is so kind, and she truly thought it was an ending. She was shocked by the generosity of those who were his blood. It was a marvelous thing, that any of them would take time to grieve with a hideous stranger.
Such a scrap is more than she has asked for in years.)
She bid farewell to Maria—to all of them, the women and young ones who had been her friends—before they departed, south and curving away from the river and the lake. It was a land no more desolate than the mountainside, with its variegated stone flesh, its forests, its arid bushland. Mithrim encompasses a hill, a meadow. Scattered trees.
This will not be all their home; it cannot be. Gathering the camp together after Maedhros’ brother came to make terms with Fingolfin, Haleth explained in plain language that she worked by agreement for a wealthy rancher named Elu Thingol. A Spaniard in the South.
“He is no friend to your hunters,” Haleth said. For most, that was enough. Hunters—and here only a slender bridge and a single, stone-walled fort to keep them out!
It was true, Mithrim did not look anything like the home Estrela dreamt of, but she sought it no more for that than for its safety.
She knew what was barred to her. The old portion: beauty and freedom and father. The new—new affections, if they took root too deeply. A secure resting place could not save her; could not give her comfort.
In this stolid, guarded place, she must gather up her old affections, and her new lot, and make something of it worth keeping. She must remember who she was in the slave-camp. The others would want to forget that, but Estrela was ever more a creature than they were. When she had been trusted, she had protected the women with the illusion of pox and other illnesses. She had saved bread and water for the children, doctored their ills with the scraps that others brought her.
The trust had come with time.
She could not be loved by anyone but the children, who had always known her. She had no body for bartering—to be exact, no face. Gwindor and she had befriended each other because of some equal brokenness. The brokenness need not be explained, for her; for Gwindor, it took the shape of pain and longing.
When the long line of Haleth and the camp moved off, leaving only a few tents in their wake, Estrela knew her half-choice had been made. She kept company with half-choices; selecting among a handful of better or worse.
Despite the pain and the slow swell of trust, theirs had been a kinship: her and the other women, her and the other children. They knew what it was to be afraid more than angry. To lose good memories without the hope of creating more. The back-breaking weariness. The bleeding shoulders, the bleeding fingers, the bleeding soles of their feet.
Nothing beautiful in that; nothing to be taken from it.
Nothing left by its loss.
Fingolfin and his family have with them a dozen or so companions who joined them before Haleth’s party did. These, Estrela understands, suffered a hard winter together. The companions, unlike the family, look on her with grim uncertainty.
Worse shall come.
She had intended to remain with Fingon, with Maedhros, so that she might help ready him for the journey. In the end, Finrod and Fingon had conversed briefly, needing few words between them to satisfy their mutual understanding. Then they had agreed that Estrela should not trouble herself; no, she should make her goodbyes to her friends.
“You’ve done so much already,” Fingon said warmly. He did not look at her weak, swollen hands.
She held Maria too long. She felt her friend begin to weep against her. That was unfair.
“Go on,” Estrela said. “You’re off south. It will be warm there. Warm! Depend on it, you’ll be so happy as not to even think of me.”
Maria shook her head, but that was just more kindness. More sentiment, of a moment.
One could not ask for love.
Inside Mithrim, there will be no recognition, and no trust. They do not even trust Fingon there, for they are the family that betrayed him—that betrayed gentle Fingolfin. Estrela does not know the whole of it, though she heard the essentials from Finrod. She does not know what can drive men apart when they are still young, still hale. All her griefs came brutally and quickly, by a ruthless hand. Then she was left to live long with them. Perhaps this has twisted her understanding.
(If he did wrong, did he believe he should suffer for it? There was so little complaint in him. She remembers how, in the vicious sunlight, he did not scream.)
When she crosses the bridge, behind his body, she can see the crown of Maedhros’ head. Too dark, still, as Fingon has not had time to wash and dress his cousin’s hair, amidst all his other duties. Estrela wishes that there was more permanence in her knowledge of him. To her, he is a thousand facets, all of which may not be believed by those who knew him better. To her, he is Russandol, seeming so young in the quiet spaces beneath violence and woe.
His brothers are younger than he is. She must remember that, when they hate her.
She must remember that there is time, yet, to win trust.
Now, in the snatch of time that has passed, Russandol’s brothers are watching her. They are nothing alike, save for the intensity of their regard.
This is where Estrela must not fall apart. This scrutiny. When they entered the fort, she kept her head down. She followed Fingon.
Still, she knew some of the whispers were for her.
