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Curufin paid them in gold. Ulfang’s gold. Curufin was like Athair, in this and in many things: he knew the value of men’s sins, when it came to paying other men for their virtues.
Celegorm will forever attribute the peacekeeping of that fraught day to Curufin, just as he won’t blame him for the way the same peace crumbled quietly when the first shock of Ulfang, dead, was over. The men all stayed, and signed their names to a new charter. They said they would stand with Mithrim, though their loyalty had been brought into deadly question. They were, under the terms of the agreement, believed.
Then they made their quiet betrayals without war or poison.
Curufin said, It doesn’t matter. We don’t need them. It was just a way of keeping us alive.
Celegorm believed him. It was easy to believe Curufin, when he was speaking in the most persuasive of his many voices. To Celegorm, that voice was not the ringing Athair-voice, the one that made men twice and thrice Curufin’s vine-tender age stop in their tracks. Instead, it was the tired, quiet voice, the almost-whisper. The voice of confidences rather than of confidence, laid on Celegorm in the twilit times when they were certain nobody else could hear them and plot their deaths.
Celegorm fancies he can smell blood, mingling in the cool-scented breeze. The western world is rarely cold enough for a frost-snap. Still, he shivers a little as he moves, with Curufin, up around the edge of the fort towards the tell-tale mine. What are these fuckers after?
Fear, fire, or Maedhros?
Celegorm will kill them all with his teeth and fingernails before he lets them get to Maedhros.
As it is, Curufin kills their first man: a stoop-shouldered, sneaking fellow who is creeping along the side of the fort like a clinging lizard. Curufin nicks him in the throat with a throwing star.
The sound of his death is satisfying.
They pause to hear its certainty, then move onward. Huan pads along close beside him, but his stride is too tense, too guarded, to be ordinary.
Behind them, where Caranthir and Maglor and the rest are, a battle rages as more men race up from the unguarded bridge. It is not an impressive battle, in Celegorm’s mind. If this is an army, it is a disjointed one. If this is a hunt, it is entirely without focus or honor.
When he and Curufin find the spent mine, and the shattered body around it, they do not tarry. Instead, they converse in swift whispers before they seek good hiding places on the crest of the hill, which also offers the vantage necessary to watch.
Watching is, almost at once, a tiring business. Celegorm itches to return the gunfire. But Curufin tilts his head as he listens to it, as if he were trying to remember a melody.
“Damn me,” he mutters. “They fire long and fast.”
“Long?”
“Aye. Too many bullets before they reload.” Curufin is silent for a while. Then: “Like Athair’s guns.”
“They can’t have Athair’s guns,” Celegorm scoffs, and then he remembers. “Hell. Maedhros—”
“Maedhros took his Colt,” Curufin says, quiet but strained. “I’ve his gun in my hand this moment…the one he left.”
Celegorm turns this over in his mind, watching more bodies move over the ground. There is no conclusion he can reach that will satisfy, and at any rate, they have more pressing business at present. Mulling is Curufin’s province; Celegorm is a hunter, and with a hunter’s sense of time and balance, he watches the horde of men making for Mithrim’s gates. Watches, with even more interest, as a flank splits and crawls off northwest, past their lofty hiding place.
The backdoor. They’re going for the backdoor—or hoping to find one. If they know already where it is, then that is a troubling development, suggesting treachery. As they circle the wall nearest the hillside, Celegorm knows he can wait no longer. Fingon left Maedhros in the map-room, whereto naught but hours with a pickax could break, but all the same…these fiends are too close.
He straightens, runs a hand over Huan’s shoulders, and mutters,
“Ready, boy?”
Then he signals to Curufin to follow with him, ghostlike, deadly.
They’ll write their names in blood tonight, no matter what bullets fly.
Curufin paid Mithrim’s traitors in gold. Celegorm thought that wise. But Curufin later took Nora to his bed, and Celegorm knew naught of it, until Aredhel demanded him to hear and see the truth.
When will Celegorm know enough, in time?
They are in the midst of it, now. Finrod fights well. So does his native friend. Not everyone is so lucky. Not everyone survives. This is not a railroad skirmish, but an attempted massacre.
For his part, Celegorm survives. He is shoulder to shoulder with Curufin, his dog guarding their legs. Curufin fires a shot and his thin frame jolts backwards, his elbow bruising Celegorm’s ribs. Yet Celegorm stands firm, as Curufin knew he would when he took the shot.
Just so, Celegorm is comforted. The woman’s wiles, her answer to whatever hurt Curufin sought her with, have not affected his acuity, his reflexes.
You were a child once. You dream in ore and caverns, now. I’m with you.
How much can you trust a brother who holds victory in one hand and destruction in the other?
What if your brother had only one hand?