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I try to avoid the map room as much as I can. At first, it reminded me too much of Athair, filled as it was by the shades of his various plans and councils with us, and by even his writing pens, left as he had left them, loosely wrapped in an oilskin bundle on the desk that he had not fastened shut. He never did like to lock up his tools or close things fully, being very particular about the placement of his things but not that their placement be necessarily away. This was once a frequent point of contention between him and my mother, who always was so careful to screw the lids of her paint jars as tightly closed as was possible, and to keep all her brushes sorted by size and material. Disorder maddened her. But in this one thing, at least, I had understood my father’s mind because mine was the same: my mother would argue that any proper craftsman should lock away his tools of trade when the work is done, but for my father, and for myself, the work never is done. I cannot predict when a song should come to mind that requires immediate transcribing; I could never risk missing committing a tune to memory because I had first to fumble with the latches on my fiddlecase before I could play the music out. Disorder is, sometimes, not disorder at all to a gifted mind.
Maitimo told me that once, wryly, after he had knocked his shins and taken a spectacular fall over the piano bench where I had left it out of place in the darkened music room. Or, well—to tell it truthfully, the actual first words he directed towards me once he could manage language again was an irate and accusatory Goddamn it, Macalaure! But it was only a very short time later that he favored me with a little smile despite his split and bleeding lip, and tossed me that charmingly perceptive observation, that I might know he did not bear me any true ill will. I think he must have seen the fright upon my face, even in the dark.
It was merely another one of the clever sort of remarks my brother was fond of making at the time, particularly in mixed company, and yet it has stayed with me all these years later. For it was an observation, I suppose, that showed I was both forgiven, and understood. My brother has always seen me more clearly than anyone else does, for he has both our father’s perception and our mother’s patience, the latter of which I know I must try—oh, that I must try endlessly! And yet he is always so ready to give me that forgiveness, and that understanding, no matter my flaws, and no matter what pain I inadvertently, stupidly, cause him.
I do not deserve my brother. But then again—who does?
(“Fingon,” Maitimo gasps, and he struggles to rise from where he was cowering—yes, cowering, though I wish I had not seen it!—upon the map room’s dusty floor.)
Yes—Forgive me for having gotten lost somehow, as I so often do—but let me return to the map room. Let me look through that dreadful door, with its heavy lock and pitiless walls. There are ghosts in the candlespun darkness within: a woman with one eye and a ghoulishly grinning mouth, a pale-haired man slopeshouldered and lurching. Children crawling upon the floor and wailing. My brother, death-pale and agony-gaunt, livid and scarred and dragged out living from his grave.
(I almost called Fingon a Resurrection Man once, when I was feeling bitter about his presence in Maedhros’ room and trying not to be. I am glad I managed to catch that ill-thought jest before I voiced it, though. It would have been horribly cruel.)
My brother is not a corpse. He is my brother—very frightened, very changed, and oh! So very himself, somehow, despite that. Celegorm rushes into the room to offer reassurances, because he has always hated to see any creature afraid. Around him, the ghosts are not ghosts: Gwindor leans heavily against the wall, looking haggard, and Estrela is not grinning at all, no matter how her scarring twists her face. The children are wailing only because she is trying to pry them away from their Russandol.
Their Russandol, but my Maitimo.
I cannot even care now that he called our cousin’s name, and not mine.
I follow Celegorm into the room.
I said before that I always avoid the map room, and the way Athair fills it with his absence. As soon as I cross the threshold, even in the dark, I can see those pens there upon the tabletop, left as carelessly as I might leave my flute, if I thought I were soon to return to work. Of course my father’s work had always been different from mine. In the forge, he had left his engraving tools laid out on a cloth instead of locked in the case mother made for him; in Mithrim, he always kept his guns close, and improved the firing mechanism so that he might carry one already loaded for days without damaging the interior. The pens he left upon the desk meant his work had been writing, or charting maps, or drawing out marching orders for our attacks upon the enemy. Even Curufin has not dared to touch them.