I shall allow you one chance to change your mind, ma belle. I should not like you to regret your answer.
The room where they have laid Russandol is lived-in, yet it remains unfriendly. For those first moments, it was crowded, bustling, but the comers soon dispersed. The bedframe there is only broad enough for two, but there were three bedrolls that Fingon and his father divided after Turgon and Finrod departed. Three bedrolls for five brothers? There is something missing from her understanding.
The children are with Galadriel, who is not inclined towards children particularly, but who (Finrod assures) will keep them safe from any interference by the inhabitants of the fort if so charged. In not too much time, anyway, Beren, Wachiwi, and the others shall arrive. Estrela barely knows them, but for their kindness to her in the grey haze of the past week.
She is grateful that Fingon seems glad of her company; grateful that Finrod does not ask why she feels justified in choosing Russandol over the children. Gwindor does not begrudge her this choice. When they first settled Russandol on the bed, concealing his misshapen limbs beneath the coverlets as soon as they could, Gwindor sank against the wall by the window and let the lost spirit in him shine out of his eyes.
Yet later, Gwindor goes out to search for food and drink, because Fingon asked him to. He will do what Fingon wishes, that much is clear. Estrela will never know what passed between them on the mountain; she cannot know. She struggles to imagine how they could have saved him, valiant though they both are, from the forces that held him fast.
Perhaps he had been left for dead, and Fingon took what should have been a body.
Such things have been done before.
She folds her hands (her two hands) in her lap, waiting for Fingon to give her a task to perform. She, too, will do what Fingon asks.
She will live and die at this bedside, if that can restore life and health, the silver sheen of his gaze, the faint ribbon of his smile.
Waiting, her eyes trace the line of his arm to its unnatural end.
Mairon must have taken his hand; it would be like him to claim the trophy, at Bauglir’s order or on his own campaign of cruelty. Mairon is not the one who haunts her mind, however, for all that his handiwork is here.
Bauglir is Estrela’s monster, because he knew her better. He knew where her scars should be placed, and what is more, he knew what they would do to her, for as long as she miserably lived.
Estrela sat with her back to the outer wall and her face muffled in her shawl, that night that Russandol lay dying, and heard her monster speak.
Maitimo, I often wonder where I shall find you next.
She had done all that was in her power to keep from screaming, to keep from warring with voice and body against that detestable, covetous tenderness. In her father’s house, she had thought it desire, and it was—
But it was, too, an instinct greater than that. A body could be taken and used.
A soul…
Russandol—Maedhros—Maitimo should not have suffered her fate. Should not have been craved and ruined by the same hands, the same mind. Mairon is the flint and they the tinder; but somewhere, always, a maker strikes the flame.
Bauglir asked for her eye. Her mouth. Bauglir must have asked—
When she was his inadequate physician, she had directed Russandol to join his hands with Gwindor’s. His ruined back had trembled, had bled.
She was wild with the prayer of her desperate folly, then, and in the many days that followed, and she believed herself capable of guessing his future.
That past is razed to silence now.
(Did Mairon make him beg?)
“Estrela,” Fingon says, his jaw and temples tight, “It would be well to bathe and dress him, I think.”
“What do you need?” asks the dark-haired brother stiffly, and the fierce one with the dog sneers silently.
“Need?” Fingon asks, turning to look at his—his cousin.
The boy turns red. He looks nothing like Russandol. His face is all square corners; his hair pitch-dark. He folds his arms over his chest. Estrela likes him, though she has no right to.
“Privacy,” Fingon answers, in his soft doctor-voice. “Really. It will make him more comfortable when he wakes, I expect, to know that few—”
“You count out his own brothers?” the fierce one demands. When he spoke before, Estrela was reminded of the camp guards. That is not fair. She knows that there is pain here; there must be pain, looking upon this ruin. She is no help to them, for that. She is a ruin too; a ruin and a shame.
(Russandol should not have suffered her fate.)
“He is an invalid,” Fingon snaps. It is not a tone she has heard him use, before. “Honestly, Celegorm. You may stand there and glare, and I daresay you will think yourself heroic for doing it, but it will do nothing for Maitimo.”
Celegorm’s eyes blaze. He is beautiful, and though he is cast in gold rather than copper, Estrela understands. Understands and imagines, what it would have been like to see Russandol stand so tall—strong rather than starved-thin—bold rather than meek.
Maitimo.
