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Celegorm stalks back towards the keep as evening begins its yawning, the chill rising from the lake following close at his heels the way Huan is wont to follow. He does not quite—remember, what he did, after he left Maitimo’s room. He remembers Maglor’s battered face, his wide cow’s eyes, seen through a red haze. He remembers Maitimo’s hand, five thin fingers, unmarred palm, raised to defend Maglor, again, to choose Maglor, again—
Maitimo had still been so light, in his arms, as he helped him back to bed. Still so much less than he should have been.
And still, he chose Maglor.
Maitimo had said go, and Celegorm had obeyed the way a dog would obey, following Curufin’s hand on his arm. And then they had been in the hall together, and the red haze would not leave him, and Curufin had—gone—where he knew not, and Celegorm had fled the only way he knew how: out of the keep’s stifling walls, away from all these hateful men, out to the wild lands and the open sky. If he had seen Aredhel, as he ran—oh, but he did not. And it was not any business of hers, anyway, what Maglor had done. She would not understand.
He had walked for miles, blindly, his face numb with the cold but the rage so hot in his chest it felt like burning from the inside out. He had cried. It was perhaps a mercy that he had not come across any straggling raider from Bauglir’s mountain, because he had no weapons besides his knife, and no awareness of where his feet took him, and any sights and sounds he passed meant nothing to him. But as he returns now at last to the keep, his mind a little clearer, he wants nothing more than to find something to kill—not a wild creature, but a man, one of those goddamn gunmen with their goddamn wolf pelts, something he can take apart with his bare hands, can rend and rip and ruin.
Maglor’s blood is still on his knuckles. The violence crawls in his blood like panic, screaming to be let out.
When he approaches the courtyard it is in shadow already, the sun having set behind the hills. The lanterns have been lit, wavering and sputtering, but the yard is quiet and deserted. Celegorm hesitates in the deeper darkness beside the stable, glaring up at the yellow-eyed keep and hating it, wrestling with horror at the thought of walking willingly back into its stinking, noisy halls. Of seeing Maglor again.
When the keep door opens and a lone man steps out, it takes Celegorm a second to recognize Beren. He is dressed in dark cloth and leather, the same weathered clothing he had worn when he first arrived in Mithrim, but which he had exchanged for cotton shirt and trousers since. There is a wool cap pulled over his loose dark hair and which looks like Finrod’s, at this distance, and Finrod’s hunting knife too, at his belt. The familiar shapes of a short hunting bow and a quiver of arrows jut over his shoulders.
Celegorm does not think he moves, but Beren suddenly pauses and looks his way, head cocked cautiously.
Celegorm does not like the feeling of being caught, so he steps out from the stable’s shadow and throws his head back arrogantly, as though he meant to be seen.
“Where are you going?” He demands. His voice is hoarse and angry, even to his own ears, but Beren does not seem ruffled. He straightens and relaxes, hand falling away from his knife.
“Out over the hills,” Beren answers politely, “Looping around towards the town, and then back by morning. I thought it wise to scout the forest, after what happened on your Christmas night.”
“A good idea,” Celegorm says. His fingers are still twitching, restless, and he forces them still. “I had a similar notion. Is Finrod going with you?”
“No, I told him to stay.”
“You shouldn’t go alone. Hold there while I fetch my weapons; I’ll come with you.”
If Beren is surprised, he does a good job hiding it. All he does is nod, and shoulder his quiver easily off his shoulder and onto the ground at his feet.
“I’ll wait,” he says.
There’s no one in Celegorm’s room, when he opens the door. He doesn’t know, even as he stands alone in the empty space, if he had been hoping to find Curufin here, but the beds are untouched, and the lamp is cold. He quickly collects what he needs, pulling on his coat and a new pair of socks before he relaces his boots. He has not eaten since the morning, and he knows he should visit the kitchens to take some food for an overnight hunt, but—
He can’t.