To see them there, still as casually stowed as Athair left them, it feels as though some mad part of us all is still waiting for our father to stride back into the room, to take the pen back in hand to finish some half-formed thought on paper, to tell us everything he does is out of love for us, and to tell us what it is we are to do next.
That is the ghost I used to be most afraid of, in the map room. But now there is a second, more awful one there too—more awful, because it was I who put it there, when I gutted black-bearded Ulfang with my knife.
Maedhros looks at me, and he is trembling.
But I have entered into the map room and braved both my ghosts, because by some miracle which I still cannot put into words or song—which I can put into no melody but the rhythm of my heartbeat in my bones—my brother Maitimo is alive, and not one of my ghosts at all, and he needs me.
When I take him in my arms, I can feel how violent that trembling is, in both him and in me. I can feel the melody in it: the song of my brother kept safe at last.
“Thank God,” I whisper, as he reaches up to hold me tightly. It is briefly terrifying to feel his fingers clutch against my ribcage, but of course it is the left hand, not the right.
“Thank God, Maitimo,” I whisper again, feeling the tears starting, and I bury my face against his shoulder.
*
We have to stop to let Maitimo rest four times, after we retreat from whatever mess that was in the hall with Fingon. I still think we shouldn’t have let him have his way, and should have taken him straight to bed instead of to that crowded, noisy, stinking place—it cannot be good for him, to see blood about, and all the wounded, groaning men—but Maglor never listens to me and never refuses Maitimo. So we hobble slowly back up to his room, like the sorriest set of three-legged racers you ever did see, and I’ve half a mind to go back to fetch a stretcher after all, except that would risk me running into Fingon again. If my cousin saw me return alone to the hall so soon, he would be alarmed, and that would mean he would likely follow me back to fret over Maitimo and agitate him even more. I’d rather take a bullet to the arm myself, than have to bear up under Fingon’s fussing right now.
So: I don’t go back to the hall. Maitimo is sickly-grey and shaky and much quieter, by the time we reach his door, leaning so heavily upon my arm that I’m practically carrying him even without the stretcher, but he is still—technically—standing. Maglor has hold of Maitimo’s other side—the right side—but I can tell Maitimo isn’t leaning on him half as much as he is leaning on me. When we pause at the door, Maglor darts out from under Maitimo’s arm to open it up, and I jostle Maitimo’s elbow very carefully but bracingly, to cheer him. After all, we won the fight, we slaughtered those bastards and sent them running, but it’s like he hasn’t even realized it.
“Good work,” I say, trying to peer sideways at my brother’s face. “You champion, Maitimo, walking all that way! You’re looking so much improved, Jesus Christ. Should have given you a haircut weeks ago, if we had known it would make such a change.”
It hadn’t, and he doesn’t. Maitimo looks like he is half a crooked step away from fainting, or being sick, or both. He knows it, too, because there is still that strange burning look on him, bright and angry and upset, and he is biting his lip hard, swaying.
“Celegorm, leave off him,” Maglor hisses as the door groans open, and he scuttles back to help guide Maitimo inside and into bed.
Maitimo isn’t sick, and does not faint. I only realize he was holding his breath when he lets it all out in a hissing rush, as we lever his bad leg up onto the bed and lay it out as straight and carefully as we can. His head drops back hard against the faded pillow, and he closes his eyes.
“Well, that’s done,” I say to those closed eyes, because I just can’t shut my fool mouth, seemingly. Maglor gives me one of his Maglor-looks, but Maitimo takes a shaky breath and opens his eyes again. I had expected, with some dread, that they would be watery and wavering, but they’re not. My brother’s eyes are bone-dry and iron-bright. It is almost the way a lynx’s eyes will catch, if moonlight or firelight finds them in the dark. Something unearthly and staring.
He stares at me, and he breathes out again, low. He says: “What happened?”