“You don’t have to be savage with us,” growls the dark-haired one. “You brought him back, and we’re grateful—”
“Speak for yourself,” Celegorm says, and Estrela, who knows the touch of a blade’s edge, feels it in his voice. “He’s less a hand. You see that, Caranthir? You see where it ought to be.”
Fingon squares his shoulders and is silent for a moment. Estrela wishes he would look at her, so that the meeting of their eyes could steady him, but perhaps she is only thinking of what would steady Gwindor.
She has known Fingon…it has been a matter of days, only.
(It isn’t like that, here. Not like a lonely week or month or year spent in close quarters under the watch of overseers. You couldn’t make friends easily, in Gothmog’s domain. Not without danger—without all the sluggish weariness belonging to a meaningless existence.)
Fingon clears his throat. Russandol is between him, between him and Estrela. His chest rises and falls. Some of his wounds were opened again, carefully, covetous of the unmarked skin between them. She and Gwindor alone know that.
Estrela feels every seamed scar in her skin burning.
“Celegorm,” Fingon says, “I will never ask for your gratitude. I would sooner ask for your life.” To Estrela, he adds, “We will need hot water. Soap and clean rags are in my pack.”
“I will boil water,” Caranthir offers, moving hastily to the door. The look he casts back is gentle, fearful, suffused with longing. Estrela thinks he might be Haldar’s age—a little younger.
But Haldar, of course, will always be young.
Celegorm, for his part, curses under his breath. Then he sits down heavily on the floor beside his dog, and scrubs one palm against his eyes. “Have you fed him?” he asks gruffly. “Given him water? What was he like when you found him, hey? Have you made him worse?”
Fingon is hesitating. Not only to answer, Estrela realizes: he does not want to undress Maedhros before an audience.
Even—especially—if the audience is his brother. Fingon’s enemy.
“I sent Gwindor out to find food.” Fingon’s fingers twist the edge of the blanket, draw it straight again. “It wasn’t only for myself.”
“Prickly as ever,” Celegorm scoffs. His face is hard, but when next he speaks, he is…less so. His arms rest on his knees. “Doctor or no, we know him better than you do. We’ll—when he wakes, what are the faces he expects to see? Not yours. You were gone.”
“Gone?” Fingon wheels on him. No more talk of bathing, of dressing wounds, of medicine or victuals.
Estrela flinches, from anger not aimed at her.
“Gone?” Fingon says again. “Your father took our gold. Your—you slaughtered men for miles, all to outrun us. But I outpaced you. I did. When I found him, he was nearer to death than he is now. And I did not demand an account of where he had been. No, more than that! When I found him, I did not ask him to count the men he killed. I did not ask him why he burned the bridge.” The words choke there, and Fingon tucks his chin against his breast.
A strange silence. Celegorm tilts his head. His dog does the same. Estrela almost finds humor in it, or would, if the seams of a scarred life were not being stitched together in her sight.
She doesn’t know any of them. But she did know Russandol. She did.
“Maitimo didn’t burn the bridge,” Celegorm says, low. “Fucking hell, it’s so long ago you think you’d have wept out all your tears about it. But since it still digs, you might as well lay off him. He can’t defend himself.”
“He—” Fingon ventures, white-lipped. “It wasn’t—”
Celegorm grins. Estrela has never seen Russandol smile fiercely. She wonders if it would look like this. There must have been fierceness in him.
Even there…Gwindor told her what he did.
(They cut off his hand because he brought down their kingdom with it.)
“Maitimo,” Celegorm says, “Nicked seven men that day. I’m sure you know it, coming after as you did. Then came the bridge—a way out, for those of us who needed it. We were to set torches to it. He wouldn’t.”
Burned it, Gwindor told her. Burned the forge from the inside out. That was his plan, and by God—
This was before, and after. After they had lost him. Before Fingon turned back time.
A sigh, deep in the sunken chest. No change to the bruised face.
“I didn’t know that,” Fingon says.
“How could you?” Celegorm answers.
Celegorm hates him. Estrela wishes she did not see that. She keeps still and quiet. She is not here, to them.
The door swings open. It is Gwindor, with a bowl in one hand and a mug in the other. “Stew for you and fresh water for him,” he says ruefully. “Broth’s brewing. Shan’t be ready for a spell. And they’re coming. I couldn’t stop them.”
They are two more brothers. Amras and the one who strode into the camp late this morning, with pale resolve on his thin face. His name is Maglor, and he looks rather like a darker Russandol, though he is smaller of frame. They crowd the bedside; they do not acknowledge her, either, beyond a small nod from Amras.