He is out of the room and heading back down the hallway in less than ten minutes. Maedhros’ room at the end of the corridor is silent, quiet as a church. Celegorm fixedly does not look at that closed door as he leaves it behind.
“That’s a beautiful weapon,” Beren remarks, as Celegorm rejoins him in the courtyard. He is talking about the longbow Celegorm is gripping in one hand, the one he traded for when they first reached California over a year ago. His cloth-wrapped quiver presses silently between his shoulder blades, not so much as a rattle to betray him. He has his good hunting knife in its sheath at his belt, and one of Athair’s guns at his hip too, but he does not expect to use the gun. A bow and a knife should be enough tonight, even if he and Beren do find anything worth killing during their patrol. Even Athair’s guns are too noisy to be of practical use after dark, unless in most dire need, and there’s the flash of the powder too, like a signal. Too dangerous.
But still: he had wanted to bring it. Not one of Curufin’s newer, quieter weapons: Athair’s.
“It cost me enough,” Celegorm replies, trying to refocus his thoughts on his bow. “Traded away my medal for it. Silver.”
“Where is Huan?”
“I—don’t know.” He tries to think back, through the shock and the fury, to the time before he knew—before he knew Maglor not only forced him to kill the woman who brought the terms of Maedhros’ release, but also forced him to—lied to him, and tricked him into abandoning Maedhros—there—
It didn’t have to be Fingon’s victory. It didn’t have to be Maitimo’s hand. Maglor was the one, who made both things so.
And Maglor had had the gall to say he had no choice.
“Huan is with Maedhros, I think,” Celegorm says at last, uncomfortable that he does not know for certain. He always knows where his dog is; this is yet another wrong Maglor has done to him, another thing broken in an already fractured life. “He—likes to stay with Maedhros. And with the children. Soft-hearted.”
Huan always knows when things need fixing, and how to do it. It’s because words don’t matter, to him. Nothing to get in the way of feeling and doing.
Beren says: “Huan is a good dog.” He means it, too. Celegorm wouldn’t say he feels friendly towards this man, particularly when he remembers he is close friends with Finrod, but he has noticed how Beren has treated Huan well, since coming to Mithrim. Indulges him with good scraps from the table, gives his thick winter coat obliging scratches, greets him with the same courtesy he gives to the human inhabitants of Mithrim too, indiscriminately. Where is Huan, he had asked, not Where is your dog? All small things, but somehow Celegorm has noted them, each one.
He knows Huan adores Beren, too, but that doesn’t signify much. Huan adores most people.
As they set out, Celegorm a step in the lead, he is startled by Beren pressing something unexpectedly into his hand. When he looks down, it is a water flask, which is another obvious necessity he had neglected to gather, in his haste to be away.
Beren doesn’t smile with his teeth, in the fading light, but he does smile all the same.
“Thought you might need one,” he whispers.
The carrion birds that have gathered thickly upon the hillside the past few days have mostly departed for their nests, and Celegorm and Beren are able to easily avoid frightening off any of the stragglers which remain. The shape of the earth is all new, twisted and ruptured by Curufin and Athair’s fires. It seems a lifetime ago that Celegorm stood here, breathing in the acrid smoke, laughing at bloody victory, and looking to see where Maglor had gone.
He had been so glad, then, to know they were all unharmed.
Maglor’s blood is on his knuckles. When he looks down, there is a fragment of shattered bone in the flattened grass beside his boot, pale as a long tooth in the gloom.
Beren passes him as he stands still, moving in a silent, steady crouch. Celegorm ducks low to follow him, and does not retake the lead.
It is child’s work to follow the tracks of the marauders back beneath the fringes of the trees. Far fewer retrace the route away from the keep than raced towards it, and that does give a savage sort of satisfaction. The prints are disordered, hasty. They discover a few cast-off items but nothing of real interest or value: empty cartridges, a smashed and emptied oil lamp, bloodied and ragged furs.