“We just walked you back to your room,” I begin, confused, but he shakes his head in a sharp, impatient way that looks like—well, that looks like Athair. I’ve always hated to catch similarities between the two of them, and it stings now like a blister rubbed raw. As if Curufin isn’t enough on his own, Jesus Christ. Of course it would be like Athair, to leave behind more than one ghost to haunt me.
“What happened outside,” Maitimo says, and he looks like himself again. It’s the new version of himself though, the version Fingon brought back, and that’s a blister too, in its way. There’s a little blood on his lip; he must have bitten it deeper than I thought. The color is distracting, because his face is still so pale.
“Celegorm, I need to know—everything you saw. Everything.”
“Maitimo, that can wait,” Maglor says, pitifully. He looks a right wreck, and maybe that gives Maitimo pause, because he goes quiet. He’s shivering again, so I pull up the blankets, and he puts one hand over his eyes.
One hand. He—only has one hand.
Suddenly it’s like I can’t breathe either. I was so—happy, I suppose, or glad, something better, something alive. And then it was Fingon, and now Maglor, and now this.
I stand up quick.
“Do you want me to leave you Huan?” I ask. I offer Maitimo my dog because that’s what I always do, because I’m never knowing how to offer myself instead. Not in words that will make him listen. I’m not clever like Maglor, nor even as sharp as Fingon, no matter what Maitimo has told me before. Maitimo is the kindest, grandest fellow you’ll ever meet anywhere, but he ain’t half a bad liar. Most of us are, truth be told. Out of the lot of us, the only ones who have ever been really good at fibbing are Curufin and—
And—
(Shut up. Shut up. Goddamn you, not now.)
So. I’m—not clever. Yes. My—parents, they used to call me quick, but that was on account of how fast I liked to be up in the mornings, out in the wet grass to see the prints on the ground, and to hear all the waking birds. I never got half as much as schooling as Maglor, and he used to like to hold that over me like a water bucket balanced atop a door. The thing is, the joke doesn’t work if I let the door alone. I never learned how to play the goddamn harp, but I learned enough to know how to play the harpist well enough!
Maitimo lying and telling me how he thought I would be bully at Greek, or how he wouldn’t mind sharing some of his calculus lessons during the summer, if I liked—that was him being a poor liar, like I said, and I knew it even when I was only fourteen. But I can’t help that his praise always left me all warm and pleased, despite knowing it was naught but hot air blown pretty. Smoke rings of flattery, that’s all any such talk is. I shouldn’t mind it. And I don’t, much, any more.
Education don’t matter out here, in the territories. It feels silly to think I used to half want to have my own try at city schooling. To have my own little desk, in my own little classroom, and grow to be my own little sort of man, one of them as lives inside walls. I should have been miserable, and what the hell use is Greek anyway? A fine lot of help knowing a dead language would have been here, all those months Maitimo was away, when Maglor was fair gone mad with poetry like he’s always wanted, and Caranthir was even less help than usual, and Curufin was—
Anyway. What I’m saying is: there’s a lot more to death than language, isn’t there. It isn’t what’s in the walls that’s important, in the end. It isn’t what’s in words. It’s everything else.
That’s where my learning has been.
*
“Do you want me to leave you Huan?” Celegorm offers, as he gets up. The way he stands is awkward, halfway twisted between facing the bed and facing the door.
“You left Huan with the children,” I point out, as I fumble for the water jug. Celegorm, who had not been looking at me, does now with a scowl.
“Well I’m going to fetch him now, aren’t I?” He drawls, exaggerating his tone, as if I am the stupid one. But his sharp, sun-brown features are a little flushed, so I know he is flustered. He is also upset, I think, about the scene with Fingon in the hall. His mouth keeps twisting in a way that reminds me, oddly enough, of the way Caranthir would look when he was small, before the tears would come.
“Wash up before you go,” I say, pouring some water into a bowl that I hold out his way. I am spattered with blood, but Celegorm looks positively ghoulish, and I don’t think he even knows it.