Celegorm looks stormy at their arrival. He folds himself back up against the wall, standing. Estrela notices that he is taller than all his brothers, save the one on the bed.
“Please,” Fingon says, raising his voice almost more than he did when he was quarrelling with Celegorm. “The air will grow too close, with so many people about.”
“Open a window,” Caranthir suggests, returning with a steaming pot of water in his hands and a bundle of cloth tucked awkwardly beneath his arm. “Here, Amras, go and throw open that window.”
Amras scrambles to his feet.
“That’s not—” Fingon splutters, and Celegorm laughs unpleasantly.
“Outnumbered, are you?”
“Maitimo,” Maglor whispers, kneeling at the head of the bed—forcing Fingon to shift a little as he does so. Fingon’s nostrils flare as he breathes evenly. Estrela moved aside for Amras, but she has no right; no stake to claim.
Maglor strokes Russandol’s hair with his long, sensitive fingers. “Maitimo,” he whispers. “You’re home. You’ve come home to us. Darling, you can wake now.”
Estrela shrinks from that tear-filled voice; that fragile beauty. She looks away from Maglor and his Maitimo, and instead finds Gwindor. She sees that he is disgusted and impatient. Sees next, with another turn of her head, that kind Doctor Fingon has unraveled to madness, to panic.
Only at the edges, that madness, but it is enough.
“Maglor, it would be best if no one touched him yet,” Fingon says. He speaks quietly at first, and then—“All of you, enough! This is the first time he has lain on a proper bed in who knows how long. He needs to be bathed, properly. His wounds must be cleaned. His bandages changed.”
“And you would not let us see him at all, while you do these things?” Maglor cries. “Do you think you were invited here to guard him like—like a jealous dog?”
“Leave dogs out of it,” Celegorm interjects, sneering. His hound does not stir. “Fingon sees himself far above their kind. We are unworthy, Maglor.”
Maglor’s eyes flash, and Estrela half-believes that, were he closer to Fingon, he would try to strike him.
For his part, Fingon is slow-burning.
Gwindor—outside of the threat of the lash, or death itself, Gwindor is not slow at all.
“Unworthy!” he snorts. “I’d say so. The fucking lot of you. Did any of you drag him back, living and breathing? The dog keeps its tongue in its head, at least! Ungrateful shit-heaps, you are!”
Celegorm steps forward, his hand moving for, or like, a weapon. Maglor stands up, drained of color. They are brothers, after all. Killers, too, if given too much chance.
“Gwindor,” Fingon says, lowering his voice considerably. “It’s all right. They are alarmed by how much Maedhros is hurt. We are all…” He speaks this, next, through is teeth. “We are all of like mind here. Maglor, Celegorm, he was Maedhros’ good friend and protector, these—these last months. We would not have returned at all, without Gwindor.”
Gwindor glares, fierce as a hawk, but at Fingon’s words, he retreats to the corner of the room that is nearest the bed. Celegorm and Maglor likewise stand down: their attention once more diverted to their cousin, and Gwindor once more beneath their notice.
In short, the murder leaves them, rippling down like tension released, but Estrela imagines its progress, snake-coil-smooth, along the floorboards. Such intent finds places to wait and hide; it does not disappear entirely.
“More than his hand?” young Amras whispers. There is none of the killer in him. “He is much hurt, more than his hand?”
“Of course he is hurt, more than his hand!” Maglor cries, crouching once more beside the bedside and arranging the coverlets fretfully. “Fingon, for all you observed afterwards—you did not know Bauglir as we did. And Gwindor, you may know Bauglir, but you do not know Maedhros! Without both, it is not possible to understand the wounds you have seen—whatever they are! It is our right to help him, who are his brothers, his first friends! If anyone, he would not wish for you to see—”
Fingon is piqued again. He is no peacekeeper. “I do not agree with you, and even if I did, could not permit you—”
“Permit?” The serpent, as expected, strikes, snapping its fangs through Caranthir’s lips.
Fingon’s madness is not Celegorm’s madness, but both could lead to blows. When they were alone, a truce might have been made, but now they are made foes again, for love of—
You loved them, Estrela thinks, her eye on the uneven colors, the uneven planes, of Russandol’s face. You must have loved them very much.
Estrela knows he was whole. Has she not dreamed of him? Dreamed of his face, unmasked and unafraid, his slim wrists unmarked, his legs straight and gainly?
Yet, she made no guess as to how it would feel to see those who had known him, whole, when they came to understand what he was now.