Celegorm pauses to sniff over one of those. It is not even a wolf pelt, now he sees it up close: coyote, maybe, bristly and poorly-tanned.
Beren crouches beside him, eyeing the fur with cool distaste.
“Their torturer wears furs, yes?” Beren asks in the barest whisper. “Mairon?”
The breeze is cold. It reminds Celegorm of the desert, dry and freezing, except it smells of sweet pine.
“Yes,” he whispers back.
When Celegorm was a boy, there was a hard winter. Curufin had been scarcely more than a baby then, and very ill and fretful; Caranthir had been Celegorm’s frequent companion in those days, albeit a very dull sort. Caranthir had always been more interested in plants than in animals, and did not enjoy leaving the confines of the farmhouse, so quarrels over both work and play were common. Maglor, whenever he deigned to pay attention, had always taken Caranthir’s side in these disagreements, and that had been galling too.
Celegorm had known, even then, that he could be of more help out of doors than in.
As Athair had gone away, it had been Maedhros who Celegorm had accompanied on exhausting winter hunts, checking and resetting snares and creeping through the snow-soft trees as quietly as two half-starved boys could, in their outgrown jackets and paper-stuffed shoes. It had been Maedhros who had shown Celegorm how to identify a fresh rabbit run for trapping, and Maedhros who had taught him how to move quietly over dead brush and wet snow, carefully stepping heel to toe, heel to toe.
It is how Athair taught me, Maedhros had said once, and then he had colored unhappily, and ducked his chin into his tattered scarf, and said nothing else.
Orome taught Celegorm so much more, of course. It was Orome who truly made a woodsman of him, that long, dark winter, and all the years after as he grew up as wild and country as his father would allow.
But Orome had been impressed, at their first meeting, by how quietly Celegorm could move, in the woods.
Beren is not merely quiet. He is utterly silent. Celegorm’s eyes are uncommonly good, in the dark, but even so he finds he sometimes loses track of where the man has gone ahead of him, and has to pause to reassess his surroundings. When they find a campsite, tucked behind a little ridge of the land and thickly filled-in with debris, it is clearly days old, likely a place where Mairon’s men waited Christmas Day, before making their advance at nightfall. Celegorm does not want to risk a light, so he makes a mental note of the location so that he might return to search it in daylight, with a few more men.
The dead leaves and twigs shift and rustle beneath his feet as he climbs back out of the alcove, but Beren’s feet, again, make scarcely a sound.
Celegorm has wondered about Beren’s shoes before, made from close-fitting, soft hide and patterned with tiny beads. He knows Beren has made a much simpler pair for Frog, since settling in Mithrim; maybe he would craft Celegorm a pair too, or teach him the trick of making them himself, if he asked.
The air is good out here, this far away from the battlefield. The wind is clean. The night is quiet.
He feels guilty for not bringing Huan along.
They find nothing of alarm in the woods, and the road, when they circle round to it at last, is empty. There were not many stars, because the clouds rolled in thick tonight, but what few there were faded out a while ago. Everything is no longer black but grey, tired and dusty in the predawn like the shelves on an antique shop. Celegorm had begun to feel his own exhaustion finally these last couple hours; he blinks hard to chase the weariness away, as Beren stretches his shoulders beside him.
“No one been this way lately,” Beren mutters, nodding towards the road. His voice is hoarse after so many hours of silence. “Not that I would have expected it. You move well, in the woods,” he adds, with a little smile. “Better than Finrod, no matter how I’ve taught him. You good with that bow, too?”
“Passable,” Celegorm says.
He has hit his mark accurately at almost two hundred yards, with this bow, without any trouble.
“Come on,” he says, setting off back towards Mithrim, walking beside the road. “They’d best have breakfast heated by the time we’re back, and coffee too, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Breakfast, yes; coffee no,” Beren answers, easily matching stride. “But thank you for keeping me company, Celegorm. It was a good hunt.”