He glances down at his bloody arms and shirt, and sniffs in a way that reminds me of Huan.
“Isn’t mine,” he says, dismissively. It is now my turn to scowl.
“Did I say that it was?”
“Celegorm,” Maitimo whispers from the bed, rallying. He begins to push himself up on one elbow, and Celegorm and I both immediately lunge to help him, but what that means is Celegorm catches him by the arms and carefully eases him up to lean against the head of the bed, and I—forgetting I still had the water basin in my hand—spill icy water all down my trouser-leg. I yelp, and both my brothers’ gazes snap towards me.
“I’m all right,” I mutter. Celegorm snickers, eyeing my wet clothing.
“Jesus, Maglor,” he says, “you really are set on this whole bathing thing, aren’t you.”
“Celegorm,” Maitimo repeats, but this is a more familiar, quelling use of the name, and he puts his hand out to rest on Celegorm’s arm. “Do stay a little longer. Please, just a—a little while.”
It’s hard, to have to see how visibly Celegorm lights up when Maedhros coaxes him. I know I am like that too, and that I am likely worse. The thought is disagreeable, seen from the outside.
“Oh, very well,” Celegorm agrees, sitting down heavily into his chair again and shaking back his long hair. “Since Maglor is so persuasive.”
“You’re a bastard,” I tell him, but he only hums, and sets to unbuttoning his bloody shirt. I pass him the now mostly-empty basin, and the soap, and the water jug, but only after I fill a cup—for Maitimo, this time. He must be exhausted, after the excitement and strain of the night, and the uncomfortable walk back to his room. He had even run, after a fashion, in the main hall. When he saw Fingon.
He obediently takes the cup I offer and drinks it down, and then gives it back to me.
“Macalaure,” he tells me, softly but vigorously, not a waver in his voice. “I need to know.”
“Later,” I reply, and when I see he is opening his mouth again, I hasten to add: “Once we have all the reports in. I didn’t see everything, and neither did Celegorm. We shall have a meeting in the morning, and you can be there, of course, and we shall put the picture together as best we can. It would be useless to speculate now, on only fragmentary intelligence; you know that.”
I know he does know that, because it is what we were taught by the same teacher. In the frowning silence that falls, the only sound is Celegorm’s muttered swearing as he washes the dried blood off his arms, chest, and face. His filthy shirt is on the floor between where his feet are hooked around the chair legs. It might be a total loss, to be honest, but Caranthir has been known to work miracles in the laundry tub, so I cannot quite despair of it yet.
“Cold, Celegorm?” Maitimo asks. His voice is a little strained in its lightness, but I relax gratefully at the deliberate change of subject.
“Not at all,” says Celegorm, grinning a fearsome, frozen grin so that his teeth do not chatter. His skin is all over gooseflesh, as he leers at me.
“You should wash up too, Maglor,” he says sweetly—or as sweetly as one could, through that gritted grin. “Water’s fine. And look at the state of you. Maitimo, tell him he’s a sight.”
“You’re a sight,” Maitimo says, and licks tentatively at his lip where the blood is drying. “Where are the others? Is Amras—“
“Taken themselves to bed like sensible folk, I shouldn’t wonder,” Celegorm says quickly, combing wet fingers half heartedly through the ends of his tangled hair. “Saw them all after it was over, not a scratch on any of them. Swear I’m not lying, Maitimo. You’ll see them in the morning. Maglor, catch.”
I yelp again, this time as Celegorm tosses the wet rag he was using at me. My reflexes are, as Athair used to chide me frequently, very poor. It hits me squarely in the chest, and tumbles to rest with a squelch directly on my lap.
“Oh my God, Celegorm!” I gasp, leaping up to dislodge it, but he only laughs louder, hearing me swear. There is now so much water in my trouserlegs, I feel as though I were just wading in an ice bath. The sensation is a horrible one.