You must live, if you are to love them again.
There!
There, unexpected, a movement. She is the only one who has eyes (eye) on him, at present; the rest are furiously fixed on each other. But Estrela saw the jolt of motion down the maimed right arm, which would have leapt to the mobile fingers, lifting them together, if fingers still there were.
Her heart leaps with it.
His face is like death, and he makes no sound, but Estrela cannot mistake the sign of some waking. She raises her voice, since it still belongs to her, to defend him.
(He once did the same for her.)
“Please,” she says, leaning forward so that they must see her, bent as she is half across his body. “He cannot ask anything, for himself.”
Maglor does not like to look at her. Amras is all pinched with sympathetic suffering; she has witnessed such moods in Sticks, before. Celegorm, for his part, has gone quite still. No longer battle-ready. He is, instead, watching her mouth.
Estrela thinks he wants to see how it works.
She could not hide her slurring speech from these boys, well-used to beauty as they are, even if she tried. “When you have been hurt like this,” she says slowly, straining to observe both the room, lest the moment’s peace splinter, and Maedhros, lest he move again—“It is agony to wake, to be disturbed. It is agony to rest, to dream. You must all, if you—if you love him—you must do your best not to distress him. Is Fingon your kinsman? Is he a doctor? That must be enough, today.”
Spittle runs out between her crooked lips. She swipes it away. For him, humiliation. Anything.
(She knew him, whole, in a way. She knew him when he was Russandol with two hands. He grieved for her hands, upon a time. He cursed, he begged. She saw him lit through with a flash of righteous concern—and it was for her.)
Fingon clears his throat. He assumes his father’s manner. “I will call you back after we have finished attending him. Then you may—you may keep watch yourselves, if you like. Until then—”
“No,” Maglor says. He is trembling, but he is not…he is not weak. He is the eldest left, Estrela understands, and he could not have held this fort with any power—could not have been the name Gwindor was given, if he was only weak. “No. We will not disturb your…work. But nor will we leave him.”
Gwindor curses under his breath. Estrela wonders if he also returns in thought to the red-drenched yard, to the relentless call-and-answer of a whipping.
Everyone watched while Russandol’s scars were made.
Fingon cannot know, of course, the scope of that indignity. But on the basis of his own principles, he shakes his head against Maglor’s offer. “This is not a business for spectators,” he says. “No matter how dear and close.”
An impasse, this. A war of promises unmade and pride unmaking.
Then Fingon’s father comes.
With a pang, Estrela remembers what it is to have a father.
(Mr. Bauglir wishes to speak to you, minha filha, he said, with gentle confusion.)
“What is the trouble?” Fingolfin asks, setting down the basket of oddments he carried in with him. Medicinal herbs and a few dark bottles.
Maglor’s hysterical resolve; Celegorm and Caranthir’s stubbornness; Gwindor’s impatient fury. All fade and are subdued before Fingolfin. Estrela is mesmerized, for his authority remains gentle, even here. She feels that she trusts him more than even Fingon, though she understands him far less.
No one answers him for a moment. A sullen silence pervades the room. Before Estrela was a disfigured slave, she was a proud and headstrong young lady, and before that, she was an ingenious and independent child.
She was never sullen, for she had to keep her father company. They were both lonely, otherwise.
Amras pipes up, at last, too young to fight in the same manner as his brothers. “We don’t want to leave Maitimo. Fingon says we have to.” He places no hateful inflection, she notices, on the name Fingon.
Fingolfin folds his arms over his chest. A deep line separates his dark, straight brows. Gwindor is not young enough to be his child, though the rest of them are. Do those who are not his children here feel as if they are his children? She does not think they want to.
“Fingon,” Fingolfin asks, finally. “What are your objections?”
Fingon is obliged to repeat the sentiments he has now expressed several times. “With such a crowd as this, the air in the room is too thick and unhealthy. Moreover, we do not know when or how he shall wake. Changing the bandages is a troublesome business, and—”
Fingolfin interjects. “And your reasons for staying, Maglor?”
“He is my brother.”
“Our brother,” says Caranthir.
Amras stares at the bed, and the brother in it. Celegorm says nothing, yet. There is a queer look on his face.
“You offered us safety,” Fingolfin says carefully, addressing Maglor. “I do not flatter myself. I know it was not for me, nor for Fingon. It was for Maedhros. Consider, I implore, what safety means for him. It means an undistracted doctor. Healthy air. Enough space for water and such medicines as we both have collected and offered for his good. Do you not agree?”