Was it a hunt? Of a kind, he supposes. Again, he misses Huan. He shall have to take his dog out on a proper hunt again, soon, as an apology for leaving him behind this time.
“No trouble,” is what he tells Beren, gruffly. He nods at the stitches in Beren’s arm.
“That paining you at all?”
Beren blinks, and looks down at his arm.
“Oh, no,” he says. “No—I’m well.”
They are almost back in sight of Mithrim when Beren freezes and points, slow and careful. There, in the blue shadow of one of the scrubby hills, three rabbits are calmly feeding, ears pricked but unworried. Celegorm realizes the wind is in their favor; they have not yet been noticed.
“Take two back for the pot?” Beren asks, quietly. He has a shortbow, only a little over three feet long, but even that could be accurate, at this range.
Celegorm considers, then breathes out slow between his teeth. The nearest rabbit’s eye is bright even at this distance; it is thickly-furred for winter, but not so lean as winter rabbits were back East. That is one of the grand things, about a land without deep snows. The hunting still changes, of course, but the scarcity is not the same.
“No,” he whispers back, shaking his head. “We’ve enough meat at present. There’s no need.”
Together, they slip past the creatures and back towards the fort, under the lavender dawn sky. Behind them one of the rabbits sits up, ears tall and wavering, and watches them go.
It is more than an hour past dawn when they return to Mithrim, and the crows are already busy again on the hillside. Celegorm had expected to be greeted by a fort still mostly quiet, the only bustle being at the kitchens and the makeshift infirmary, and his brothers likely all still asleep. Instead, there are knots of people gathered about, murmuring—in the garden, half-heartedly pulling at weeds; in the entrance to the stable; around the pump, loitering with buckets half-filled. Finrod, who had been on watch when they left, is gone. The sentries eye them uncertainly as they approach, and everyone hushes when they recognize Celegorm. The open fire pit which had been burning low when Celegorm left is now roaring high, and there are stones heating in the flames, and one of the largest stewpots Mithrim owns is hoisted over the blaze, bubbling.
As Celegorm pauses, confused, to take all this in, the kitchen door bangs open and Caranthir spills out, closely followed by Amras. They rush to the fire, and Caranthir seizes a poker to begin sweeping the hot stones out of the pit, swearing as sparks flurry up towards his face.
“Damn you, didn’t I say we needed more as quick as you could get them?” He exclaims at the nearest bystander, who had hastily started raking at the coals himself as Caranthir approached and then fell back, looking flustered. Amras is scooping the stones into a thick blanket—one of Maedhros’ blankets, Celegorm realizes—with the aid of one of Caranthir’s gardening trowels.
“We weren’t certain if they were hot enough,” the chastised man begins, but Caranthir cuts him off, still furious.
“If they are hot at all they are hot enough, you imbecile. Get more going while I start with these, quickly. Amras, give me those. Bring up some of the water for Fingon, hurry, hurry, much as you can carry—“
But: “Celegorm!” Amras cries, noticing him. He looks as though he has been crying. His eyes are all red, and his hair is frantic.
“Where the hell have you been,” Caranthir shouts in way of greeting, but he doesn’t wait for an answer before dashing back indoors, leaving the door open behind him.
Amras disregards the empty bucket at his heel and runs to Celegorm, his face ashen.
“Celegorm!”
“The hell happened here?” Celegorm barks back, harsher than he meant to. The men and the women around the courtyard—they won’t stop looking at him. The skin on his arms prickles; the back of his neck crawls. He wants Huan.
“It’s Maglor,” Amras says, with a strange, taut horror snapping his words thin, and Celegorm feels a lurch he had not expected, deep in his ribcage. It is a dread he did not know he had, coming to strangle all his anger with cold fingers.
Roughly, he says: “Is he dead?”
Amras shakes his head.
“No,” he says, still very grey: “No, he is alive, they got to him in time, but—Maedhros—“