“You—you!” I sputter, outraged, but my wicked brother is unrepentant. Mother called him hasty, and his moods are very quick indeed, changeable as a summer sky. Whatever dark turn had taken him only moments earlier has turned again, and his high spirits are very much returned. My own anger is not as fierce as it might be, because I can see a turn on Maitimo’s face too—his mouth is all twisted on one side, but that’s still a smile there, on his face, and a brightness that might be tears in his hot eyes.
“Oh, give me that then,” I say savagely, snatching the soap and basin from Celegorm’s hands. “But if I catch my death of cold it shall be you to blame, Celegorm! Maitimo is my witness.”
“Fingon shall save you,” Celegorm says snidely, unrepentant. There is a moment’s hush, and I glance nervously at Maitimo, but he does not look upset.
He says, evenly: “Of course he shall.”
*
Mags performs a mincing, hasty sort of sponge-bath, griping all the while over how he wasn’t even half so filthy as me—which is true. Since his trousers are sopping, once he has done he bundles himself up in one of Maitimo’s many blankets and snoops about the room hunting for a pair of spare clean trousers he is convinced must be magically present.
“Caranthir keeps all sorts in here,” he argues, dragging out a basket from beneath my bench. “He does mending when he visits. It is not unreasonable—“
“You can borrow mine, Maglor,” Maitimo says, amused. “It’s not like I’ve a need for them under the blankets, anyway.”
While Maglor stammers his stout refusal, pulling stocking after stocking out of poor Caranthir’s darning basket, I wrap my own borrowed blanket a little more snugly about my shoulders and just watch Maitimo in warm silence. He has some color back, and his nervous shivering has stopped. He looks so much better now than he did when we found him in the study with Gwindor and Estrela—so much more himself again. And this time I really do mean himself—the real Maitimo, the way he was before.
I know I’m hard on Maglor a lot. I am. Can’t help it, with him the way he is. But it is oddly sort of nice, being just the three of us again, and him being his fretful, foolish self, and Maitimo sat there watching. I know he still has his questions, and he will still insist upon attending that meeting tomorrow, of pushing himself back into the war we wage even if he’s scarcely walking again, and him with only—only one hand. But isn’t that the real Maitimo too? The brother who taught me to ride, to shoot, to fight. Even Rumil’s folk knew he was a leader, and a fighter, my god, such a—a fighter.
I would do anything for him. Anything. Just because I haven’t had the chance to prove it doesn’t make it less true.
Maglor has emptied the basket in vain, and is now flinging all the stockings back into it in a haphazard disorder that shall surely incite Caranthir’s wrath tomorrow. Because I’m feeling generous, I say: “Hey, Maitimo. You’ll never guess what Maglor did.”
“Oh don’t you start!” Maglor snaps, hot-faced and out of temper, but Maitimo asks: “What did Maglor do?”
“In the fight,” I begin, and flap my hands at Maglor to shush him again. “I know, I know we said we wouldn’t talk it out tonight, but it’s only a small thing. They tried to set fire to the doors. We stopped them before any real damage was done, but Maglor was the one clever enough to realize they might try the stables next. And he went there all alone, like a madman, and he fought them off. Saved Alexander.”
Maglor, ridiculous on the floor with a ratty stocking in each hand and a blanket wrapped around his middle, looks up at us with huge eyes.
“Wasn’t me,” I say, shrugging it off like that don’t matter. “Maglor did it. But I meant it when I said we were all safe, you see?”
“Macalaure,” says Maitimo, and that is all. His voice is all changed. He sounds—he sounds almost just as he did, when he ran to Fingon in the hall.
Maglor almost looks frightened. He swallows, and says, very hesitantly: “I wasn’t alone, Maitimo. I had—I had some men with me, Ricketts and—and—“
He stutters into silence, swallows again, and says, even more hesitantly: “I couldn’t? I couldn’t let them hurt Alexander.”
Maitimo looks at him, and does not look like our father at all, anymore. He looks like—someone else.
“Thank you,” he whispers, very small, and that is, I suppose, the actual proper end to our Christmas-ing after all.