Maglor does not have an opportunity to reply, because Celegorm does it for him. “Fair enough,” he says, with another of the sharp smiles that Estrela is learning to distrust. “We will broker a deal that ensures our mutual concern for Maitimo.”
(Maitimo. A monster, too, can call him that.)
Fingolfin waits. Maglor flushes bright.
Celegorm says, “If Fingon and those people—” A jerk of his head encompasses both Gwindor and Estrela—“stay, one of us does, too.” Then, with a triumphant glance at Maglor, he continues, “I shall take the first watch.”
In the end, a strange calm reigns. Maglor has gone away, Caranthir and Amras with him. Fingolfin and Gwindor have briefly departed so that they may discuss the particulars of their new shelter.
Estrela’s thoughts dwell most on Maglor, because she expected him to protest Celegorm’s sly maneuver. Upon reflection, however, she decides that Maglor did not concede easily because he did not, in fact, concede.
He does not want to look at her.
That means he does not truly want to look at—
I am so sorry, she whispers, in the quiet blur of her mind and memory. I am so very sorry, that even for a moment, they see you like me.
Celegorm settles down beside his dog again. His dog’s name is Huan. He speaks to Huan from time to time, chides him for being such a useless lump during the “trouble.”
Fingon ignores him. He purses his lips; his eyes shine with focus and certainty. He cleans his hands, and helps Estrela clean hers, apologizing for how it pains the still-raw flesh there. Because of her wounds, he explains, she must confine herself to handing him what he needs. He will do the bandaging himself.
Celegorm falls silent when Fingon peels the scraps of linen and cotton away. None of them here have seen the brands fresh, but even the brands are lost, at present, amid black and purple bruising that looks read to burst and weep. Estrela tries to hold back little moans of grief.
She is used to whining and keening and keeping quiet, in the dark.
You have seen this before, she reminds herself. But she is wearied and worn-down, seeing it again. The night they worked to save him, to bring down his fever, she had no time to overcome her shock with pain. Numbness having faded, she now must ask herself every cruel, impossible question.
Was he conscious, when they carved open those letters for a second time?
(You know that he was.)
Did he beg—for himself—
“Estrela.” She scrabbles for another bandage, but they are gone. Time has passed. She must have done her duty. Fingon has just finished slipping a shining steel pin into the swath that passes around the stump of Russandol—Maedhros’ right arm.
“What can I do?”
“His hair,” Fingon says, with the funny little frown between his brows that looks almost like his father’s but is too recognizable as an expression that would fit a child’s face. Estrela does not smile, not even fondly.
Her smile is a hideous sight.
“Yes,” she says, with a sigh instead. She has already resigned herself to this minor evil. “If you have a good blade, I will do my best. It should be shaved as close to the scalp as possible. That way it will grow again—”
“No!” Fingon says, so sharply that Huan sits up in a great, scrambling gathering of limbs, and whines. Celegorm looks displeased; whatever satisfaction he gained by claiming first watch has vanished.
“No?” Estrela asks, conscious of a state of boorishness or sin that she has slipped into, unawares. “I—”
“I would not,” Fingon explains, rather breathlessly, “Take—take something from him without his express permission. He has lost so much already, you see.”
She remembers the curious jolt. The fingers that she could see only in a flicker of memory.
She nods. I am sorry. She cannot speak the words aloud, which is not Fingon’s fault, but the fault of everything else.
Celegorm growls, “If you touch so much as a stray hair, I’ll gut you both.”
Estrela nods. When she has found her voice again (for Fingon, not for Celegorm), she asks, “What shall I do, then?”
“It should be washed.”
Another memory. Estrela pushes herself to her feet. Her hands hurt. Her hands will not soon forget the touch of him. “I shall find you more water,” she says, taking on a weight she cannot measure.
Yes, she will walk these halls. Yes, she will beg.
“I have a sliver of soap in my satchel,” says Fingon.
“We have soap,” Celegorm says, still angry.
Estrela closes the door quite gently behind her. She is weary, sagging at each joint for a dizzy moment before she recollects herself. Outside—yes, outside the room of sorrow and ready daggers, she has greater fears to face: the unfriendliness of strangers who will never need her. Not everyone in Mithrim loves the man who lies between life and death at its heart.
Yet, she will choose these things. These fears, these sorrows. In that way, she will share in the same heart that beat in the disfigured body of a slave.
It has been an affectionate heart, since childhood. Estrela allows herself that.